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The Peace Speech

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Less than six months before his murder, President Kennedy spoke to the graduating class at American University in Washington, D.C.  It became known as his “Peace Speech.”

Today we are going to recall those remarks, delivered June 10, 1963 because they speak of a nation to which we should yearn to return and to be dissatisfied with leaders who want to deliver anything less.

We are not engaging in nostalgia with this entry. We are engaging in hope as it was embodied in a President who believed in doing for his country, not for himself, and summoning his generation to follow in that spirit.

(If you wish to hear President Kennedy’s voice as you follow along, go to Bing Videos.)

The ‘Peace Speech’

It is with great pride that I participate in this ceremony of the American University, sponsored by the Methodist Church, founded by Bishop John Fletcher Hurst, and first opened by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914.

This is a young and growing university, but it has already fulfilled Bishop Hurst’s enlightened hope for the study of history and public affairs in a city devoted to the making of history and to the conduct of the public’s business. By sponsoring this institution of higher learning for all who wish to learn, whatever their color or their creed, the Methodists of this area and the Nation deserve the Nation’s thanks, and I commend all those who are today graduating.

Professor Woodrow Wilson once said that every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation as well as a man of his time, and I am confident that the men and women who carry the honor of graduating from this institution will continue to give from their lives, from their talents, a high measure of public service and public support.

“There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university,” wrote John Masefield in his tribute to English universities — and his words are equally true today.

He did not refer to towers, or the campuses. He admired the splendid beauty of a university, because it was, he said, “a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.”

I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived – and that is the most important topic on earth: Peace.

What kind of a peace do I mean? What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.

It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.

Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles — which can only destroy and never create — is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war — and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

Some say that it is useless to speak of peace or world law or world disarmament — and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it.

But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude — as individuals and as a Nation — for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward — by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the Cold War and toward freedom and peace here at home.

First, examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view.

Our problems are manmade. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable and we believe they can do it again.

I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and goodwill of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions, on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace, no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers.

Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems.

With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.

So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.

And second, let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims, such as the allegation that “American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars, that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union, and that the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries and to achieve world domination by means of aggressive wars.”

Truly, as it was written long ago: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” Yet it is sad to read these Soviet statements to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning — a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.

Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and families were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland, a loss equivalent to the destruction of this country east of Chicago.

Today, should total war ever break out again, no matter how, our two countries will be the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.

And even in the cold war, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this Nation’s closest allies, our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle with suspicion on one side breeding suspicion on the other, and new weapons begetting counterweapons.

In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours, and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.

So, let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Third, let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been different.

We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace.

Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death-wish for the world.

To secure these ends, America’s weapons are non-provocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.

For we can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people, but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.

Meanwhile, we seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system — a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished.

At the same time we seek to keep peace inside the non-Communist world, where many nations, all of them our friends, are divided over issues which weaken Western unity, which invite Communist intervention or which threaten to erupt into war. Our efforts in West New Guinea, in the Congo, in the Middle East, and in the Indian subcontinent, have been persistent and patient despite criticism from both sides. We have also tried to set an example for others by seeking to adjust small but significant differences with our own closest neighbors in Mexico and Canada.

Speaking of other nations, I wish to make one point clear. We are bound to many nations by alliances. These alliances exist because our concern and theirs substantially overlap. Our commitment to defend Western Europe and West Berlin, for example, stands undiminished because of the identity of our vital interests. The United States will make no deal with the Soviet Union at the expense of other nations and other peoples, not merely because they are our partners, but also because their interests and ours converge.

Our interests converge, however, not only in defending the frontiers of freedom, but in pursuing the paths of peace. It is our hope, and the purpose of allied policies, to convince the Soviet Union that she, too, should let each nation choose its own future, so long as that choice does not interfere with the choices of others.

The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.

This will require a new effort to achieve world law, a new context for world discussions. It will require increased understanding between the Soviets and ourselves. And increased understanding will require increased contact and communication. One step in this direction is the proposed arrangement for a direct line between Moscow and Washington, to avoid on each side the dangerous delays, misunderstandings, and misreadings of the other’s actions which might occur at a time of crisis.

We have also been talking in Geneva about our first-step measures of arms control designed to limit the intensity of the arms race and reduce the risks of accidental war. Our primary long range interest in Geneva, however, is general and complete disarmament, designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.

The pursuit of disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920’s. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects are today, we intend to continue this effort, to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.

The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. It would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security, it would decrease the prospects of war. Surely this goal is sufficiently important to require our steady pursuit, yielding neither to the temptation to give up the whole effort nor the temptation to give up our insistence on vital and responsible safeguards.

I am taking this opportunity, therefore, to announce two important decisions in this regard.

First: Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking toward early agreement on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.

Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on this matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.

Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. We must show it in the dedication of our own lives, as many of you who are graduating today will have a unique opportunity to do, by serving without pay in the Peace Corps abroad or in the proposed National Service Corps here at home.

But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete.

It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government — local, State, and National — to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within our authority. It is the responsibility of the legislative branch at all levels, wherever the authority is not now adequate, to make it adequate. And it is the responsibility of all citizens in all sections of this country to respect the rights of others and respect the law of the land.

All this is not unrelated to world peace. “When a man’s ways please the Lord,” the Scriptures tell us, “he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.” And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights, the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation, the right to breathe air as nature provided it, the right of future generations to a healthy existence?

While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can — if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers, offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough, more than enough, of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it.

But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on, not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.

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The speech was delivered only eighteen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and only eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis that frightened leaders of both countries into starting back-door discussions. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev called it “the greatest speech by any American president since Roosevelt.”

A few weeks later, the United States and Russia signed the first nuclear test ban treaty outlawing tests in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space.

But that was then. This is now.

Maybe in looking back we can find hope in moving forward

(Photo credit: Google Images)

Sister State

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I want to tell you about a special place that should be our sister state.

Most of us are familiar with sister cities and other sister states—-usually, in Jefferson City’s case, a town with similar cultural roots in Germany.  Missouri has a sister state relationship with Nagano Prefecture in Japan. Jefferson City’s sister city is Munchberg, Germany.

Missouri, a state, should have this place as a sister CITY for a reason I’ll mention later.

The scenic town is six-thousand feed up in the Himalayan foothills of India, about 180 miles north of New Delhi and is known affectionately as the “Queen of the Hills.”

It’s a Hill Station, a British phrase used to describe a popular tourist town at higher elevations where people who visit to escape the summer heat in the valleys below. Although the phrase has been used in other countries, India has more hill stations than any other country.

The city has been a popular tourist destination since a British miliary officer established it in 1825.

Seven years later, the Surveyor General of India, George Everest, wanted to make it an anchor of the Great Trigonometric Survey that provided a detailed map of the Indian subcontinent.

