The Cost Of Silence

     In college I had a professor who called himself a Communist. He loved to denounce the American system. That is, he loved to denounce the system that protected his freedom to denounce the system. He thought he was bold and progressive. I thought he was a fuzzy-minded prat.
     He would surely be startled to hear me accuse him of  being in company with today's fundamentalist right. Beneath cosmetic differences they share a naive notion: That a system conceived to shelter divergent doctrines would be improved if one doctrine were elevated and empowered to discourage the rest.
      Religious fundamentalists aligned with Donald Trump are headed down a rocky road. They have sought to advance their principles by embracing a man who has none. They have imagined that they can safely dance with the devil. With others who have indulged this form of delusion, they will find that the cost is high.
     Secular fundamentalists have found a haven for now in the United States Congress.  This stands as a major irony of the 21st Century. A great deliberative body has become hostile to honest disagreement.  The Congress has become a hothouse of absolutism.  It has institutionalized intolerance.
     That's the genie now loose in American life: The idea that differences among us are inherently disreputable. Racism and homophobia are only two ugly symptoms.
     In this climate we arrive at the two big questions facing the nation:
     -- What is the settled meaning of this presidential election?
     -- What can we expect from a Trump administration?
     To the first question, one offered answer has been that it represents an angry uprising by working-class whites. While this is certainly an ingredient, it is not the whole recipe of the gumbo. Quite possibly the controlling pronouncement in this election cycle has been not uprising but silence. Trump's nomination was made possible by the huge majority of Republicans who didn't bother to vote in their party's primaries. Hillary Clinton's defeat was made possible by the statistically significant number of Democrats who stayed home in the general election.
      In the primaries and in the general election, most of those who actually cast ballots voted against Donald Trump.  After he's taken office, will they assert themselves politically? We don't really know.  And if all those who remained silent at the ballot box begin to assert themselves politically, what will they assert? We don't really know.  The settled meaning of this presidential election very much remains to be seen.
     Thus any answer to the second question involves rank speculation.  Here's mine: I think there's a lively possibility that what we can expect of a Trump administration is impotence.
      He will learn that he cannot govern the country -- much less lead the world -- with strut and bluster. Any plan B will have to surmount his having made himself an object of widespread fear and ridicule.
      He might not have much help in the work. Democrats in Congress likely will replicate the obstructionist tactics refined by Republicans in eight years of working to undermine President Obama.  Across the aisle, even the moral dwarfs in leadership may be unable to stomach Trump's capacity for corruption.  And in any case they've long shown they value partisan self-interest above their higher obligations. Partisan self-interest may not include trying to save a manifestly unfit president from himself.
     Thus the basics: Most of the voters didn't want Trump in the White House, and Congress could have many reasons for being content to let him run in noisy circles.
     This melancholy state of affairs won't last, because neither the election of Trump nor the tactical success of the fundamentalist right reflects in any coherent way the character of the American public.  The duration will depend on how soon the rest of us realize that if we are not to be ruled by self-interested factions we must be consistently attentive to the glamourless work of citizenship.
      And come to think of it, perhaps that will turn out to be the settled meaning of this elections.

How Did Trump Happen?

