Republicans Take a Look at Day and Night—and don’t like what they see

Today, Republicans in the halls of Congress have taken a stance on the controversial issue of day and night. Early this morning, shortly after daybreak, Republican leaders convened behind closed doors before emerging moments later to speak to reporters.

“We don’t like the day,” said one.

“We used to like it; the way it used to be; but we don’t like it anymore.”

“Too light,” added another.

“Too bright,” said a fourth, grabbing the mike and staring straight into the camera.

The chorus continued.

“Why can’t we go back to the way it was?”

“You mean go back to” a reporter began but was cut short.

“I mean go back to last night.”

“Well, it will be night soon, if you could just wait—”

“I don’t want to wait. I want to go back to the dark days of last night, right now.”

“I think you mean the dark night of yester day, Senator. Not the dark days.”

That’s the way it went all day long as Democrats tried to convince Republicans that everything would be all right if they were patient and allowed nature to take its course. And Republicans rambled on about how good the night was in the good old days—last night.

A hearing was convened on the spot because there was no time to waste. The day was slipping away. Irony replaced lunacy for a short time as scientists tried to convince Republicans that day and night was something we really did have no control over.

“That's just the way it is,” said an elitist scientist from one of those Ivy League schools.

A Fox in the Henhouse is Anything But Fair

Cranks used to be harmless individuals who stood on the corner cursing the heavens, screaming the world was coming to an end and hurling dirty looks and a raised fist to anyone so bold as to ridicule them.  There weren’t enough of them to make a difference and for the most part the few that existed were obviously crazy, or as we used to say, touched in the head. They’ve come a long way. Now they have their own news station.

Watching FOX News is like being a fly on the wall in a roomful of old cranks, disguised as attractive young blondes accompanied by their suitors, listening to them proclaim the sky is falling and discussing whose fault it is. FOX News is where cranks, both viewer and commentator, wind up to get wound up.

It’s not that hard in a complex world to find something wrong if that is all you are looking for. Cranks have always known they can draw a lot of attention to themselves by searching behind every silver lining for that tidbit of disaster that might exist. But Fox News has managed to place themselves ahead of the curve on the negativity scale by putting those tasty morsels under a microscope.

In their world tragedies become conspiracies, isolated cases become the norm, good programs they don’t like become evil deeds they must destroy.

We live in a country where individual freedom and representative government are the standard by which all others are measured. The very bedrock of our Constitution is based on the dignity of man and the guarantee of life, liberty and happiness. But that doesn’t mean things won’t sometimes go wrong or that in a nation of 300 plus million people, some of them at times will be less than happy. Zeroing in on those exceptions and harping on them because it gets you an audience doesn’t make you a voice of reason. It makes you a crank.

It is easy to ignore a crank standing on the corner. But FOX News has cornered the crank market. They reach millions of people who wouldn’t recognize a crank if he or she were staring them in the eye.

Like I said earlier, the crank standing on the corner thinking he could change the world was crazy. But the cranks over at FOX News can and do influence people. So what is their motivation? You don’t have to go far for the answer.

Money and power, as usual, are always the prime motivators behind bad behavior.

Why else would people claiming to be dedicated journalists who love their country express so much contempt toward their government when there is so much to be proud of?

There used to be a thing called perspective for everyone but the cranks. We were cautioned to keep everything in perspective and always be aware of it.

But in its quest for money and power, FOX News has distorted the facts by continually maximizing the minimal. They have treated perspective as something not to be aware of, but rather to beware of.

They lead us to believe that

—the miniscule number of people that might engage in voter fraud justifies putting an unnecessary burden on millions of voters who have never committed fraud;

 —more Congressional hearings are needed to determine if a tragic attack on an embassy might possibly involve a conspiracy;

 —the rise in some people’s rates overshadow ten million people having health insurance for the first time;

—the inability to stop or control political upheaval in countries where political unrest could and should be fully anticipated is somehow seen as a sign that the most powerful military in the world is suddenly weak;

—raising the minimum living wage will cost jobs when being able to earn a living is the reason for having a job;

—regulations are bad in spite of the fact that every major economic catastrophe has been due to the lack of regulations.

The list is never ending because cranks will always find something to complain about. Talk of death panels, IRS, NSA, ATF, FDA, ETC overreach, the color of the president’s suit, or worse, whether he was even born in this country—all this becomes fodder for the cranks at FOX News.

It is important to remember that cranks aren’t necessarily dancing to a different drummer. They are simply out of step.

How should we deal with all this crankiness?

The same way as if they were standing on the corner.

Ignore them. After all, they’re just cranks.

 

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow,

—It Won’t Be the First Time

 

In discussing the proposals to battle the effects of global warming, specifically ambitious carbon reduction, Thomas Donohoe, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said, “There is no way this can be done without fundamentally changing the American way of life.”