The what? It was a comprehensive survey that used mathematics to provide a precise map of the whole Indian subcontinent. It was started in 1802 by the East India Company in the days when the British Empire was being put together.  The company was created in 1600 as a trading company that at one time controlled the subcontinent and Hong Kong and was the largest corporation in the world—so large that it had its own army of 260,000-man army, double the size of the regular British Army at times.  The survey took almost seventy years. Its most important feature was the first measurement of the highest peaks in the Himalayas, including the one named for Surveyor General George Everest.

By the start of the Twentieth Century, the town had about 65-hundred permanent residents. But the population more than doubled in the summers. Among the prominent families to spend summers here were the Nehrus. For a time, the Dalai Lama lived there. The population in the first decade of the Twenty-first century had gone past 30-thouand.

It is said that a good set of binoculars will provide a nice view of the Himalayas

Visitors today can travel on Camel’s Back Road, named for a rocky outcrop that reminds people of a camel’s hump. It’s a popular hiking trail that includes the oldest Christian Church in the Himalaya Mountains, on a nearby road.  The snowy peaks of the big Himalayan peaks are visible through binoculars from the road.

The forty-foot high Kempty Falls, one of several waterfalls in the area, is about nine miles from the town, and Lake Mist, where the Kempty river flows, is a popular stop for hikers and other tourists. There’s a municipal garden and a lake where visitors can rent padd  boats.

The remains of Sir George Everest’s laboratory are in a park. Happy Valley includes an academy, a municipal garden and a Tibetan sanctuary. An ancient Hindu temple dedicated to the Snake God Shiva is nearby.

And then there is Cloud End, a dense forest, and Van Chetna Kendra, a bird sanctuary that was the last refuge of the now-extinct Mountain Quail.

One of the oldest and most highly-regarded colleges in India, St. George’s College, is there. It’s been run by the Patrician Brothers since 1893.

There’s a lot more to see and to do in the multinational community of Mussoorie, the “Queen of the Hills” of India.

Sounds like an interesting place.  Maybe we should get to know it better.

Save me a place on the flight, Governor.

 

The Border War

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I might not be considered a loyal Missourian—

because I don’t give a hoot on which side of the state line the Royals and the Chiefs play.  If I’m going to drive three hours to get to a game in Kansas City, what’s another ten or fifteen minutes on Interstate 70?  A game is a game wherever it’s played.

I long ago thought the Missouri-Kansas sports rivalry thing was stupid. The pre-war Civil War ended more than 150 years ago and to liken two teams of big guys trying stomp on each other, or two teams of tall guys jamming a ball into a metal circle has any significance to the universe is insane.

The great sports columnist Heywood Hale Broun wrote in the forward to his wonderful book, Tumultuous Merriment;

“The actual importance of the contest is immaterial to both spectators and players once the period of magic has begun.  The level of excitement is subconsciously chosen by those present and after a time exists beyond their control. It is only harmful when, like some lingering germ from a tropical paradise, it darkens the future.  All of us should play as if life and honor depended on it, and all of us should cheer as if it were Lucifer State versus Angel U. in the arena; but at game’s end all of us should recognize that paradise was neither won nor lost. None of us should emulate those middle-aged men who stare glumly into the bottom of a highball glass when they think of a shot that failed to drop in the last second of some long-ago basketball game.”

In other words, the game is what is important and it is important only within the time of the game. Attaching any importance outside that period is a waste of time.

So, then, is all of the anguish about economic advantage of one place over another unimportant within the entirety of an economic area.  And that should be what we are talking about here because the metropolitan cities and counties form their own economic area regardless of rivers and streets. Why there continues to be a counterproductive economic civil war within that area is beyond my understanding.

It’s not a case of whether the teams play on one side of the Missouri River or the other. The river as a boundary is a manmade abstraction as are state lines. The grass is the same color on both sides. Drive down Stateline Road. One side is in Jackson County, Missouri. The other is in Wyandotte County, Kansas.  If you drive north, you’re in Missouri.  Drive south and you’re in Kansas.  The difference is a white line about six inches wide in the pavement..

The Chiefs and the Royals are still going to be “The Kansas City Whatevers” regardless of which side of a manmade line on which they hold their contests.

Get over it.

For years, Missouri and Kansas have waged an economic war, giving tax breaks to snatch this or that business from the other side only to have the other side a few years later offer tax breaks to get the company back.

If one state or the other is economically ahead, it can’t be by very much.

This silliness almost became—and maybe should have become—academic in 1855, the days of the pre-war border war, when pro-slavery Westport resident Mobillion McGee decided the chances of Kansas entering the Union as a slave state would be improved if the Missouri boundary line was shifted to the east a few miles, thereby putting more pro-slavery voters in Kansas. He and newspaper publisher Robet T. Van Horn convinced the legislatures of both states to agree to the scheme.  But a young man they hired to seek congressional approval went to Washington, fell in love, married and left on an extended honeymoon, during which time enthusiasm for the plan cooled and it was never carried out.

Their idea has some validity today, not in redrawing the boundary lines for slavery but in considering territory on both sides of the lines as a single economic entity. Such a move would take, as happened in 1855, legislative approval from both states to form an economic district that would jointly pursue economic development mutually beneficial to the broader area.

Call it the McGee Enterprise Zone in which rivalries would not be recognized and the economic power of two states will be combined for greater development, the value of which would be shared by both.

It won’t be simple to organize such an entity. But doing so could end decades of unproductive rivalry resulting from unnecessary adherence to manmade lines. A battle between Lucifer State and Angel U is okay in the three hours of a game. But the game does not last for more than 150 years and neither should the parochial man-made rivalry between Kansas and Missouri.

Build stadiums wherever negotiations lead them to be built. It’s all still the Kansas City area and in the end we should be glad they don’t move to Nashville.

 

A Museum is Dying—And We Should Be Ashamed

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Something more important than Kansas City sports stadiums has come up so I’ll wait to encourage some thinking about that issue until later.   An announcement late last week takes precedence—the planned closing of the Steamboat Arabia museum in Kansas City.

Some readers of these entries know that for almost eight years I have been trying to convince the Missouri General Assembly to keep this irreplaceable historical resource from closing and probably leaving our state.

We have tried to convince the legislature to meet its responsibilities to the people of Missouri by updating an important part of our gambling laws—the casino admission fee. One part of that proposal would have that industry finance a new home for the Steamboat Arabia Museum in Kanas City—or in some other city as long as it stays in Missouri.

But the legislature has refused to end the multi-million dollar scam gave them more than $60 million in unearned profits in the most recent fiscal year, weakened the financial ability of the Missouri Gaming Commission to regulate it and, even worse, has brought our system of seven state-operated veterans homes to the verge of closing one of those homes.

Last Thursday, the Arabia Museum announced that it would be closing a year from now. Many of you know what an incredible experience the museum provides in telling the story of life in Missouri and on the frontier five years before the Civil War.  There is nothing like this museum anywhere.

For those unfamiliar with the story, here it is.

The Steamboat Arabia, bound upstream to deliver winter supplies to sixteen then-small communities and outposts struck a submerged log above Kansas City and sank withing half an hour, taking 200 tons of cargo with it. The boat sank into the soft river mud so quickly that the cargo would not be recovered—-until the winter of 1988-89 when five men located it in a Kansas farm field a half mile away from the present river channel.  They went far in the hole financially and realistically, finding the wreckage fifty feet down and recovering the entire cargo that had been perfectly protected from the deteriorating effects of light and air.