     As the epochal train wreck of the Donald Trump victory has the world searching for meaning, I am reminded of a story that was much liked by one of my old newspaper colleagues. It concerned a young boy who yearned to be a railroad man.
     When he came of age, the boy went straight to the railroad company and applied for a job. Well, said the manager, you'll have to take our employment test.  The boy did so, and waited in the lobby while the manager graded the result.
     I'm sorry, the manager said when he had finished.  The test says you don't have the aptitude for railroad work.  But there's good news. The test results say you'd make a perfect journalist.
     A journalist? the boy said. What do you mean?
     It's in your answer to question number seventeen, the manager said.
     I don't remember the numbers, the boy said.  Which one was that?
     The question was: What would you do if you were handling the master controls of a railroad switch yard, and you saw two trains hurtling toward each other from opposite directions on the same track?
     The boy's answer was: I'd run and get my brother, because he's never seen a train wreck.
     In the search for meaning,  I'm with those who think -- for starters -- that the press was complicit by dereliction in Trump's rise. My former associates in the fourth estate were too long willing for him to use them as megaphones, and too long reluctant to call a toad a toad.
     Part of the reason, surely, was simple surprise. We had not before seen this level of barefaced corruption in a presidential nominee. The traditional methods and standards of the press corps were unprepared for it.  In the bedrock ethic of the profession, reporting and commentary were to stop somewhere short of participation. If Trump was a ghastly nominee he was, after all, the nominee.  The selection was not up to the press to make.
    The impact of surprise was compounded by a time-wrought change in the character of the press itself. Competence has declined.  Where once the national press included not a few accomplished students of public affairs, it is now peppered with mere spectators, and polemicists.  When these don't say much of consequence, it's because they don't  have much of consequence to say.
     Trump's nomination emerged from a perfect storm of arithmetic happenstance.  A substantial majority of Republican primary votes were cast against him.  But they were scattered across a splintered and confused field of opponents. A whopping majority of those eligible to vote didn't bother. He took the nomination by winning a fraction of a fraction of the eligible vote.
     Yet, in the general election, half the electorate favored him. (We will be amply reminded in the days ahead that half did not.) Thus the search for meaning: What in the name of sanity were Trump voters thinking?
     Some of them were expressing the racial and ethnic bigotry that Trump vigorously stirred, but this cannot be the centerpiece of his appeal to a nation that twice elected Barack Obama.  Others reflected an aggregation of various single-issue passions. Emblematic might be the evangelical leader who said he was willing to accept Trump's ethical sickness as the price of having conservative Supreme Court nominees.
     A portion of blame can be assigned to party-line voting -- a convention now carried to such extremes that entire legislative districts are ceded to one party or another, and elections are little short of sham. With this verdict goes a corollary hunch: Republican loyalists did not feel that Trump's cynical duplicity represented a fundamental departure from established political norms. This view has surely been fed, alas, by years of dereliction in Congress,  and by two presidential campaigns featuring mercenary, celebrity wannabes masquerading as serious candidates.
     A Trump presidency will be a challenge for him as well as the nation -- and not only because of his comprehensive incompetence for the job.  The bigots and zealots he has energized will be a long time crawling back under their rocks. He will be taxed to sell them on constructive participation in a system whose integrity he himself has savagely impugned.
      The Trump victory will be portrayed by some as a mandate. It is no such thing. It is an aggregation of factors, some of which are cohesively related to each other, but many of which share only this moment in history. (He may yet lose the popular vote, and he ran against an historically unpopular opponent.)
      Some others will say that this phenomenon should have been impossible in the United States. The founders of our country would shush them. Precisely against such eventualities, they designed our system of government to be bigger than any person or party. In particular, it is designed to outlast temporal moods in the electorate. The founders knew that their provisos could someday be needed.
      The system remains in our care. Going forward, the quality of our national life will depend on our not flagging in care of it. If we cannot for a time respect our president, we can hold our noses and do citizens' work in respecting, energizing and enlisting in the rule of law. Today's circumstances have been delivered to us in part by fellow Americans who believed that citizenship could safely be a part-time job.
     It can't.


   









   

