The terrorists are winning

Posted on November 21, 2015 by bpriddy

Just a few years ago, we recall, President Bush was saying this country would not do various things because if we did, “The terrorists would win.”

They’re winning.

Some of Missouri’s politicians are demanding Governor Nixon, in effect, seal the state’s borders to protect us from Syrians. The Paris attacks this year and particularly in the last few weeks are giving ample opportunity to some to fan the flame of fear. Fanning the flame of fear is good for those who want to be seen as protectors from evil. Or, evil-doers to borrow again from the Busch II years. And with elections coming up, it never hurts to carry the image as a protector.

Terrorists want to scare governments and people into changing their behaviors. Their ultimate goal is much larger, of course. But first they have to create a climate that is ever more restrictive of thinking, of movement, of hope. Sealing borders tells us they are winning.

And what is all of this fuss about?

President Obama has said he will allow four times as many Syrian refugees to come into this country as have been admitted in the last four years. And Secretary of State John Kerry has announced this country will lift the lid on the number of refugees admitted to this country from the present 70,000 to 100,000 in 2017. Many of those new slots will go to Syrians fleeting terrorists.

Are Obama and Kerry going to flood this country with terrorists? Are we all in peril if we go to a play, to a restaurant, to a sports stadium if a flood of Syrians comes in? The answer is a simple one: to maintain public safety, we have to keep Syrians from flooding into our state.

There is no flood in Missouri. There won’t be a flood in Missouri.

The New York Times on November 16 reported that only 1,854 Syrian refugees have been admitted to the United States since 2012. The nine volunteer agencies working with them have scattered them among 130 communities. The newspaper says Boise, Idaho has more Syrian refugees than New York and Los Angeles combined. Worcester, Massachuesetts has more than Boston. Should the people of Boise quit going to restaurants? Should the people of Worcester fear attending a concert or a movie?

Missouri has a few Syrians in the St. Louis area. Overland Park, Kansas has a few. The International Institute of St. Louis, which has been working with immigrants for 96 years, reports eight percent of the population of St. Louis City and St. Louis County is foreign-born. 7,500 people from 75 countries.

The Post-Dispatch reported in September that 28 Syrians had arrived in St. Louis this year and twenty more were expected by the end of the year.

When we close our borders to Syrian refugees, can we draw the border so it keeps St. Louis on the outside because that city already endangers the safety of our state because almost fifty more of those dreaded Syrians will be there at the end of the year?

The Times says Syrian refugees made up only two percent of the 70,000 refugees admitted to this country last year. Germany in that same four-year period has admitted 92,991 Syrian refugees. President Obama says this country will admit 10,000 this year. The Census Bureau says we already have 150,000 Syrians living in this country of 300-million people.

Syria ranks seventh in the list of countries whose immigrants have been allowed into this country in the most recent federal fiscal year. Myanmar has sent almost 20,000. Iraq has sent about 12,000. Somalia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bhutan have sent more than 5,000 each. Iran has sent far more than Syria.

But it’s Syrians who have a bunch of Missouri politicians in a froth. Well, how easy is it for those scary people to get here? They have to apply to the United Nations first. If the UN says they can come, they have to be examined by the FBI. They have to be run through terrorism databases run by the Defense Department and by other government agencies.

The UN has recommended 18,000 Syrians for scrutiny by the United States. The State Department says more than half of them are children.

Not all Syrians are suicide bombers, you know. And when it comes to killing bunches of people, we are pretty good about doing that ourselves. A check of a couple of websites that list mass shootings and finds that since March of 2005, this nation has had thirty-three incidents in which 270 people have been killed and 254 have been wounded. One of those incidents was in Kirkwood in February, 2008. Six dead, one wounded. Another incident began in Illinois and ended in Festus. Eight dead. Four of the incidents happened in Wisconsin. Four more were in California. We don’t think we say any Syrian names on those lists of killers. But we did see people from Wisconsin and California. Perhaps we should block people from those states from coming to Missouri. Those people clearly are dangerous.

(http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-ramp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers_(Americas)

We checked a list of German mass killings since March, 2005 and came across one incident where a German student killed 12 other students and three other people before killing himself in 2009. We checked Germany because it has been a landing place for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East for more than a decade.

But let’s be afraid anyway. Because some of our leaders find it advantageous to tell us we should be afraid. Of Syrians.

Cultivating a climate of fear among the electorate is convenient. It keeps the electorate from raising embarrassing questions about things like school funding, mental health services, crumbling roads and creaking bridges, lack of funding for cigarette-related health issues, services to veterans—-add your own priority here. Then forget about it because you are supposed to be living in fear of a Syrian.

Edward R. Murrow, the great CBS newsman, observed on his See it Now broadcast of March 7, 1954, when he said, “No one can terrorize a whole nation unless we are his accomplices.”

When Murrow began a series of programs called This I Believe in 1951, he noted:

“We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all—now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog—there is an enveloping cloud of fear.

“There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottom of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and the fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt—doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging.

“It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.”

If you want to hear the entire broadcast or read the entire script, go to http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16844/

And finally, from another See it Now broadcast, this one from 1954:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.”

The problem with sealing the borders is not necessarily the people we seal out. It’s the kind of people we seal inside with us who made us fearful to begin with. And the action does nothing to end the terror that drives people to our borders. In terms of our national character, could it be that those who tell us we should live in fear are more dangerous than children from Syria?

What in the world ?

Posted on November 13, 2015 by bpriddy

Two people are standing at the railing of an ocean liner gazing at the miles of Pacific Ocean all around them. Nothing is out there but water. All the way to the horizon. All the way around them.

“Sure is a lot of water,” one observes.

“Yeah,” says the other. “And that’s just the top of it.”

This observer has been getting emails from friends as far away as Vancouver and Los Angeles who have been watching, hearing, and reading about things happening at the University of Missouri for the last several days. In various ways they have asked, “What in the world is going on at the University of Missouri?” What follows will be long and does not pretend to be an analysis that will preclude other thoughts or actions that disagree or contribute to consensus.

The reporting of the way events have spiraled and spread has been most comparable to that first observer on the ocean liner: “Sure is a lot of water.” That is not a criticism of the reporting. Those who have been on the ground as journalists in situations such as this and—more prominently, in Ferguson last year—know that when you are being swept along by the tide there isn’t much time to think about how the coral was formed ten feet below you. The same often is true for those who are drawn into participation in those events. Thinking about the deeper issues that are involved or the deeper consequences that might result becomes secondary. Passing judgment on participants, whether demonstrators, administrators, reporters, observers—the list could be longer if we try to think of more categories—is easily done from a distance and the situation becomes more complicated when others with other agendas try to capitalize on it.