They decided their discovery was too important to be sold and three years later opened the museum that has never take a dime of government funding but has given hundreds of thousands of visitors an unequalled window into the mid-19th century and how our ancestors lived.

I invite you to look at a video at 1856.com to get a taste of what is and what can be—if the state steps in and for once does not allow itself to be influenced or intimidates by a predatory industry untruthfully claiming to be a good corporate citizen.

Our plan has been to increase casino admission fee, set at two dollars per person in 1993, to contemporary dollar values with part of that money going to finance a new building for this incredible historical resource.

Why the casinos?  Because the very existence of casinos in Missouri is based on our riverboat heritage. The industry never promoted “casino gambling” in winning voter approval for it in 1992.  Instead, it promoted “riverboat gambling,” avoiding the red-flag word that might have incited increased opposition.  We still see the results of that campaign in our laws and in our Constitution where casinos are called “excursion gambling boats.”

Thirty years of inflation have greatly increased the contemporary equivalent of two dollars in 1993 money to $4.56 as of September, 2025.  So it is that the state and host cities still split the two dollars for each admission but the casinos keep $2.56. However, inflation works both ways by lowering the buying power of the two dollars they do receive. Two 1993 dollars have the buying power now of 90-cents.

The admission fee is equally split between the gaming commission with its worthy causes that include veterans nursing homes, and the casinos’ host cities.

These calculations mean that the host cities of our casinos are getting 45 cents in today’s valued money while the casino on the riverfront of those cities is making $2.56.  That is not how the legislature thirty-some years ago planned for the situation to be.

These are the five men who spent a cold, wet, muddy and miserable four months digging down to the Arabia and recovering history as it really was lived in 1856 on the frontier.  Two of them have died—Bob Hawley and the older of his two sons, Greg, (the left of the two men in or near the cab). The other three are (L-R)_ Jerry Mackey, Dave Hawley, and David Luttrell.

These five men decided their findings were too important to be sold. They have protected the museum and its teachings and dreamed of expanding it to include, among other things, an entire boat that might have escaped extensive damage in its sinking.

The dream is fading and the museum will disappear if private philanthropists or philanthropic organizations do now act quickly to raise money and if the legislature continues to let the casino industry dictate what state policy will be for that industry.

I have compiled almost 200 pages of charts, tables, and other information showing how this industry, not the legislature nor the gaming commission, is serving the general public as it should.

One of the sad facts accompanying the situation is that the Missouri Gaming Commission has let all of this happen without public comment even as it has watched its own financial resources decline because of decreasing admissions and the decreasing value of the funds the casinos have agree to let it have.  It publishes an annual report but never has put the industry-supplied numbers in any context that would tell the public how the industry has annually mugged the state.

In the most recent fiscal year, the casino industry kept $64.1 million in unearned income that would have stayed with the state and the host cities if the admission fee had been adjusted for contemporary values.  Because inflation also has diminished the purchasing power of the money the casinos DID pay, the state and the cities lost another $30 million.  The lost revenue/unearned profits are on track to be a nine-figure amount this year.

Maybe, now that the museum has announced its planned closure, enough members of the legislature will recognize the seriousness and the urgency of this issue and will find the courage to meet their responsibilities more to the people at home than to the casino people in the Capitol hallways, and will provide funding to keep that museum open and in Missouri.

Leavenworth, Kansas has made a strong offer and the state of Kansas is supporting it.

This is make or break time for Missouri. Frankly, I am pessimistic. I do not believe our legislators have the will to act in the people’s interests rather than the gambling industry’s interests.

All of the numbers I have cited here, and much more, are from a lengthy study, year by year, of how the industry has exploited a flaw in the original admission fee law and now refuses to let the legislature fix it.

Do not misunderstand me. The Missouri General Assembly seems incapable of exercising its policy-making authority on this issue.

The situation is more desperate than ever. The clock is ticking at an increasing rate. The people must act, whether it is in pressuring their elected officials or seeking out those with philanthropic sympathies.

We cannot lose this museum.  We will lose a major part of ourselves and of our history if we do not act now.  As we view the situation at this hour, though, Leavenworth and Kansas will not so much gain the museum as Missouri and Jefferson City will shamefully abandon it.

If you can help or if you know someone who can offer major help, we will be giving ourselves history—and saving history is a reward in itself and a legacy of this generation to generations we will never know.

There’s another video I hope you will watch— One Last Chapter: The Arabia Steamboat Museum.

You know what’s worse than personal disappointment?  The feeling that Missouri will have let down the dreams of the five men who gave us this incredible gift recovered during those cold, wet, muddy months in the winer of 1988 and ’89 because it puts the will of the powerful few above the benefit of the common many.

I’m not sure how much I can believe in the state motto very much:

“Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.”

Notes from a Quiet Hill (Dork edition)

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Would Donald Trum’s campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize be more successful if he could get a truce between Republicans and Democrats in the House and the Senate?  That would be—what? the tenth war he has ended?

What a great ceremony that would be!

In the Trump Ballroom.

So far, he hasn’t suggested the nation’s capital be renamed Trump, District of Columbia.

What did the members of the United States House of Representatives do during the longest government shutdown in our country’s history?

There is one thing they did NOT doing with all of this free time—visiting the folks back home, going around to the cities in their districts, holding meetings or shaking hands with constituents who are shopping at Wal-Mart.

Given the continued deterioration of the economic situations of millions of Americans, it is logical that they would prefer to hide out instead of holding community meetings.  In a time when wisdom is in short supply, perhaps they are wise not to show their faces in their districts after all.

We cannot recall the last time the congressman representing Jefferson City visited here and met with the good folks who sent him to Washington. Coming to Jefferson City to file for another term doesn’t count.

Come to think of it, his predecessor was no prize either. I went to his office once, found the door locked, and when somebody opened it I was greeted with an attitude that asked, “What are you doing here?”

Maybe next year we should elect somebody who won’t ignore us for a change.

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Does anybody else think the President looks like a Dork in his baseball cap?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dork squared.

Does he wear it to cover his apparently expanding bald spot?  Or does he wear it because he didn’t shampoo his mane?

At least he didn’t wear it during his visit with the King of England or in his recent United Nations, uh, speech.  Had he done so, this is the one that would have been appropriate, if any cap was appropriate.

This is the cap he wore while speaking to the Ameircan troops during his recent visit to  Japan. If we were a person in uniform engaged in the serious business of defending our country, we might struggle with our composure while listening to some old guy in a necktie and a ball cap ramble on about how he’s so abused by critics. I’m not sure I could salute my commander in chief who thinks dorkiness is fashionable.

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Speaking of wretched excess (a White House ballroom, a marbleized Lincoln bedroom bathroom, a $400 million used jetliner), there is this home in Jefferson City where “going overboard” is woefully inadequate in describing Halloween decorations.