A Chance Of Sunny Rain

     The shop was not busy, and the guy on the cash register was in a chatty frame of mind. The conversation turned to his college-bound son. He had urged the boy to become a weather forecaster, the guy joked, because they can get things wrong a lot and keep their jobs anyway.
     The guy really was joking, and not unkindly. He wasn't setting out to libel an entire profession. Just passing a wry comment on one of life's little quirks and ironies.
     And he did have a point, it seems to me.  In the morning, when I look out at the emerging day, I do with some regularity have occasion to imagine a chorus of weather forecasters chanting: Oops!
     We've all had the experience. The snow flurries that turn out to be a blizzard. The rainy day that turns out to be a sunny scorcher. At forecaster school they must talk a lot about learning to try, try again.
     And they must talk a lot about learning to talk a lot without actually saying any single thing very clearly. If I pause over the weather reports on television, I hear at length about isobars and fronts. The TV reports have never equipped me to understand them.  A front remains, to me, just a squiggly line with little semi-circles sticking out on one side and little triangles sticking out on the other.  An isobar is ... well, I forget.
     I do not hear clearly about the single question that interests me: Is it going to rain tomorrow?  When the forecasters finally get around to it, they shroud their answers in a kind of  statistical fog. They may say, for example, there is a 20 percent chance of rain. Does this mean a 20 percent chance over 100 percent of the area, or a 100 percent chance over 20 percent of the area? For years I have listened in vain for clarification.
     In the interest of fair play we should stipulate that a certain amount of this is not under the forecasters' control.  They are at the mercy of Mother Nature's whims, after all. And in these latter years they have become slaves to the masters of us all: Computers. Watch the weather forecasts long enough and you'll hear about computer models. In any given weather circumstance, you'll hear about several different computer models. Their diverging forecasts are intended to edify me about all the possibilities. I do understand that.  However I can't help fastening on one thought: The very best-case scenario is that all but one of them are wrong.
     Lay people can develop their own expertise in matters that especially interest them. I have a couple of friends who are football nuts. They are genuinely expert on the game. The same principle applies to those of us who follow weather forecasting. Years of watching it have equipped me to deliver my own weather report on most days.
     If the question is: Will it rain tomorrow?
     A good, serviceable forecast is: Maybe, maybe not.
     Thus my attention to the subject has become more in the nature of a humanitarian enterprise. I imagine a forecaster going home to a spouse who says, Well honey, how was your day?  I imagine having to answer that my day consisted of being made to look bad by forces beyond my control.
     Thus I am resolved: If I ever meet a forecaster face-to-face, I'm going to make it a point to be especially nice. I suspect they need hugs.












   

Taking Stock Of Taking Stock

     Back in a misty yesteryear, someone told me that a wise man pauses now and then to take stock of his life. I don't remember who or where or why. It could have been a mentor, or it could have been a tipsy babbler on the next bar stool.  For whatever reason, I took the admonition to heart.
     Since things have gone pretty well for me in life, I'm usually able to finish taking stock before I finish my first glass of wine. This leaves me feeling derelict in my obligations to wisdom. It also leaves me resentful of the need to invent reasons for having another glass of wine.
     But on the assumption that stock-taking techniques, like other skills, benefit from regular exercise, I persist in my efforts. In this way I have long since harvested all the low-hanging fruit, as the cliche goes.  I am driven to taking stock of matters that are -- I freely admit it -- distinctly peripheral.
     Thus I recently decided to take stock of all the devices in life that ding, chime, buzz, beep or whir at me. The list is long. It includes smoke alarms, home security systems, audio-visual devices and the truck that picks up our garbage.
     The kitchen hosts a chorus.  The stove and microwave beep when I press their buttons, and beep again if I don't press promptly when they are through.  The coffeemaker carries on when it is done, done, done, done, done. The dishwasher does mention that it has finished, but only once. Ding. The refrigerator offers a counterpoint of warbling.  It has three voices for dispensing water, crushed ice or cubed ice.
     The kitchen devices are essentially friendly in their attentions to me. As if with a gentle hand on my elbow, they guide me through excursions in nourishment and refreshment.  My car, on the other hand, has been given the electronic personality of a scold. It warns me if a seat belt goes even momentarily unfastened. It warns me if it deems that I have backed too close to objects that I can plainly see in my rear view mirrors.  If I offer to  leave the key behind, it is especially sharp. My car is ever alert for lapses on my part. I imagine a condescending smile in certain shapes on the dashboard.
     The ubiquity of these noises has given rise to dubious jokes:
     In a grocery store aisle, a portly gentleman is bending over to fetch an item from a bottom shelf. When his cellphone goes off, a little boy exclaims, "Look out Mom, he's backing up!"
     It has also caused the princes of technology to develop alternative noises. They've afforded me the option of choosing a cellphone ringtone that sounds like someone gargling molasses.  A while back in our house, a dinner guest's cellphone rang. It just rang.  Like a bell. This visibly startled a couple of oldsters in the room, who possibly had not heard a telephone make a simple ringing noise since the days of rotary dials.
     In any case, life is what it is. Diligence in adjusting to this reality can make us more complete human beings. I have adjusted to my car's behavior, as I adjusted to the attentions of an autocratic aunt who meant well and didn't realize that she screeched. And I have learned not to fret about the possibility of exhausting even peripheral opportunities to take stock.
     I may repeat stock-taking exercises of old.  It could be the life-journey equivalent of re-watching a favorite old movie.
     Better yet, I could become a consultant of sorts. Offer to take stock of other people's lives. I might even charge a fee. Clients would be expected to pay for my wine, of course.