So, to answer the friends and neighbors who have asked, “What in the world is going on…?” we offer some observations. They are made from a short geographical distance and they are made by someone who is no longer in the business of being in the middle of the events or in a newsroom.

VIOLENCE

This is an important thing to remember. No buildings were set on fire. No roving gangs of demonstrators were going up and down Ninth Street throwing bricks through windows and looting businesses. As far as we know, guns were not part of the demonstration(s) and nobody was hurt. Some headlines were generated when a reporter and a cameraman were pushed around in a regrettable incident but the students who advocated a non-violent protest achieved that goal. While some of their actions might be properly questioned, let us not lose sight of the fact that this is one incident that did not turn violent.

But their activities have created image problems or feared image problems for the university, for some of its schools, and the athletic department. Andrew Kloster, a legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation, has written of what he calls “mob rule…in higher education.” He writes about recent disturbances at Yale and the disturbances in Columbia, “Both situations involve student activists disrupting education, allegedly on behalf of education…At Mizzou, activists claimed that failing to deal with ‘structural racism’ was harming their education. Both groups listed not specific harms, but rather vague interest in feeling good at their university.”

That kind of reaction, nationally circulated, is not what the protestors want to hear or want to hear said about them. What can it teach them? What can be learned from these experiences? Is the result as simple as Kloster suggests?

Nobody was hurt in these protests. At least not physically. That’s important to remember.

WHO IS AND WHO IS NOT GONE

University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe is gone. Columbia Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin is gone. This observer met both of them during a meeting a few months ago and found both of them personally likable. Wolfe was candid in our discussions and represented the university well. Perhaps ironically, one of the products of our meeting was a resolution of some communications problems between the group I was with and the university. Loftin, I thought, was approachable and willing to discuss the issues we brought to the table. That’s a personal impression drawn from a single hour-long meeting. I was not left with any perspective on relations between the people in University Hall and the people who were on the campus. But clearly, those who saw things on a daily basis had distinctly different impressions.

Who’s still there? A guy in the pickup truck. A drunk white guy who went where he wasn’t wanted at the Legion of Black Collegians meeting. The person who scrawled the feces swastika in a bathroom. A spirit of intolerance that bubbles under all of society, occasionally seeping to the surface. And intolerance knows no sides. They’re still there.

THE EVENTS

Critics on the campus felt the school administration was detached and unresponsive. On Monday, the day Wolfe resigned and Loftin announced he would be stepping down, the deans of nine of the university’s colleges asked that the Board of Curators to fire Loftin. They cited a “multitude of crises” on the Columbia campus. They said they had met with Wolfe and Loftin as well as Provost Garnett Stokes twice in October but had seen the issues they talked about continue to deteriorate.

A day earlier the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures notified curators that 28 of the department’s thirty faculty members had expressed no confidence in Loftin. The other two faculty members abstained. A few days earlier, the English Department faculty had voted 26-0 for a no-confidence motion targeting Loftin. Two faculty members abstained.

Loftin also was the center of other controversies including the elimination of health insurance for graduate assistants who teach many of the school’s classes. The insurance was later reinstated. He also was unpopular because of the dismissal of the Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences.

He also was in the middle of a partisan political criticism about a doctor with some privileges at University Hospital doing abortions at the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Columbia. As usual lately, anything to do with Planned Parenthood became an issue of political capital that transcended rational discussion. The situation has reached the absurd stage that one state senator wanting to firm up pro-life support in a statewide candidacy has demanded the university tell a graduate student to stop studying whether a 72-hour waiting period for an abortion really accomplishes anything.

One side claims it was absolutely right and the university is absolutely wrong. And when the absolutely right side is the one that controls the university’s budget, academic freedom can become expendable—or at least a perception can arise that it is. The university revoked the doctor’s privileges at the hospital. Planned Parenthood and its supporters charged the university over-reacted. As far as we know, the graduate student is still researching.

Student demonstrators aimed their biggest complaints at Wolfe. An incident early in the school year in which someone in a pickup truck shouted “Nigger” at the student body president Payton Head appears to have begun the unrest. Several days later, a white man, described as drunk, interrupted a meeting of the Legion of Black Collegians and complained, “These niggers are getting aggressive with me” when the group showed him he was not welcome.

An incident during the homecoming parade last month, though, is what seems to have really gotten things rolling. A group of black students stopped in front of the car carrying Wolfe and started talking about the school’s history of racial incidents since its founding in 1839. Wolfe did not react and the driver of the car tried to move around the group and bumped a couple of the students.

About then, graduate student Jonathan Butler said he wouldn’t eat until Wolfe quit. Four days later, November 6, Wolfe issued a statement and an apology that seemed weak to the students in the homecoming parade event, and to the students whose resentment about administration detachment from campus concerns continued to simmer. Wolfe admitted that the situation might not have deteriorated if he had gotten out of his car during the parade and talked with the students.

Or would such an action only have compounded the disturbance that day? It’s easy to second-guess on that issue. Many will argue the students were out of line by stopping Wolfe’s car at all, let alone for several minutes before the blockade was ended.

This writer recalls an incident in the Missouri Senate a couple of years ago when a group led by a number of ministers entered the gallery of the senate and stopped floor action with songs, prayers, and statements urging expansion of the Medicaid program. Several were arrested and charged. Their cases have yet to come to trial. One of their arguments would be familiar to the students: they were frustrated by inaction on the part of those who could do something to deal with the problems they perceived.

And so a fair question has to be asked. What is left when you think the powers-that-be are not responsive to perceived serous issues you have raised?

The organizers of the demonstrations, Concerned Student 1-9-5-0, (1950 was the year the university admitted its first black student) issued eight demands including an apology from Wolfe in which he would “acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfill (the organization’s) demands”. The group demanded Wolfe’s removal and a presidential selection process involving faculty, staff, and students of diverse backgrounds. The group wants a mandatory “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum in all departments,” increased percentages of black faculty and staff, more money for the university counseling center that will allow hiring of mental health professionals as well as increases in funding for social justice centers.

The demands and the rhetoric that appeared to some people as overcooked took the situation beyond discussion. By now, too, various political figures were weighing in with veiled suggestions that time was running out for Wolfe.

Then several members of the football team announced they supported the student group.