What better time to display “wretched” excess than Halloween?

These folks in Jefferson City obviously like Halloween but we wonder where they store this stuff the rest of the year—-especially since they put up comparable decorations for Christmas. If it’s at their house, where do they live?

A second thought occurred to us that maybe they do this to make it impossible for trick or treaters to make their way to their door.

They have a lot of fun with Halloweek and Christmas. Can’t wait to see what more they add to their Christmas decorations in a few weeks. We’ll try to remember to show them to you.

But will Santa be able to find the house?

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear (of Ourselves)  

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It was a cool-ish morning, a few degrees above chilly and several degrees above cold, the early sun making the warmth inside my car welcoming a few hours after results of this week’s elections had been announced.

As I had fast-walked my mile around the track at the Knowles YMCA in Jefferson City a few minutes earlier, two moments in history came to me as I thought about the first elections since Donald Trump began his second term.  Two phrases from those events  seemed appropriate:

“The people are coming, armed with pitchforks”  and “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

And I thought the Tuesday results amounted to the people armed with political pitchforks, a story springing from the French Revolution of 1789. And my mind added a phrase: “and the grooves in the guillotine are being greased.”

It was October 5, 1789 when 7,000 angry women, armed not only with pitchforks but with pikes and muskets, marched six miles in the rain from Paris to the palace at Versailles to confront Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette about the people in Paris who were starving while the Royal First Family of France ate well in their palace. There had been significant events preceding the march including the famous Storming of the Bastille, the infamous Paris fortress and a prison for Parisians charged with various offenses against the crown, and the circulation of “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

Four days before the march, a banquet was thrown at the palace, welcoming the troops that had arrived to protect the royal family. There were toasts and expressions of loyalty to the throne, a lavish banquet that outraged the hungry people in Paris when the newspapers publicized it.

Now, on October 5, those 7,000 rain-dampened working women were at the palace chanting “Bread, Bread,” to the rhythm of a beating drum, a moment captured two centuries later in the Broadway musical Les Miserables:

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

The twenty-thousand French National Guardsmen were unable to keep the women from breaching the gates and demanding Marie face them alone, which she did from a balcony. The mob by now recognized the strength of its position and demanded that she and the King accompany them back to Paris to witness the misery of the people from whom bread had been withheld.

They had no choice. The next day, they became prisoners of the revolution and two years later went to the guillotine.

The dropping of the blade on the neck of Louis XVI meant the future of France would involve no kings.

We will learn more a year from now how much the story of the No Kings movement in France almost 250 years ago will be played out in our streets against President Trump, who held a sumptuous Great Gatsby Party at Mar-a-Lago hours before the Food Stamp Program expired, leaving millions of his citizens wondering how they could afford bread and other necessities of life as he and his friends dined on fine food.

Tuesday’s election results from coast to coast showed an undeniable revolt against Donald Trump.  It is easy and perhaps simplistic to draw parallels with his party and the banquet at Versailles in 1789, when a ruler and his supporters ate very well at a time when many Americans wondered if they could afford bread—and other necessities.

Trump’s reaction to the results illustrates his tone-deaf self-centeredness, his attitude that he is above the mob: “Trump wasn’t on the ballot, and shutdown, were two reasons that Republicans lost elections tonight, according to pollsters,” he wrote in all capital letters on his social media page.  As usual, he did not cite any pollsters supporting his attitude.

The fact is, Trump WAS on the ballot Tuesday.  And his party loyalists who have tried to blame the shutdown entirely on minority Democrats clearly have not convinced a lot of voters they are speaking the truth.

Trump never campaigned for any of his party’s candidates in this election cycle. In the New York Mayor’s race, he didn’t even endorse his party’s candidate and his name-calling against the eventual winner failed bigly.

Our two political parties face important decisions in the aftermath..  Democrats need to keep the public pot boiling for 2026, perhaps not a huge problem as long as Donald Trump keeps doing and saying Donald Trump things.

Is it already too late for Republicans to keep control?  A year is a long time in politics. Candidates and parties historically have found ways to get off the mat.  The Democrats did it Tuesday. But Republicans surely must be questioning how much continued slavish loyalty to Donald Trump will be a major liability for them as individuals and as a party in 2026.

How relevant will Donald Trump be to what the party needs to do in the next year to avoid being irrelevant to voters?  The party surely must confront the reality of the danger Donald Trump embodies to its continued power.  How will the party move beyond him for its self-preservation?

Mayor-elect Zahron Mamdani of New York told well-wishers Tuesday night, “We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.  After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.”

On March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt opened his first inaugural address this way:

This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.

This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.

Republicans surely understand that they have been warned, that the No Kings rallies are now emboldened, the pitchforks are out, and the pikes are ready for Republican heads next year. The beating of the drum and the beating of the national heart will intensify.

After Tuesday’s elections, it appears the only thing the Republican Party has to fear is itself.

 

Brent

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Last weekend, Nancy and I drove to St. Joseph for the retirement party of my longtime Missourinet managing editor, Brent Martin.  Brent and I sat about four feet apart in the Missourinet newsroom for fifteen years before the company sent him to Lincoln, Nebraska to breathe new life into the Nebraska News Network.

He built the organization into a respected part of the Nebraska Capitol Press Corps before our parent company decided there just wasn’t enough money in Nebraska to continue support of the NRNs and abruptly shut it down.

We had hired Brent from our affiliate in St. Joseph, KFEQ, a historic station serving northwest Missouri, northeast Kansas, southwest Nebraska, and southeast Iowa.  But we had known Brent since he was a student at Central Missouri State (now the University of Central Missouri) in Warrensburg where he did the news on affiliate KOKO.

Brent wrapped up a 45-year career in broadcast journalism last week, having returned to his St. Joseph roots at KFEQ after the abrupt shutdown in Nebraska.

Brent was on top of a number of major stories in St. Jo and in Jefferson City and in Lincoln. CBS relied on him to cover the 1993 flood and its impact on northwest Missouri’s biggest city.  I trusted him implicitly to maintain the quality of the Missourinet operations when I was out of town.

That included the night 25 years ago when we lost Governor Carnahan.  Nancy and I were in Albuquerque, having just come down from our annual archaeological work in southwest Colorado, and watching the 10 .p.m. news on KOB-TV when the anchor reported that the airplane carrying Missour Governor and senatorial candidate Mel Carnahan was missing. We immediately switched to CNN and got the updated information that the plane had crashed.

I knew that Brent would be in the newsroom along with the other members of our staff and other staffers who would be drawn there by the events, and I knew he would have things well in hand.

And he did.  I told him to send someone to the Capitol and find Lieutenant Govenror Roger Wilson, who would become the new governor at almost any time.  One of the people who had rushed to the newsroom that night was my former assistant news director at KLIK, a Jefferson City Station that no longer exists—Clyde Lear, now the owner of Learfield Communications.

Brent gave Clyde a recorder and sent him to the Capitol to stick to Wilson. When Wilson was sworn in and, understandably under the circumstances, said he didn’t have anything to say, Clyde—ever the journalist—asked him one and got an answer.