Now there is no way to know what aspects of the American way of life he was referring to; the ongoing effort to eliminate the middle class, our fascination with guns, our propensity towards violence as a first line of defense for matters big and small, our love affair with mediocre T.V. and lots of it, our dependency on fast food, our refusal to avoid HOV lanes at all cost, or our determination to live in the past even when we know the past wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

My guess is it is the last one. We continue to think, as Jerry Lee Lewis expressed so aptly a half century ago—Has it been that long?—that we Americans really “have the bull by the horn-a.”

Has fundamentally changing a way of life ever been a good thing?

The obvious answer is ah…well…ah yes, yes it has—especially when that fundamental way of life doesn’t seem to be working.

Living in filth during the Black Plague seemed like the only way to go until someone got the bright idea that cleanliness is next to Godliness. It took a while because Europe was a pretty big cesspool but in time and with a great deal of effort and expense, Europe cleaned up its act and eliminated a deadly disease in the process. And when it was over, the only question being asked was, what the hell took us so long.

Of course, the answer to that question was that for a long time not everyone was walking around in the filth but when they learned that you didn’t have to actually walk around in the filth to be affected by it, fundamental changes occurred and plagues, for the most part, now only turn up in children’s nursery rhymes.

But you can go back even further, right to the beginning in fact. There was a time, and people tend to forget this, but there was a time when men lived in caves. Not only did he live in caves but he was damn happy to be doing so. He had his fire going, a bed of straw, a coat of fur, and a stack of rocks to keep the neighbors out of his yards.

Then someone came up with the bright idea that they could do better and the natural response was, “What, better than this?”

That was a cave man trying to hold on to his fundamental way of life. That was a caveman flat out rejecting the idea that while bear coats might be appropriate for everyday wear, deerskins might be better for formal events.

The world that has been continually changing from day one. And no faction of society has successfully been able to apply the brakes to change. So again the question becomes, why do we still fear it?

The answer is no one really fears change. But some people have a stake in avoiding it.

So the next time someone—someone in the oil business, say, makes the argument—yes, we could go to wind power and solar power, and it would be cleaner, but do we really want to turn our backs on dirty coal?

You tell him not to let the windmill blade hit him on the way out of the 20^th century. And remind him that today’s fundamental way of life is yesterday’s old news and today’s new ideas will be tomorrow’s fundamental way of life—but not forever.

  

Writing will improve when readers demand it. Reading will improve when there's something worth reading.

A recent article entitled, “SOL SCORE STAGNATION” highlighted the fact that

reading and writing scores are down. State officials point out that like math scores, which were once also down but are now on the rise, reading and writing scores will also rise once students become more comfortable with the tests. Interesting. They do not say that reading and writing will become better—only that scores will get better.

I garnered this information from my Thursday edition of the Virginian-Pilot but the vast majority of people getting this news will pull the story off the Internet. There, they will be free to go immediately to the comment section and read what anonymous people everywhere were saying about the story; and by the fifth or sixth comment also discover what these anonymous people were saying about everything and anything else under the sun while breaking every imaginable grammar rule in the book—assuming there still are grammar books.

They can then Tweet and text their friends about the article. The good news is no one will be grading those.

Reading and writing scores are down because reading and writing serve no purpose in the modern world—at least not reading and writing the way it used to be. Today, words are out, punctuation is out, complete sentences are out, and coherent ideas are out.

LOL, !!!!!, & :'(  (for crying out loud) are in.

For the past year, I have been transcribing letters between my father, when he was a POW in Germany and my mother, a WAVE serving in Pensacola, Florida. Their engagement, like those of most of their friends from that era, was carried on through the mail. These letters help to point out the stark differences between then and now. They also say something about reading and writing.

Most importantly, I can hold these letters, which are over 70 years old in my hand just as my parents did when they sent and received them. Most of the millions of Tweets and comments that have been posted online over just the short time I have been writing this have already been forgotten and been moved down the page—never to be seen again, replaced by even less important and equally forgettable stuff.

My father was captured in Sicily on July 22, 1943. She continued writing even though her letters were being returned, “addressee missing in action.”  He continued to write not knowing if his letters were even being received. Finally, on February 4, 1944 he receive his first letter from home. He responded immediately, “Finally received a letter from home. You can imagine what it meant to me.”

Waiting for something makes it more important. Knowing that someone else is waiting for your response makes what you say and how you say it even more important.

Today, if something is posted on Facebook and doesn’t receive a “Like” within a reasonable amount of time—usually a few hours—the poster wants to know what happened. With so many words going out to so many people so many times on so many subject, the obvious question becomes, “How can any of it be important?”

The answer is, it isn’t.