THE TEAM

The announced “strike” by several football players pushed the issue into national headlines. International headlines in fact. Suddenly the confrontation was on the BBC. Suddenly it was on the national networks. And it put the coaching staff in a difficult position in what already has been a difficult year. They’ve already dealt with some unfortunate situations within the team this year apart from the win-loss record. It was important that the team understand that it IS a team and this episode threatened to pit involved members against those who didn’t feel touched by the controversy. Coach Gary Pinkel knew that however this event turned out, this incident had the potential to turn the locker room into at least two camps. So the word went out that the whole team supported Jonathan Butler and was concerned about his health. Pinkel has admitted, however, that some players were not enthusiastic about the “team” support of Butler. And in a press conference after the resignations, he didn’t take a position on the departures of Wolfe and Loftin.

The upcoming game with Brigham Young was endangered. The university could lose a million dollars and that was only a beginning.

There were doubtless some who immediately started thinking the football program was trying to run the university. Some undoubtedly felt cancellation of the game, the season, the players’ scholarships would be appropriate because the players were getting outside their roles. After all, the university is about education, not sports and—they might argue—the sports program was getting out of line.

Others could argue that athletes are also people and they do not give up being people just because they play sports. In fact, some might argue on their behalf that the players’ actions were a recognition that some things are far more important than collegiate sports. After all, these young men sit in classrooms with many of those who had pitched their tents on Carnahan Quadrangle. They are not apart from them just because they play football.

The university basketball players also were talking about taking action, which coach Kim Anderson says he would have supported, when Wolfe resigned.

It is easy to dismiss the action of the football players and the backing they got from their coach and the school’s athletic director as the athletic department throwing its weight around. But was it, really? Or was it people who were students first creating by their actions a situation the athletic department had to deal with at a time when it had been only an observer that was focused on fulfilling its special role in the university?

Regardless, SEC coaches in their weekly teleconference praised Pinkel’s integrity in supporting his team.

The entrance of the football team into the picture made the news story, for whatever reason, one that could not be contained in Columbia. It went global. And nobody knew how much worse it could become if something didn’t happen at University Hall.

THE CHOICE

We don’t know and maybe will never know what kind of conversations were going on between the university administration and the curators. We don’t know when or if somebody finally said, “Tim, the only way to end this situation is for you to leave.” Or maybe he’s the one who told the curators that he realized there was no way the situation could be resolved as long as he stayed.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has reported the curators continued to support Wolfe, who left without any kind of a severance package. The newspaper says that’s an indication he was not forced out. But Loftin was a different case. The curators voted to assign him to a new job. The newspaper says Loftin “made enemies out of deans, faculty and graduate students” and “frequently blindsided the curators with his decision making, stirring up controversies, then having to backtrack.”

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/missteps-not-student-revolt-led-to-mizzou-chancellor-s-demise/article_f955e9cf-6fc8-5fb0-b2cc-1b798d53fccc.html

The student group wasted no time issuing new demands for an “immediate” meeting with the university system faculty council, curators, and with Governor Nixon “to discuss shared governance and create a system of holistic inclusion for all constituents,” as one of the group members, Marshall Allen, put it, saying the demands have to me met “in totality.”

The resignations create some breathing space. There comes a time when heated rhetoric (“in totality,” for example) needs to be tempered so productive steps can be taken to produce change. Shared governance? That term as well as “a system of holistic inclusion” is good for pumping up a crowd. Creating realistic definitions is harder. The students are not going to run the University of Missouri. Or the faculty. But the point has to be acknowledged that the administration cannot be apart from the campus and the issues that personally touch those on it.

THE PROFS AND THE GREEK LADY

The Dean of the School of Journalism, David Kurpius, quickly put out a statement when a video went viral showing Professor Melissa Click helped block reporters from covering the post-resignation reactions of students in their encampment on the Carnahan Quadrangle. The video showed Click calling for some “muscle” to help remove student Mark Schierbecker who was shooting video of a confrontation between freelance photographer Tim Tai and Janna Basler, the assistant director of Greek Life and Leadership. Tai was shooting for ESPN News.

The video shows Basler telling Tai, “You need to back off. Back off, go!” When he asks her if she is with the Office of Greek Life, she responds, “No, my name is Concerned Student 1-9-5-0.”

Tai is heard saying that his First Amendment rights to be there are equal with the First Amendment rights of the students who have been demonstrating.

And a third person, identified as Professor Richard Callahan, the Chairman of Religious Studies, is shown with the protestors throwing up his hands to block the view Tai could get with his camera.

The J-School dean wanted to make it clear that Click is a member of the Department of Communications, which is part of the School of Arts and Sciences, not a member of the School of Journalism faculty. The J-School also released a statement discussing how it had used the events of the last several days as teaching opportunities for future journalists.

The national reaction on social media and in mainline media to the actions of those faculty members has been generally severe. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says Click locked herself in the office all day Tuesday and at times could be heard sobbing. At the end of the day she issued written apology for her actions, and said she had personally apologized to the journalists involved. She resigned her tenuous tie to the Journalism School. She had a “courtesy title” that let her serve on a graduate committee. Although Tai says he has accepted Click’s apology, Schierbecker has told the Washington Post he has not. “She made no acknowledgement that what she did was assault,” he told the newspaper.

Callahan is Click’s husband. Thai has told the Post that he also has apologized “for getting in my face and yelling about it.” We’ve heard no word about whether his behavior also is being scrutinized.

Basler has been put on administrative leave and relieved of her duties as the Director of Greek Life while the investigation of her activities continues. Tai says he’s had a personal meeting with Basler and has accepted her apologies.

There have been calls for the three to be fired. Washington Post blogger Erik Wemple, for example, has written “These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead they stood up for coercion and darkness.”

Who’s right and who’s wrong in all of this? From this reporter’s perspective (once a journalist, always a journalist), the students and the teachers were wrong. The young journalists were legitimately trying to cover a story, to help listeners, viewers, and readers gain some kind of insight into the situation. But this incident, as is the case with the larger activities, is not so black and white. KBIA, the University’s public radio station that relies heavily on journalism students in its newsroom—and has done outstanding work in covering these events—published this story on its webpage:

http://kbia.org/post/rights-activists-and-media-no-clear-answer

And KBIA News Director Ryan Famuliner, a former Missourinet reporter, added some context to help people see “below the surface of it.”

http://kbia.org/post/4-things-you-might-have-wrong-about-mizzou-story

Tuesday, the day after the confrontations, protestors decided reporters were welcome at their encampment. They took down signs telling the media to stay out and they passed out pages urging protestors to cooperate with the media. The headline on the flyers said “Teachable Moment.”

OKAY, SO—–

We talked to a distressed former member of the Board of Curators the other day who fears these events have set a “horrible precedent.” Some of those we have talked to who also have watched things from a distance suggest the university is in for an extremely difficult time finding someone to step into the president’s job. “Who in his right mind would want it?” one person asked.