Brent told me that as the a time grew closer to our first newscast of the day, at 5:55 a.m., he paused and collected himself after the intensive hours that had passed, and reminded himself that in a few minutes, thousands of Missourians would learn from him that Mel Carnahan was dead.

Throughout that long day, as Nancy and I drove almost 1,000 miles back to Jefferson City, the Missourinet, led by Brent, told Missourians about what things were developing in the wake of the tragedy.

Less than a year later, I was in Nashville for the opening of the national convention of radio and television news directors, due to start on September 12. Just as we were to start our pre-convention board meeting, the first airplane crashed into the first of the World Trade Center towers in Washington.   Again, it was Brent in charge of the Missourinet newsroom, running our coverage of state events that were affected by those two crashes.

Fortunately, I had driven to Nashville so I was not trapped as were several other news directors because all airline flights had been grounded indefinitely. When I got back to the newsroom, our operation hadn’t missed a beat.

I missed him when he went to Nebraska—-more because he was a dear friend more than anything else.  We talked about all kinds of stuff in our years together; politics, government, religion, families, cars—-Brent bled blue and white during the Kansas City Royals seasons and he bled red and yellow during the NFL season.  Our sports director, Bill Pollack, once confided to me, tongue in cheek, that he was always glad to see me back in the newsroom so he could get his sports business done because Brent always wanted to talk about the Royals or the Chiefs or the Tigers.

Being a journalist requires enduring energy for a long number of years. It’s exciting to be on the front row of history, whether it’s in city hall or a state capitol.  Sometimes it is frustrating. Sometimes it is boring. But it is always human and the role of a reporter is vitally necessary to our state and country. Brent spent his fifteen years as Missourinet Managing Editor covering the House while I camped out in the Senate trying to make the complicated process of making laws simple enough to explain to Missourians who need to know what their government does to, with, and for them.

Sometimes, it wasn’t fun at all—the Carnahan crash, the floods, the twin towers attacks.  And executions.  Brent and I covered 34 of them; he covered twelve before going to Nebraska where he became not only a reporter but also a source for other reporters when Nebraska had its first execution by lethal injection in 2018. We felt that the state should not exact its most serious penalty against someone without witnesses from the two statewide media organizations as witnesses.

Brent’s wife and daughter planned the retirement party at the church the family attends in St. Joseph.  One of the gifts he was given was a Chiefs jacket.  And there was a special guest:

Brent is looking forward to time to read and to write poetry and to spoil his two granddaughters. The big retirement gift from his family and friends is a trip to England next year. I gave him a small gift, something a baseball fan might appreciate—an official 1994 World Series baseball. The Royals weren’t in it but a baseball fan such as Brent Martin would appreciate it because nobody was in the World Series that year because of a players strike.

He’ll have plenty of time for Royals games after missing so many because he had to be up early the next morning to tell the people of St. Joseph, and for a few years the people Missouri and Nebraska what was going on around them.

I wrote a little poem in the card we gave him that began something like:

Guilt-free naps

With a cat on the lap

And the Chiefs on the TV….

And it went downhill from there.

I reminded him and Tammi of something Christopher Bond told me after he had retired from the U.S. Senate—that his wife said she married him for better or worse, but not for lunch.

We hope the Martins have better luck at figuring out the lunch thing that we have had. We’re okay with Monday through Wednesday and the weekends. But after eleven years, we still havne’t figured out Thursday and Friday.

I hope my friend Brent is more successful than I have been about lunch.

 

 

The Bunny, the Bully, And A Sing-Along 

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It has been more than 46 years since a bunny has made headlines such as this—when President Jimmy Carter saw a swamp rabbit swimming his way and either splashed water on it or hit it with his canoe paddle to keep it away.

It was a minor thing, really, but you know how the press is. The Associated Press broke the story and the commentators and comedians started having a field day with Carter fending off a “killer rabbit.”

Now we have Bad Bunny lined up to do the halftime show at the Super Bowl, the first male Latin performer to do that show, and the MAGA crowd is having a cow.  Especially Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

When President Trump was asked for his reaction he offered his usual, “I never heard of him. I don’t know who he is” response, which he has used too often for us to count to deny knowing people he knows. “I don’t know why they’re doing it, it’s like crazy. … Then they blame it on some promoter that they hired to pick up entertainment. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous,” he continued.

Interesting, isn’t it, that it’s ridiculous to hire somebody he never heard of?

So, for him as well as for those of us of his well-advanced generation, here’s some information about BB and why the MAGA crowd has its undies in such a knot:

He’s 31 years old, a performer from Puerto Rico (real name: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) who has made Spanish rap music popular worldwide. He’s been a star for almost a decade. From 2020-2023 he was the world’s most-streamed artist on Spotify. His sixth studio album, described as “a love letter to Puerto Rico and his heritage, was number one on the Billboard Top 100 albums earlier this year.

He’s also a WWE pro wrestler and a former 24/7 champion, which—if he weren’t Puerto Rican—might entitle him to take part in the 80th Trump birthday celebration wrestling matches at the White House.

Earlier this year he wrapped up a 23-performance tour of Latin America, Europe, Japan, and Australia—but not the United States because of concerns that ICE would pounce on fans going to his shows.

And that is what has smoke coming out the ears of some MAGA people, including Noem who has proclaimed that her ICE agents will be out in force at the Super Bowl.

In an interview, it was clear that she has become a graduate of the Trump School of Nonsense: “I have the responsibility for making sure everybody who goes to the Super Bowl has the opportunity to enjoy it and to leave, and that’s what America’s about. So yeah, we’ll be all over that place. We’re going to enforce the law. So, I think people should not be coming to the Super Bowl unless they’re law-abiding Americans who love this country.”

As for the NFL, she spouted this head-scratcher: “Well, they suck and we’ll win, and God will bless us and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe. And they’re so weak, we’ll fix it.”

Huh?

Her intelligence deficit was mirrored by MAGA influencer Tomi Lahren on her podcast interview with The Hill’s Krystal Ball (yes, Krystal Marie Ball is her real name), when Lahren asked Ball what she thought about whether BB was a good choice for the halftime show.  Ball admitted she didn’t know much about him but that he “seems like a great American artist, so sure.”

That’s when Lahren put her foot in it. “He’s not an American artist, but—”

Ball: “He’s Puerto Rican. That’s part of America, dear.”

Huff Post reported Lahren plunged ahead and criticized BB’s criticism of ICE only to have Ball remind her, “America agrees with him on that…A majority of Americans think ICE has gone too far. They’ve watched videos of, like, 79 year old business owners being slammed to the ground and their ribs broken by ICE. So I think the American people are probably on board with that message at this point.”

The best retort Lahren could offer was, “Whoever you’re talking to, I’m sure is. I’m not so sure the rest of the country is.”

Well, the fake news just reports fake polls, you know, and you shouldn’t pay attention to them.  It’s better, after all, to believe the First Golfer, who says he’s so popular that nobody has ever seen anything like it, to quote one of his favorite phrases.