And neither are the writing skills that go into texting and Tweeting. Once you become used to reading misspelled words and miss-punctuated sentences, not to mention sentences that don’t even make sense to begin with, it’s not long before reading skills also go out the window.

In today’s world, speed is of the essence. That and ease—easy to write, easy to read. If it isn’t easy and it isn’t fast, then it isn’t getting done. In today’s world of low reading and writing scores, nobody is going to wait almost a year for a response. Who has that kind of time?

Lest a young reader think I’m just another disgruntled old dinosaur out of touch with the always changing times, I’d point out that when I was their age we had abbreviated, coded messages, too.

Whether as students away at college or soldiers in Vietnam, our correspondence often contained the cryptic message S.W.A.K. (sealed with a kiss) on the flap of the envelope. The only difference between then and now is that we also had a written letter inside that could be held in our hands and read. Some of us still have those letters.

 

  

 

 

The Times They are a-changin'

The Virginian-Pilot Sunday Forum, August 3, 2014.


FIFTY YEARS ago Bob Dylan recorded what for many became the standard for the turbulent ’60s. 

Most of the politicians he sang about are gone now. So are most of the parents. He was right: “The times, they [were] a changin’.”

The young people he sang to have become today’s politicians, parents and grandparents. 

Back then, as teens, we were looking to the future and telling our leaders and parents that if they couldn’t do the same, they should “get out of the way, don’t block up the road.” Today, we’re the ones looking over our shoulder.

And just like our parents and leaders then, we aren’t comfortable in a changing world. I talk to people all the time who say they don’t care anymore. They’ve given up on their leaders, their country and everything in between. They don’t vote because “they’re all crooks.”

The Wealthy Also Have a Dream (final installment)

Don't Wake Us From This Dream

To their credit and despite the brutal attacks waged against them by workers—often out of sheer jealousy—the rich continued to make money. The number of millionaires grew from a mere 50 in 1848 to 5,000 in 1910. Despite a crippling income tax that stole virtually every dime they made, the number of millionaires somehow—by hook or by crook—grew to 50,000 in 1958 and 500,000 in 1980. But always in the back of their minds was the notion; how much more money could they have acquired were taxation not robbing them blind—or at least making them teary-eyed.

Workers continued to accuse their bosses of being greedy and indifferent, some might say insensitive, to the plight of labor. But workers didn’t have to walk in fine Italian shoes or ride in long limos or fly in company jets and know that those shoes could have been even shinier, the limos even longer and the jets bigger and faster. Workers didn’t have to spend every waking moment burdened by images of how things might have been, could have been—dammit, should have been.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. The “Money Movement” that had begun with so much promise with Taft-Hartley was faltering. Who would deliver the spark needed to restore dignity to the downtrodden rich man? The young didn’t worry about the rich the way they had worried about the Vietnam War. Blacks didn’t concern themselves with the plight of the rich the way they had obsessed about Civil Rights. And the rich certainly couldn’t count on Feminists, whose concerns were lagging so far behind that “glass ceiling” wasn’t even in the vernacular yet.

The Wealthy Also Have a Dream (continued)

The Dark Days

Many say the beginning of the end to actually enjoying being wealthy was the great railroad strike of 1877 and the many other labor strikes that occurred in its wake. These events served fair warning to the Captains of Industry that the gilded train they had been riding was about to derail. Maybe derail is too strong a word, but the ride was going to get a little bumpier as their grip on the purse strings loosened. But they weren’t going to roll over and die without a fight. They weren’t called Captains of Industry for nothing.

In 1957, the Mafia held an informal, casual dress board meeting at the palatial estate of Joseph “The Barber” Barbara in Apalachin, N.Y to devise a game plan for dividing the underworld empire of assassinated kingpin Albert Anastasia. Big news at the time, it wasn’t the first time the rich and powerful got close and personal. Back in 1889, the great railroad magnates assembled at J. P. Morgan's home at No. 219 Madison Avenue to form, in the phrase of the day, an iron-clad combination on how to deal with the labor issues confronting them.
Key to their plan was maintaining their control over the federal government, which was already very much beholding to these money magnates. How beholden?

In 1887, President Cleveland vetoed a bill appropriating $100,000 to draught-stricken Texas farmers because he didn’t want to weaken the sturdiness of our national character by encouraging the expectation of paternal care by the government. This tough-love approach was for the farmer’s own good. That same year, when it came to dealing with wealthy bondholders, his paternal instincts kicked in, and his concern for the sturdiness of our national character took the day off as he used a treasury surplus to pay off $100 bonds at a rate $28 dollars above value—a gift of $45 million.

Whether Republicans or Democrats held office made little difference because the real power rested with this small group of men with all the money. Socialist and Populist groups took up the cause of workers, but were never more than weak third parties capable of small gains but unable to make a real difference.