What has been accomplished by all of this shouting and pushing and demanding is that impediments the protesting students, graduate students, and faculty members saw to communications between the folks on campus and the folks in University Hall have been removed. They’ve gotten the university’s attention.

Now, it appears, talking instead of shouting, discussing instead of demanding can start.

THE TEAM 2.0

No, the athletic department does not run the university. It is, however, the most publicly prominent entity that represents it. It would be nice if the public found the teaching of English, Journalism, Agriculture, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, and so forth to be something it would buy tickets to watch. But the fact is the public is more likely to cheer for an All-American football or basketball player than it is to cheer for a Nobel Prize winner. Another fact is that the university would continue to do its work educating students even if another fan never walks into Memorial Stadium.

However, the virtues of “the team” or as some of the players said, “the family,” should not dissipate as time passes and, in fact, might be good to keep in mind as the university re-shapes its administration. Teams work when they share a common goal. They fail when they break into factions. Factionalism breeds resentment. Resentment brings conflict. And conflict destroys the family, the team.

Take a look at this effort to help us see below “the top of it.”

http://kbia.org/post/mizzou-football-sets-precedent-student-athlete-activism

One of the jobs of a coach is to hold the team together. It would be fair to include questions to presidential candidates about how good a coach a new president and chancellor might need to be.

THE TEACHABLE MOMENT

One reason Click, Callahan, and Basler are in trouble is because they forgot that teachers remain teachers outside as well as inside the classroom. Whether the teachable moments represented by their apologies reverse the negative teachable moments of the confrontation with Tai and with Schierbecker is hard to determine. Perhaps the changed attitude of the protestors the next day, when they removed the signs and welcomed reporters, indicates some learning has taken place.

Did the change of attitude represent a learning moment resulting from the teachable moment? One would hope so, for students and teachers alike.

The events have created numerous teachable moments and they have provided learning moments as well. And those moments go beyond the teaching and learning that might happen in the new diversity and social respect programs the university is moving toward.

POLITICS

Events such as these are potential minefields for politicians—witness the no-win situations Governor Nixon found himself in, or put himself in, last year in Ferguson. These events also can be opportunities to say and advocate things that appeal to the public gut and gain some points for candidates and office-holders. Before Wolfe’s resignation, various office-holders put out fence-riding statements that tried to sound, well for lack of a better word, leaderly without running the risk of antagonizing potential voters, protestors, and those who thought Wolfe and Loftin were just fine. “This is serious stuff,” the statements generally said, “and I am sure the right things will be done.” Afterwards the same people who had not publicly come out specifically in favor of Wolfe’s departure courageously said he had done the right thing and they were glad he did.

But there’s another political matter that is hinted at in a part of the scenario that has been overshadowed by the events on the Carnahan Quadrangle. One of the graduate students who sent a letter “For my dear friends outside of Missouri campus” alluded to it when she wrote, “for many of us, it was clear we were just expected to pay ever-increasing fees (mine are currently about $1000 per semester above and beyond tuition), ½ tuition waivers for some grad students (where prior had been full waivers, which drastically impacts recruiting and retention efforts), an insurance debacle…and ongoing racial discrimination.”

Students are going deeper in debt. Some graduate students are paying increased fees. Insurance coverage for them was dropped, then restored when they made enough noise. And state support for higher education in Missouri is a fraction of what it was a decade ago. Data compiled earlier this year by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association says funding per full-time student has dropped almost 28 percent in the last five years while college enrollment has increased by twenty percent.

Your reporter was in a meeting yesterday with a former legislator who recalled that when he started in the General Assembly a few decades ago, state funding for higher education paid about half the costs of educating a student. Now, he said, it’s only about ten percent. There might be more accurate figures but the trend is accurate.

A seminar at Truman State University last March was called “Crisis in Missouri: The decline of state funding for higher education.” The announcement of the meeting that listed discussion points said, “For decades, public support for higher education in the state of Missouri has declined precipitously. The impact of this underfunding has been widespread and deeply felt: An increased financial burden on Missouri’s student population; An inability to recruit top teachers and scholars; a deterioration of the quality of education at our state institutions; A weakening of morale for the vast majority of those who work at those institutions; A culture on our campuses of frustration with the present and fear for the future instead of a culture of innovation.”

Fear. Frustration. It’s top to bottom in Missouri’s higher education system. The definitions of those words differ according to position within that system but all strata have them. Not to give the university administration a pass, but funding issues are a huge issue and at the highest levels are one of the primary ones. The President of the University of Missouri is seen by many as a manager and a fund-raiser. The chancellors are the on-campus managers.

But the buck has to stop somewhere. And ultimately, Wolfe felt the whole package of bucks rose to his level and the best alternative was to leave so that healing could begin on a campus he loved.

But don’t expect the people in Jefferson City to do anything financially that would ease the concerns that dog all of our campuses. Advocates of smaller government are more concerned with shrinking the state’s capability to pay its bills and obligations than they are in easing financial pressures on higher education and those it serves. Or other services to the general public.

“You can’t cure a problem by throwing money at it,” some like to say. That might be true. But you certainly can’t solve many problems by financially starving them. In 2013, then-auditor Tom Schweich released a study showing Missouri tax collections are about four-BILLION dollars below the amount allowed by the Hancock Amendment adopted in 1980 as a way to control over-taxation and over-spending. But the legislature only wants to widen that gap. So the concerns and frustrations of some of those who called for the departures of Wolfe and Loftin will go unanswered.

WINNERS?

It’s easy to pronounce winners and losers in these situations. But that’s a mistake because many participants are both. Victory has a cost. Loss has an opportunity.

Well, Wolfe is gone and so is Loftin. An African-American temporary president who was the first black graduate of the law school has been installed. An African-American law professor and associate dean has become an interim vice-chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equality. Curators have promised to restore “a culture of respect,” to hire more minorities, step up recruitment, and offer support to students who feel aggrieved.

Beyond that——-

Three people have been arrested for turning social media into anti-social media by making threats on the internet. The threats, especially in a time when mass shootings are not so uncommon anymore, honestly frightened some people on the campus.

Someone painted out the word “Black” on the sign in front of the University’s Black Cultural Center; the paint has since been removed. (Someday, maybe, there will be some discussions about whether cultural centers for various ethnic groups are long-term counter-productive to advancement toward a color-blind multicultural society many of these groups seek. Someday. Perhaps not this day, though, when emotions that would detract from the kind of discussion that needs to be held are likely to rise.)

The person or persons so consumed by—whatever—that he or she put a piece of human excrement into their hand and drew a swastika on the wall of a co-ed dormitory bathroom and left feces on the floor is still unknown. The student protests about racism overshadowed concerns by those to whom a swastika has a special significance.