Also chiming in is longtime Trumper Corey Lewandowski, now an adviser in the Homeland Security Department (If you can’t give a favorite ego-feeding supporter a specific job at the public trough, you can always make them an “advisor.”), who called the BB announcement “shameful” and charged Bunny “just seems to hate America so much.”

Lewandowski is lying. BB doesn’t hate America. But he doesn’t want his fans put in the sights of ICE agents emboldened by Lewandowski’s boss.  Bunny told i-D magazine, “There were many reasons why I didn’t show up in the U. S. and none of them were out of hate.” He recalled he had performed “successful” and “magnificent” concerts many times and has “enjoyed connecting with Latinos who have been living in the U.S.”

The whole incident has become great fodder for internet denizens.

Trump’s antagonism toward Puerto Rico is widely known. When he tried to fire three members of a board that oversees the territory’s financial management, a federal district judge ruled he had likely violate constitutional due process rights and federal law.

Last year, a comedian at a Trump fund raiser referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.” Trump’s reaction to Tony Hinchcliffe’s comment was the usual: “I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is.” But he didn’t repudiate it.

He told a Puerto Rican native at a campaign roundtable in Pennsylvania, “We helped you through a lot of bad storms. I’ll tell you we really had some bad ones. You remember you were there when I brought the hospital ship against everyone’s advice and we got it there and took care of a lot of people. But I think no president’s done more for Puerto Rico than I have.”

Few viewed his visit to Puerto Rico some nine days after Hurricane Maria in 2017 as anything more than “insulting,” as San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz,  a “PR, 17-minute meeting.” They remember that he threw paper towels to a room crowded with victims hoping for something much more important, a “terrible and abominable” image that “does not embody the spirit of the American nation.”

“They had these beautiful, soft towels. Very good towels,” he recalled on a Trinity Broadcasting Network interview. There was a crowd of a lot people. And they were screaming and they were loving everything. I was having fun.”

He visited only one small part of the island for a short time—-and then piled insult on insult by minimizing what was facing those people who needed a whole lot more than paper towels. “Every death is a horror,” he said, “but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous—hundred and hundreds and hundres of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”  He belittled the storm by noting there had been only sixteen confirmed deaths. Mayor Cruz said Trump showed no interest in reaching out to suffering Puerto Ricans.

About that hospital ship: Reuters reported the Pentagon did not dispatch it until three days after defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said on Twitter that Trump and his Secretary of Defense James Mattis “should send the Navy…to Puerto Rico now. These are American citizens.” Further, the Inspector General in the Housing and Urban Development saw calculated  that the administration had withheld about $20 billion in hurricane relief after the island was hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017.

MSNBC talked to the Executive Director of Deadline Hollywood, Dominic Patten, who says Noem’s comments and the MAGA World’s reaction to the Super Bowl choice is rooted in three things—a hatred of capitalism (“Bad Bunny’s a big star; he’s going to make a lot of money for the NFL”), ignorance (“They might want to remember that Puerto Rico IS part of America”), and “a bit of the loser syndrome” (BB’s criticism of ICE).

As far as Noem’s claim that the NFL sucks, is weak, and “won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe,” Patten responds, “The NFL don’t care. The NFL is the NFL. They’re the biggest game in town.” Digit elevated.

The Super Bowl halftime show is organized by Roc Nation, founded by rapper Jay-Z, considered the “live music entertainment strategist for the NFL.”  The show is sponsored by Apple Music.

“Let’s also not be naïve,” said Patten. The NFL and Jay-Z knew exactly what they were doing. They decided to poke the paper bear and they’ve done a very good job of it.”

Well, the paper bear has decided to let loose with a jingoistic growl (We’ll save you the effort of looking up “jingoism,” by citing Britannica’s definition: “an attitude of  belligerent nationalism, adherence to the rightness or virtue of one’s own nation, society, or group, simply because it is one’s own.”). Turning Point USA. Charlie Kirk’s creation, has announced it is going to host “The All -American Halftime Show” as an Bunny alterative. It is taking an online survey of what music its adherents want. The first choice is “Anything in English,” a cheap shot at BB, who performs in Spanish.

It is clear that Mr. Bunny, although a native of a United States territory, just isn’t American enough for the TPUSA/MAGA crowd.

What do you want to bet that the song getting the biggest crowd reaction at that alternate even will be Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.

Tell you what—let’s look at the lyrics.

If tomorrow all the things were gone
I’d worked for all my life

(Such as the freedom to express an opinion without someone in an Army uniform pepper-spraying me or some goon in a mask and without a warrant yanking me into a white van and hauls me to a crowded lockup while my terrified family wonders where I am)

And if I had to start again
With just my children and my wife
I’d thank my lucky stars
To be livin’ here today

(unless my wife and our children who were born here are being deported to some secret and awful place.)

‘Cause the flag still stands for freedom

(unless I want to read a banned book, visit a museum that tells the truth about our history, or go to a national park that doesn’t have oil wells sticking up from the ground.)

And they can’t take that away

(Oh, yes they can. And they’re trying for more.)

And I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I know I’m free

(as long as I buy into the right kind of religion, don’t have a funny sounding name, think the 2020 election was stolen, and believe all I need to prove my Americanism is to wear a red baseball cap with the right letters on it)

And I won’t forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me

(Sixty-five thousand Puerto Ricans served our country in World War II including the seven Medina brothers known as “The Fighting Medinas,” and Agustin Ramos Calero, known as the “One Man Army,” who won the Silver Star and 21 other medals and decorations. About fifty were killed. About 48,000 Puerto Ricans served in Vietnam. About 350 were KIA and five earned the Medal of Honor.)

And I’d gladly stand up
Next to you and defend her still today

(Even if you think I should not be allowed to perform a Super Bowl halftime show.)

‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land
God bless the USA

(I agree.  I love this land as you do. But I think Abrham Lincoln had his priorities straight when he purportedly said, “I do not boast that God is on my side; I humbly pray that I am on his.”

One of the immediate reactions to the Turning Point announcement was to have Bad Bunny throw paper towels into the crowd to make a political point that would remind the audience of the Trump visit.

But that would be lowering himself to their level.

Here’s what would be incredibly classy and what would at the same time send a powerful message:

(Here, let’s sing the song together:

Si mañana todas las cosas se hubieran ido–If tomorrow all the things were gone
He trabajado toda mi vida—I’d worked for all my life
Y tuve que empezar de nuevo—And I had to start again
Sólo con mis hijos y mi esposa—With just my children and my wife

Agradeceré a mis estrellas de la suerte—I’d thank my lucky stars
Vivir aquí hoy—To be livin’ here today
Porque la bandera sigue en pie por la Libertad—Cause the flag still stands for freedom
Y no pueden quitarlo—And they cant take that away

Y estoy orgulloso de ser americano—And I’m proud to be an American
Donde al menos sé que soy libre—Where at least I know I’m free
Y no olvidaré a los hombres que murieron—And I won’t forget the men who died
¿Quién me dio ese derecho?—Who gave that right to me

Y con mucho gusto me levanto—And I gladly stand up
Junto a ti y defiéndala todavía hoy—Next to you and defend her still today
Porque no hay duda, amo esta tierra—Cause there ain’t no doubt, I love this land
Dios bendiga a los Estados Unidos—God bless the USA

Just between thee and me, I’d love to hear Bad Bunny sing this song in Spanish at the end of the halftime show, maybe while the words were on the big scoreboard screens so the audience could sing along. That would be delicious.