Hate, ignorance, and downright idiocy are inescapable parts of our existence, whether on our campuses or elsewhere in our world. The events in Columbia have a double edge—protests against wrongs perceived by one segment of society while a hate message that hurts another segment of society stays in the background.

Those of us who were in college in the days when one of the popular songs was “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” a time when demonstrators thought they could help stop wars by putting flowers down the barrels of the guns held by National Guardsmen trying to control demonstrations, still hope for peace and love and harmony.

Each generation has to confront that issue and each generation learns that there are those who think the flower children and their idealistic descendants (and forebears) are fools and troublemakers. But a generation without ideals offers little to the future.

Comedian Pat Paulsen, whose satiric presidential candidacy in the days of the flower generation, put together a campaign book in 1968. He wrote, “This book is dedicated to the time when all of us spicks, niggers, white trash, hunkies, wops, kikes, mackerel snappers, micks, gooks, chinks, red necks, beans and hippies get together as Americans.”

Columbia in the past week reminded us we still have a ways to go.

Perhaps this long, long reflection helps answer the questions from friends in Vancouver and in Los Angeles and gives some insight into the coral beneath the surface.

It’s always a surprise

Posted on October 10, 2015 by bpriddy

—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.

My shoes smelled

Posted on August 7, 2015 by bpriddy

But the smell got better

It was a musty, earthy smell of long-damp ground that had not seen daylight for a century, ground that was wet enough to stick in the treads of my shoes but was not yet wet enough to be mud. It was dry enough that I tracked it from place to place.

I checked those shoes later. The soil was gone, wiped off in the grass or the snow or maybe it had just dried and fallen out as I walked down the street. Maybe the shoes didn’t really smell anymore. Maybe it was just olfactory memory insinuating itself. I didn’t want to wear those shoes to other places for a while. Would other people smell that smell?

Maybe they’d have been bold enough to ask, “What is that smell? Where have you been? What did youstep in that you are tracking in here?” They probably wouldn’t have said those things because it would not have been the courteous thing to do. Besides, it’s not as if I had stepped in something some irresponsible dog owner left behind. Or worse, a cat.

I was not alone with this problem. Several other people were on the same little trip that day into the seldom-visited recesses of the Capitol basement. There was something incongruous about those in our group who were in suits and ties, especially the big guy who was the center of attention. Governor Nixon had agreed to take the brief photo-op tour with some members of the legislature and the media before announcing he would support some responsible bond-issue spending to make some repairs to endangered parts of the Capitol.

The Governor gets beaten up a lot for his travels hither and yon to talk about jobs and schools and other momentarily hot topics. But those trips aren’t a whole lot different from his look at what is underneath the great stairway on the south front of the Capitol, or his look from below at the unsafe condition of the closed-to-vehicles roadway that goes through the tunnel under those stairs. There is value in going to communities to make people feel good about good things happening there or rallying local support against something he thinks is bad for that community and for the state as a whole.

Yeah, sure, politics are involved in a lot of these visits and Jay Nixon is nothing if not a political animal. But visits by Governors mean something to those who do not deal with him every day—including legislators and reporters. It’s special when the Governor pays attention to something locally. The presence of the Governor is important.

His visit was important in that moldy, damp, musty-soil area in the basement of the Capitol. For those of us who love that building and all that it should represent, that little visit meant the big guy cares. It’s not important now that many of us have been talking and writing about the Capitol’s serious need of repair and restoration for years. What’s was important was that the Governor was there signaling that he is significantly engaged now in ending decades of neglect of our greatest state symbol.

He wasn’t talking about ADA accessibility or restoring the paintings and sculpture or recovering the original decorations that have been lost under layer after layer of bland institutional paint. Right then he was talking about supporting repairs that will stop deterioration of the structure itself. First things first.

Your scribe had told some members of the legislature that the manuscript for the next Capitol book, the one about the construction of the building, was sitting in a computer in his house on the quiet street of retirement. It’s been in that computer for several years waiting for the final chapter to be written. What happened during the legislative session determined whether the book has a positive ending that says the building is moving through its centennial era with efforts to repair it and restore it as the great temple of democracy that its builders hoped it would be or whether it is moving through its centennial era as a symbol of statewide responsibilities that are unmet, statewide obligations that are ignored, and a continued willingness to cover over problems and ignore them.

The Governor and the lawmakers on the tour took a step toward the positive the other day. And by the end of the legislative session, $40 million had been approved for repairs to that area. And at the cornerstone centennial celebration July 3^rd, he told the audience the investment is “a great beginning.” The he continued, “I challenge not only our current government leaders—including me—to build on this commitment and initial investment, but also challenge those who will be in the Governor’s office and the General Assembly in the years to come to carry forward this gret edifice to our state and our way of life.”

In a few minutes after posting this entry, work will continue on writing the final chapter in the next Capitol book. They will be, at the least, positive hopeful words—although not conclusively positive because there is so much to be done yet.

So it’s okay if my shoes smelled a little. It turned out to be a good smell because it represented some good steps. But there is still a lot of walking to do in our Capitol.

Missing in action at Vicksburg

Posted on July 3, 2015 by bpriddy

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

And the one for Confederate Army lists seven states.

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.

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.

Time in a capsule

Posted on June 13, 2015 by bpriddy

An email arrived at the Missourinet from Arcola, Illinois a few weeks ago.

I wanted to get a message to Robert A. Priddy and tracked him down to this website. Today I found a message Bob left in a 1916 issue of the archived Arcola Record Herald newspaper. The message was written in 1961 when Bob was working there over the summer. The note said he was home for summer from University of Missouri. The message said, “The last person to gaze upon this page was I, on this day, July 13, 1961.” Just wanted to let him know I found it and left it there but added my own message for the next person to find.

Thanks, Nancy Rairden, Arcola, IL

Nancy Rairden on April 17 had opened a little time capsule I didn’t realize that I had created a long time ago. The Arcola Record-Herald is a weekly newspaper in a small town south of Champaign and about half an hour from my small home town of Sullivan. An graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Harry Stonecipher, was the owner of the paper then and as a member of the fabled “Missouri Mafia” had hired the college kid who walked into the office one day hoping to get some experience in a newspaper office before starting his journalism classes that fall at the University of Missouri. One of my jobs was to compile the weekly historical column—you know, the 10, 25, 50 years ago thing. I don’t recall why I was looking at only 45 years. Maybe we didn’t do 50.

The note left in the 1916 bound volume had been long forgotten. But since getting Nancy’s message, I seem to recall putting the note there and wondering when the next time would be that somebody would be reading the newspaper from so long ago. Now I know. Fifty-four years.