MAGA is too young to remember Jimmy Carter and how embarrassing and foolish a person can appear to be if they think a bunny is dangerous.

Preserving the Truth of History

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A few days ago, I went to Springfield to speak at the annual meeting of the National Trail of Tears Association.

The Association represents the volunteers who preserve the heritage of the trail and of the forced removal, 1831-1838, of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole and the Muscogee (Creek) Nations from their ancestral homes in the southeast to what is now eastern Oklahoma.

Various sources indicate 55,400-64,275 people were removed. Before the caravans reached athe place that President Jackson said would let them “cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community,” ten to 12,800 had died.

This is how the speech concluded:

It has been an honor to speak to this group at this time in our history when a concerted effort is underway to treat a lot of things as if they never happened —and when a 21st Century Trail of Tears is tragically underway, another time when people who are considered “as unqualified residents near civilized communities” are being sent off to uncertain futures in strange lands.

I wonder, as we look back 200 years to commemorate the Trail of Tears and to honor those who were forced to travel it, as well as those who showed those travelers mercy, if our descendants 200 years from now will look at the mass deportation program the same way we look at the Trail of Tears. Or the Trail of Death*.

As Chief Hoskin** noted last night, on March 27th, President Trump signed an executive order he called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” by ordering the rewriting of it so that embarrassing moments would be wiped from the public telling of our heritage.

It appears no historic site will be immune to his efforts to, as he put it, “restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”  

Have no doubt about what this is.  It is more than an executive order. It is a declaration of cultural war on the people of this nation, and the nations within this nation.

I am not sure that reminding Americans “of our extraordinary heritage” is consistent with effort to whitewash reality.

He also referred to “ideological indoctrination of divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” or, at least, his warped view of it. He appears not to understand that truth is not “ideological indoctrination.”

He complained that “the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.” 

He is right…but he is right about himself.

The danger is that such rewriting of history can be little more than returning to a past where societal divides were deeper, where acts of national shame were more acceptable, and the progress we have made that inspires millions around the world is wiped out.

I want to hear how he and his enablers can sanitize the smallpox blanket.

I want to hear how the destruction of the friendly Wampanoags and King Phillip’s War is “ideological indoctrination.

I want to hear how they can describe Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee as “consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect union.”

I want to know how the subjugation of the Apaches, the story of Chief Joseph, and the betrayal of Red Cloud is an “unmatched record of advancing liberty.”

How did the Indian Boarding School lead to “human flourishing.”

How the markers of the Trail of Tears are “uplifting public moments.”

I want to know which is more sacred: The Chinese-published Trump Bible with the lyrics of “Proud to be an American,” or Black Elk’s prayer on Harney Peak to the Great Mysterious One.***

That is why we cannot allow stories such as the Trail of Tears to be rewritten, with truth being excised by a person with limited or no appreciation for the work this organization does and what it stands for.

A President who threatens actions against professional sports teams unless they start calling themselves Redskins and Indians again will never understand the nobility of the kind of cause this group advocates..

Some politicians only seek the truth to distort it for their own ends. Greatness does not flow from distorted truth that hides our flaws, but—instead—flows from protecting the truth so we may grow beyond those flaws.

That is what museums are for. That is what historic sites and parks are for and that is what historical organizations are for—to remind us that this country is not a finished work, that it does not become better, let alone greater, by ignoring our past mistakes, our nation’s wrongs, and those who lived them and worked to correct them.

One reason to study history is to understand that greatness is created by today’s honesty about yesterday facts—and understanding that truth, not the obscuring  of it, builds a stronger people.  And a stronger people are a free-er people than demagogues and despots want us to be. 

A nation that hides its truths will not become great. REVEALING the truth is what gives a nation the opportunity to be better than before.

That is our responsibility, our challenge, as historians.

Others might fear us because of that. But we must never fear them.

We must never allow ourselves to be silenced—-for history is the nation’s conscience and we must never abandon the search for the truth in it.

We cannot escape history.  Indeed, our challenge today is to save it, to fight those who would rewrite it for their own benefit.

Reveal the truth, preserve the truth, speak the truth, BE the truth—and our nation will remain free.

*The Trail of Death crosses north Missouri, the path the Potawatomi Nation followed to what became Kansas when they were removed from their ancestral lands in Indiana and Illinois. It was a much smaller group but an estimated 40 of the 859 participants died en route.

**Chuck Hoskin Jr., is the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, the largest Native American Nation, with 45,000 citizens.

***You can learn about each of these issues with internet searches.  I recommend a YouTube video of the speech of Black Elk, described by narrator John G. Neihardt, a personal friend and biographer who described Black Elk as the “last of the great Sioux Indian Holy Men.”)

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 We are Victims of Trump’s Absurd Tariffs

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—-and I am furious.

(My monthly guest column on the editorial page of the Jefferson City News-Tribune addressed this topic yesterday but of necessity it was much shorter and somewhat less candid, perhaps because I had lowered the steam pressure after starting on this version.)

There must be a reason why the highly-praised Wharton School that President Trump attended has never invited him back as a speaker. I wonder if anyone has investigated to find out who wrote his papers for him or even took tests for him.

His favorite course must have been Bankruptcy 101 and he must have slept through class every day the word “tariff” came up. The graduation program for his class does not list him for any honors and just has his name among all of the other graduates.

Stop me before I tell you what I really think.

Here is a story some nice people in a gentle English town. Stay with us. By the time we are finished the story will be about a person in a big American town who puts the “bully” into the ;political phrase “bully pulpit.”

(The phrase began with Theodore Roosevelt, one of the four faces on Mt. Rushmore, a monument he thinks he should—something even less possible than him winning the Nobel Price for Peace.)  TR used the word “bully” as an adjective for “wonderful” or “superb.”

Sorry about that. We have wandered off the path.

Grasmere, a village of about 4,500 people in England’s Lake District, has been known for decades as the home of numerous poets, writers, artists, philosophers and other notables.

Poets William and sister Dorothy Wordsworth described it as “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found.”

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) are considered the founders of English Literature’s “Romantic Age.” Coleridge is said to have “muttered stanzas” of the Rime” while walking about the countryside nearby. The Wordsworths lived for a few years in Dove Cottage, where Coleridge also lodged for a time.

The Dove Cottage is still there as is The Swan, an inn where William sometimes dined with the famous poet Walter Scott.

More recently, Gordon Matthews Thomas Sumner had a home there. The world knows him better as the musical artist, Sting.