All I had said was that I had been there. Time capsules are kind of like that. “We were here,” they say to the unknown figures who will open them decades later. That’s the basic message in all of them.

The big copper box installed in the state capitol cornerstone was removed the other day and will be opened before the centennial observance on July 3 of the cornerstone laying a century ago.

Organizers of the centennial event think they’ll draw a better crowd and the event will be better-staged if it’s held in conjunction with Independence Day activities in Jefferson City. The old things won’t be put into the new time capsule that will be placed somewhere in the Capitol, probably, not back in the cornerstone.

New stuff will be put in the new capsule and the old materials will be cared for by the state archives after being displayed for a while. As this is written, we don’t know specifically what’s in that box. We do know there were some newspapers and a book of Missouri history and a copy of the bill authorizing the bonds for the new Capitol. But the folks who lifted the box out of the cornerstone thought it weighed about sixty pounds, indicating there’s a lot more than those things in there. It will be opened in a sterile state health lab in case any dangerous mold has grown inside it.

The actual cornerstone laying date was June 24, 1915, a huge event in Jefferson City. The centennial of the event is unlikely to attract the kind of crowd that gathered a century ago although it would be nice to see a good-sized gathering.

The state is asking Missourians to suggest what should go into the new time capsule, which gives rise to a discussion about why we have them. If you could put something into the new Capitol time capsule, to be found 100 years from now, what would you put in it? If you could leave a message for your Missourian descendants to read in 2115, what would you tell them?

In one form or another, you would say to them, “I was here. I was as alive as you are now.” Even if it is only a note that says I was the last person to look at this page of this bound volume of old newspapers until you came along, that’s the basis for what we would put into a time capsule.

Sometimes families create their own. A friend many years ago bought a couple of trunks, one for each of their children, and put things in them from the family’s past and the then-present future. The trunks are to be opened in fifty or a hundred years by descendants these folks will not live to see.

Sometimes the time capsule is nothing more than a shoe box given by one generation to another to just hang onto because it has some things in it that the giver considered important to them.

Some people in Georgia in 1940 created the Crypt of Civilization. If the wishes of the creators are carried out, it won’t be opened until 8113. By someone. Or some thing. Pessimists and Optimists alike might wonder if it ever will be opened because by then mankind, or whatever mankind has become, will have fled the dead, contaminated, resource-depleted earth for a habitable planet light years away. At the same time, the mere presence of the Crypt of Civilization makes one want to be there when it’s opened just to see what life is or what life is like in 5998 years.

What’s in it? Microfilm. About 800 books including several novels show everything from the way we amused ourselves to humankind’s historical record to descriptions of our industries, our medical procedures, patent documents, sound movies of great men and women, recordings (on record) of important speeches made on the radio (radio did a lot of that then—speeches, not just talk)—even what one source calls “an apparatus for teaching the English language.” Who knows what people will be speaking in 8113? Seeds of flowers and trees and vegetables and other plants are in there. All of this is in a room ten feet high, ten feet wide, and twenty feet long under Phoebe Hearst Hall at Ogelthorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia. (Phoebe Apperson Hearst was a Missouri girl who married a California miner and became one of the world’s wealthiest women. She was a great philanthropist and the mother of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.)

Organizers of the crypt hope it survives six millennia. It is lined with porcelain enamel plates embedded in pitch, is sitting on bedrock and has two feet of stone above it. A big stainless steel door has been welded shut.

Amazing. But will the beings that open the crypt in 8113 have the technology to play the records. Will they have 35 mm sound film projectors? Will the microfilm survive or will it have turned to jelly? We know from the ancient Egyptian tombs that seeds can survive thousands of years. But will Hearst Hall? Or Ogelthorpe University? Or Georgia? Or the earth?

Time capsules are best if not boastful of the generation they seek to preserve. Instead, it is best that they reach out to those who will come after, leaving a record of a moment in time and a presence. We may be proud of what we are today but we know that what we consider modern will be antiquated by the year the capsule is opened and that’s okay. We have left a record that says, “We got this far in 2015.”

In 8113, someone or some thing might discover the Crypt of Civilization and will know that Twentieth Century Homo Sapiens reached out to them and tried to leave something more substantial behind (perhaps) than Mount Rushmore’s by-then weathered faces that said, “We were here. And in our time we were thinking, creative creatures.”

And, oh, how we wish we could see your world in 8113 when the capsule is found. .

The Missouri Capitol time capsule will be a message from 2015 to the great-great-grandchildren of this generation. It’s a lot easier to be confident there will be people here in 2115 than it is to imagine how the Crypt of Civilization will be opened or by whom. And what should we say to those to open our time capsule? Maybe something like—

We who think we are advanced today nonetheless recognize that we live in an imperfect world, one that is too much divided, too often ridden with greed, fear, hate, and quests for power, We recognize that we as Americans and Missourians have retreated from an era in which nothing seemed impossible, even walking on and exploring the Moon, to an era where we look inward, guarding ourselves against the perceived evils of those who are different—as mankind has done for eons. We live in a world where we have friends on the other side of the earth but do not know the names of our next-door neighbors. But beneath it all, we have hope and in clinging to hope we make painfully slow progress in resolving the issues that divide and therefore limit us. We hope that a century from now that wisdom and peace are more certain parts of life, that bigotry toward some is no longer masked as the protection of rights for others, that rediscovered and vigorously exercised voter responsibility has long ago replaced the deleterious effects of term limits on our political system, that you still value and protect the outdoors as a breathing place for the public lungs, a place where the different species that give beauty and perspective to our own existence still flourish, and where the sights and sounds of running streams still calm a stressed spirit. We hope that a century of medical and scientific developments have destroyed diseases that lessen and shorten life, and that society has found a way to make longer lives valuable and beneficial to those who live them. We hope children and families are no longer uncertain about their next meal, their opportunity for education, their chances for meaningful work and loving families, the safety of their streets and homes. We hope this great building remains the Temple of Democracy that its designers and builders intended for it to be, the symbol of the best that we can be to one another, a structure symbolizing the hope that all may share for fruitful lives. Our generation has sometimes let the building fall into a disrepair that regretfully represents our state as a place of sometimes unmet needs, unfulfilled responsibilities, ignored conditions, and reduced hopes. We hope your generation honors and strives for the good that this building represents. We hope that you have learned the virtue of looking outside yourselves, and that Americans have again discovered the spirit that nothing seems impossible.

There would have to be a theme of optimism in our message, wouldn’t there? If there isn’t, why would we want to send a message to the future? And if we do send one, why can’t we begin to live it now?