Perhaps better known than the poets, philosophers, and other notables who have lived there is Beatrix Potter, who gave the world Peter Rabbit and his friends. She also lived in the Lake District.

It was a coolish, dampish English day when we were there and we didn’t get to spend as much time as we wished, but that’s a penalty we paid for trying to hit some of the highlights of three countries—England, Wales, and Scotland in two weeks.

We had our lunch at the Grasmere Tea Room, ate outside on that pleasantly cool afternoon. I think we had Paninis, having a desire to break from fish and chips (we call them French Fries here). But we had been warned of interlopers that we were told were particularly aggressive that day—Jackdaws, a relative of crows and ravens. They liked to snatch food from tables.

Grasmere is, as is the case with many European communities, an old place, one where a 200-year old building is still relatively new.  We have avoided describing it as “picturesque” because we imagine the locals have heard their town referred to that way and it has become cloying to them.

And “quaint” is a condescending word, too, so we didn’t use it.  We liked Grasmere. It’s one of several small places we visited that we’d like to return to, despite the Jackdaws.

To the ancient Celts, Jackdaws were sacred birds that nested in church steeples, symbolic church guards. Like their Crow and Raven relatives, they are considered quite intelligent. We kind of thought the one perched on the back of a chair about twenty feet from our table was scheming to poach some of our lunch. But we kept a sharp eye on it and never let it have a chance.

What has all of this to do with Trump’s politically silly and nationally-damaging tariffs? We have vented about this in earlier posts but this time it’s personal.

Our excellent tour guide, Charlie Reader, gave us something else for which Grasmere is widely known.

We each got a couple of hand-wrapped gingerbreads. And we loved them.

More than 170 years ago, Victorian Cook Sarah Nelson began making gingerbreads in her 17th century home, using her “secret recipe” (that is still secret).  Grasmere Gingerbreads are a cross between a cake and what the English call a biscuit—a cracker to us.

Sarah’s secret recipe now is guarded by Joanne and Andrew Hunter, third generation owners of the business which still operates from Sarah’s house. I wish we had known of the gingerbread house before we left the town—and had the time to visit it.  But bus tours being bus tours, we had to be on our way after lunch.

The BBC has provided some looks at Sarah’s story and the wonderful products she created.

Bing Videos

Bing Videos

When we got home, I decided to secretly order a dozen of these gingerbreads to be delivered to our home each month. It was going to be a surprise Christmas present for Nancy but the surprise fell though when Diane Gallagher (probably) called from Grasmere and Nancy answered the phone. “There’s a lady from Grasmere on the phone asking for you,” she announced before listening to the conversation. Diane was calling to confirm the order.  The first order came in the tin you see here. Subsequent orders have come in hand-wrapped paper packaging and are refills for the tin.

Each month we have looked forward to finding our little package by our front door about the 10th of each month.  But on September 5, we received a note from Diane announcing the package had been shipped three days earlier but she understood “there have been delays at Customs and your parcel is due for delivery today.”

Then she wrote:

We believe the delays are because the US Government has now abolished the exemption for any parcel under a value of $800 from import duties.  This may mean that you will be liable for import duties on delivery of the parcel.  We are still trying to find out exactly what this will mean in monetary terms, but have reason to believe that for the next six months there will be a flat fee of $80 per parcel being sent from the UK. 

Eighty dollars on a $30 package!!!

This is the results of Donald Trump’s ill-advised removal of the “de minimis” exemption for small packages from foreign countries. Packages worth less than $800 were exempt from tariffs until August 29 when he decided even the smallest item would cost a lot more.

The Universal Postal Union says postal deliveries from around the world to the United States dropped by EIGHTY PERCENT within two weeks after our economic genius President scribbled his name on the bottom of his executive order.

We were supposed to take delivery on Wednesday, September 10. Instead we got a “reschedule” notice from UPS telling us, “UPS is preparing your package for clearance. We will notify you if additional information is needed.”

Diane told us it would be okay to refuse to pay the duties. Afterward the company could tell the UPS to destroy the parcel and the amount remaining on our order would be refunded.

The order from Grasmere was held up for the better part of a week before it cleared customs in Louisville, Kentucky (why Louisville, we don’t know), and was to arrive at our house on Wednesday, September 10.

We decided to pay the duty because the folks in Grasmere had produced the gingerbreads and had shipped them to us in good faith but we decided to have them hold onto the rest of our funds until our country regained this small part of its sanity and allows something so benign as Grasmere Gingerbread to be shipped to Missouri without a duty or a tariff that our President is unable to admit punishes his own citizens.

Trump says his tariffs will force foreign manufacturers to build factories in this country. I am quite sure that Joann and Andrew Hunter are not going to establish a gingerbread manufacturing plant in this country because of this petty policy.

But if you are accumulating evidence of how idiotic Trump’s tariff policy is working, we offer this observation as a good example.

We are puzzled by the whole tariff/duty business even more because while we were waiting for our gingerbreads to trickle through the customs bureaucracy, we found a book on our doorstep that we had ordered from a company in Delhi, India.  It took only ten days from the day I ordered it for it to arrive. I ordered the book on September 5. The company in Delhi gave it to FedEx on the tenth and five days later it was on my doorstep. Clearly, somebody in the customs office was asleep at the switch.

The gingerbreads?  They were mailed on September 2, three days before the book was ordered and eight days before the book was shipped.

On Friday, September 25, we got a notice from UPS:

The status of your package has changed.

Exception Reason: The customs clearance has failed and the shipment is abandoned

UPS told us on September 10 that the package was being prepared for clearance. We were to be notified if more information was needed.  We were not notified of anything until the message that Grasmere Gingerbread package apparently is such a threat to our national security that it would be dangerous for it to be shipped from Louisville, Kentucky where it has been losing its freshness for three weeks.

We got a new note from from Diane;

On 18th September we asked UPS to destroy the parcels that had not cleared Customs, but it appears that this has not yet happened for all parcels.  As well as the severe delays through Customs, it appears that parcels valued at less than £20 are incurring import duties of just under $70, which is just not viable.  For these reasons, our directors have taken the decision to suspend shipping to the US and Canada temporarily. 

I am very sorry about this. 

UPS told us:

Exception Reason: Package cannot clear due to customs delay or missing info. Attempt to contact sender made. Package has been disposed of.

Amazing. After all these months, UPS told us the reason UPS apparently could not get a straight answer from the customs people about the reason—it’s either “customs delay” or it’s “missing info.”  What missing info?   We are unlikely to ever learn why there was a delay and what information was missing in this shipment that wasn’t a problem earlier.

It’s a little package of a dozen Gingerbreads, for God’s sake!!!

It’s disgusting. But our president has taken “disgusting” to unprecedented levels in so many things.

I have notified Diane of our sincere apologies for the embarrassment this administration is. I wish we could go back to that beautiful part of our world to do it in person—-

—because he is creating so many things to apologize to the world for.

Is it too late for Wharton to ask for its diploma back?

(photos by BP. Gingerbread by the Grasmere Gingerbread Co., videos from the BBC)