Thoughts from the road about the road

Posted on June 2, 2015 by bpriddy

We left our quiet street for a few days in January and February to travel in a dozen states. We went to southern Florida during a January Missouri cold snap and drove out of a snowstorm in February to spend most of two weeks in Arizona and New Mexico. Gloating about being someplace where the daytime temperature is in the 70s and 80s and dolphins sometimes play in the surf or in places where every day is golf day in the winter Arizona desert is unseemly so we’re not going to do it. In fact there were some days when the temperature in Florida was only in the 60s and it was almost that nice here at home, at least in January. It’s not like we were full-blown snowbirds who have abandoned our neighbors to escape all of winter. They were nice times but we’re not going to force anybody to look out our pictures of the sunsets on the Gulf of Mexico and palm trees and people in bathing suits strolling on a white beach or a Greek Orthodox monastery where they grow oranges and lemons in Arizona. Unless our friends force us to show them.

We have learned that some people in Georgia talk like people from Georgia. But not all of them. Same with people from Mississippi and Alabama. People from Minnesota sound like Minnesotans in Arizona. Arizonans sound a lot like us.

We have learned that some state capitols are not open to visitors on weekends. Ours is. But the Missouri Capitol has something for people to see. The Florida Capitol is a 22-story office building. The Louisiana Capitol is a 34-story office building. The North Dakota Capitol is a 19-story building. The Nebraska Capitol is a 15-story office building. (Louisiana, North Dakota, and Nebraska were not on this trip but we’ve been there on other voyages.) . We are never too excited about seeing an office building-capitol anyway. Florida’s Capitol was closed for the weekend when we went through Tallahassee. Arizona’s capitol is a museum with an executive office attached to the rear and separate buildings for the House and the Senate. The New Mexico Capitol is round, lovely, captures the culture and is known as “The Roundhouse” because of its shape

We learned that people who drive I-75 in Florida must consider the highway’s name some kind of minimum speed. But it’s a terrific road. We were told in Oklahoma during a winter storm that if we want clear roads we should go to Missouri “because they shovel the roads there.”

We drove on some beautiful interstate highways. In fact, we thought that just about every state we were in has prettier—and generally, smoother and often at least two lanes wider– interstate highways than Missouri has. Driving on them was comfortable, especially in those areas of three or four lanes each way where trucks were restricted to the far-right lane except when passing and there were ample lanes for travelers going at different speeds.

There pretty clearly are several reasons for states having more beautiful interstates than Missouri has. The most obvious reason is fuel taxes. Missouri piddles along at 17 cents for gasoline, more for diesel. The states we visited on our warm-weather break, collect two to nineteen cents a gallon more. Of course they have better, prettier roads. Missouri, on the other hand, has political leadership that has spent years cultivating the idea that things will be oh, so much better, if taxes are considered some kind of disfiguring disease and the best solution is legislative inoculation against it.

But the big reason other states have more beautiful highways is billboards.

We have decided in our long drives down those attractive roads in other states that the absolutely ugliest interstate highway in America has to be Interstate 70 between our two largest cities. It is a disgrace. In a time when law enforcement authorities bemoan the number of traffic crashes and fatalities caused by distracted drivers, we have an interstate that is crammed with distractions. Billboards. It was bad enough until Missourians voted on limits to billboards a few years ago and the billboard—pardon me, the outdoor advertising industry—rushed to throw up dozens more of the things before the limits were enacted. Sadly, the proposal failed and we are left with Interstate 70 roadsides with the worst case of advertising acne that can be imagined.

Many of our other major roads are relatively free of these visual insults but the busiest road in the state, linking our biggest cities, should be renamed. Isore70.

Sadly, the situation with a highway that at times seems nose-to-tail trucks–with cars as the meat in the truck sandwich–between Kansas City and St. Louis appears unlikely to be better anytime soon. Missourians don’t want higher gas taxes. Missourians have rejected a special sales tax for transportation. The political tide is running against making I-70 a toll road. Heaven only knows how the situation will turn around. The legislature remains idling on the shoulder.

Imagine a sporting event—

Posted on May 26, 2015 by bpriddy

We’ll be returning to the usual topics we normally address later this week. But for now, imagine a sporting event, professional baseball, football, basketball, hockey—any of the big-time sports like that. Imagine thousands of people being allowed on the playing field before the big game, looking at the equipment, visiting with team personnel, team owners and managers, maybe spotting a celebrity or two. Then imagine the players being introduced and walking among the crowd to their positions before the crowd goes to their seats and the game begins.

That’s part of the crowd on the main straightaway at Indianapolis late Sunday morning. Not everybody who had a ticket could be there but thousands of people had obtained passes through various channels for this experience that doesn’t happen in stick-and-ball (or stick and puck) sports.

Imagine any of the stick-and-ball sports that have members of the competing teams seated at tables before the event and thousands of fans without passes lining up to get their autographs or their pictures taken with the athletes. Imagine retired players being assembled to give fans a chance to do the same with them.

Imagine a crowd of 200,000 or more watching the event on-scene and imagine that they generally quietly tolerate the traffic jams getting to the arena and leaving it afterwards.

That’s what happens each Memorial Day weekend at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the first race track to call itself a “speedway.” The climate and culture were similar at Charlotte, North Carolina that night where NASCAR held its longest race of the year—won by a Missourian this time, Carl Edwards of Columbia.

The past, the present, and the future—

All came together in one face Sunday at Indianapolis.

Your reporter was, maybe, ten feet from Juan Pablo Montoya when he turned to talk to Ryan Hunter-Ray and Graham Rahal, two men moments from trying to beat him to the end of the race that they and thirty others would run at speeds upward of 220 mph most of the time.

Montoya will be 40 in September. That’s starting to get up there for athletes at this level of competition (the oldest driver in the race Sunday was 42). He was 24 when he won the Indianapolis 500 on his first attempt in 2000.

To his right, dressed in the yellow uniform, was Ryan Hunter-Reay, 34, who had won the great race last year in a wild closing-lap dogfight with three-time champion Helio Castroneves. And to Hunter-Reay’s right was Graham Rahal, who is 26, the son of 1986 winner Bobby Rahal. His dad is the Rahal of Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan Racing, the team for which Graham drives. Sunday was already his eighth 500 and a lot of folks are hoping that he or Marco Andretti (whose grandfather won in 1969) will someday win the 500.

Hunter-Reay, who was never a factor, finished 15^th. Rahal was fifth. Montoya took home a $2.4-million paycheck for winning the race for the second time. Hunter-Reay is a representative of Indycar’s present. Rahal is clearly representative of the sport’s future. And Montoya has one foot in the past, is very much one of the dominating figures of the sport’s present, and don’t think he doesn’t believe he’s very much part of its future, too.

And speaking of Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan Racing:

Tolja he’d be there

David Letterman was in that crowd on the grid before the race. The biggest difference between him and others there is that he had a police escort and when his presence became known, photographers flocked around him. He was unruffled by the attention, chatting with keepers and tenders as he sat on the pit wall. Unfortunately, he later wound up with his face smashed against the wall on the main straightaway.

All of the team cars carried “Thanks Dave” messages on their rear fins but Oriol Servia’s car went further.

Unfortunately Servia and last year’s pole winner, Ed Carpenter tangled coming onto the main straightaway on the 113^th lap and Servia’s car went side-first into the outer wall, giving Letterman a couple of interesting souvenirs of the race if he wants them—the side pod that scraped the wall or the one that didn’t. Regardless, he could have a couple of interesting wall-hangings for the den he might spend some of his new free time decorating.

Now, some of you who regularly check this scribe’s entries normally expect to read pithy things about politics, government, public policy, social commentary, history, and other things that stimulate the mind (we hope). But every now and then there are things that stimulate the soul, that render all that other stuff emotionally meaningless. Sports are those things. Your correspondent has been to World Series games, All-Star baseball games, NFL games in four Missouri stadia that have played host to three different teams, an NBA game (one is enough), a hockey game (worth another look someday), races at Churchill Downs (sorry, but something that only goes one lap and lasts for maybe a minute and a half, max, does not make this observer’s blood run faster). I’ve seen soccer and cricket and don’t know enough about either to develop the sophistication to appreciate them. Bowling is okay as a participant. We’ve watched arm-wrestling in Petaluma, cliff-diving from somewhere, curling during the Olympics (something about ice shuffleboard with big stones holds the attention, surprisingly), and bocce ball matches at a local restaurant.

But nothing does more for the pulse rate than the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea (Wimbledon, by the way, is not something many would stay away from church to watch). Diehard NASCAR fans undoubtedly think the same way about the Charlotte 600-miler that runs the night after the 500—and NASCAR has its own noisy charm as we know from experience.

So let’s leave it at this: Get some earplugs. Get some tickets (there were plenty of available seats Sunday). Get to Indianapolis on Memorial Day weekend. Get to the track and to your seats. Soak up the pre-race atmosphere and then hang on and watch amazing things happen in front of you when the engines roar.

Beats the hell out watching the things that happened in front me while I was at the Senate press table all those years, I can guarantee you that.

Maybe I’ll see you at the place they call The Racing Capital of the World next year when the engulfing experience of this event happens for the 100th time. Look for me ‘n’ Dave. \

(pictures copyright by Bob Priddy)

On the grid with David

Posted on May 22, 2015 by bpriddy

David Letterman has joined those of us who have left decades of the tyranny of a clock-regulated life and have started living by our own clock. He might have disappeared from my TV set but I know where he’ll be on Sunday. I’ll be there, too.

We share a great affection for the Indianapolis 500. Both of us were at the great Speedway for the first time when the fastest lap was about 140 miles an hour. Now the cars and drivers are aiming at 240. We’ve heard the great engines, from the Offy to the Novi to the Cosworth, the Fords and Buicks and the Chevvys. And the Hondas and Toyotas—even a Porsche once, an Alfa-Romeo and a Mercedes that was known as “the beast” by those who created it. We’re like tens of thousands of others who are drawn to a specific place and a specific event because it’s part of us.

We’ll be among the people in the crowd on the starting grid of the nation’s most iconic sporting event, the Indianapolis 500. I’ll be there as a reporter. He will be there as one of the owners of the Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan Racing. He’s not just a celebrity who has put some of his spare cash into a hobby. He’s serious about racing, as viewers should know from watching how much he enjoyed interviewing racing drivers on his television show.

We both were part of the crowd on the grid just before the start of the race last year.

No, I didn’t interject myself into his personal space to say hello. But if I had, I would have told him that something he said more than a decade ago has stuck with me because I had never heard anyone who is so much a part of the sport say it—not in all the years I’ve followed and attended this great event.

The year he said it was 2004 and Buddy Rice was writing a Cinderella story for the then-Rahal-Letterman team as the race started to wind down with rain moving in. Rice was in the car because the winner of the 1999 Indianapolis 500, Kenny Brack, had been injured in the last race of the 2003 season and wasn’t cleared to race. He had started from the pole, the first starting position, and was leading at the three-quarters mark. A pit reporter for ABC television interviewed Letterman, who was obviously feeling the moment—the excitement, the tension, the anticipation. Letterman told him, “It’s an unbelievable job Buddy has done all day. It’s a heroic effort.”

Later, when rain, thunder, and lightning stopped the race and forced the Speedway to move victory lane indoors so Rice could get the victory wreath, the traditional bottle of milk, and the celebration of his victory, Letterman described Rice and the rest of the team as “smart, brave, tough guys.”

In all the years of listening to or watching the race broadcasts or hearing people on the public address system during the race, I don’t think I ever heard anybody use the word “heroic” to describe the drivers’ efforts. But that’s an appropriate way to describe what these drivers are all about.

For them, dressing in their fire-resistant suit and climbing into a race car probably seems as ordinary as people like me putting on a coat and tie and going to the office. It’s what they do. But what they do during their day in their office is so far removed from what we do or are capable of doing that is unfathomable to most of us.

It’s not the danger although danger is always present that makes them heroes. It’s the skills they demonstrate lap after lap, hour after hour, that puts them on a level far above most of us. There’s no break between rounds, quarters, or innings. There’s no halftime. For about three hours, the Buddy Rices who will climb into the cars on the grid at Indianapolis Sunday will have no breaks from the necessity of putting their tires exactly—exactly—where they have to be to go through a corner at more than triple our interstate speed limit or to pass a competitor who also wants that space. They have to do it while competing with 32 other Buddy Rices who want the same thing they want and they’re willing to live on a fine edge to get it.

To watch these drivers flash past at speeds television cannot properly convey, lap after lap, is something unique. It is heroic.

Saying that is not a matter of hero-worship. Calling their efforts heroic accurately describes what they do. We accept mortals doing things that most of us consider super-human without thinking what an extraordinary thing they are doing. That’s why his passionate description of what he saw unfolding in front of him is so memorable—because he captured the nature of those efforts with just the right, memorable, word eleven years ago.

We’ll both be at the first place to call itself a “speedway” watching men and women do something heroic on Sunday. We might see each other. I will know who he is. He won’t know who I am. And that’s okay because both of us know why we are there.

Bob Priddy

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On the grid with David

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