   

Presidential Election Blues

                                            There's two kinds of people
                                            I just can't stand
                                           An evil-hearted woman
                                           And a lyin' man
                                                                   Albert King
                                                                   Don't Lie To Me Blues


     When I worked in the newspaper business (my mother never knew; I told her I played piano in a house of ill repute) we did man-on-the-street interviews in election years.  We always ran across people who didn't know that a presidential election was being held.
     Flash forward to this election year. A sorry truth remains. Even at this point in the season, a great many Americans are only beginning to pay focused attention.
     On the Republican side, this has produced the Trump disaster: a comprehensively deceitful bigot with a running mate who would need major improvement to be merely an empty shirt.  A huge majority of those eligible to vote in Republican primaries didn't bother. The Republicans left the keys in the car, and it was taken by hooligans.
     On the Democratic side, the Clinton candidacy is greeted with enthusiasm by her family, close friends, and people who want to curry favor or get a job. Many more of us -- with me among them -- are grateful that she is competent but regretful that she brings so much baggage to her candidacy.
     Lingering charges of dishonesty seem to me overdone. For decades, foes have labored in vain to prove it against her. True, when caught by the spotlight at awkward junctures, she has sometimes split hairs with the truth. In this she is far from being alone, alas.  The habit is endemic in our politics. It is fair to object, and to demand better of our leaders in the long term.   In the near term, it is not fair and not useful to single her out.
     Clinton partisans say she is faulted for traits that would be respected or at least tolerated in a man. They have a point.  She can have a  hard edge. It hints any given smile may be a pose -- or a ruse.
     But as the fictional Irish bartender Mr. Dooley used to say, "politics ain't beanbag." People in positions of power have serious enemies.  They forget it at peril to themselves and, more, to their mission.  If Clinton keeps an active awareness of this, she is only appropriately armed.
     One more problem dogs her. She continues to pay a price for her husband's behavior.  She isn't faulted for what he did, at least not by sensible people.  Rather, I think, she is the target of a common hunch that she stayed with philandering Bill less for love than for ambition.
     Clinton does have one conspicuous shortcoming.  She has very little natural gift for the politics of public leadership.  She is stiff with the public and graceless as a speaker.  Sometimes a president needs to say persuasively to the American people, "Follow me."  For a President Hillary Clinton, this would be a challenge. In a Clinton presidency this would be a material weakness.
     With hate-mongering and deceit, Donald Trump's campaign will inflict lasting damage on the country.  Pundits are saying as well that he has crippled the Republican Party for the long term. This is true in part. However blame must also be laid to so-called mainstream Republican leaders, who have betrayed the public's trust with eight years of cynical sabotage against a duly elected president.
     They are the ones who left the contemporary Republican Party hollow at the core. They are the ones who elevated the example of politics as a trickster's game.
     On the assumption that something more useful would emerge, I'd say an implosion in today's Republican Party would be healthy for the country.  Meanwhile, we face several dismal months until election day.  The blues man Albert King has been dead for a while.  Somewhere, perhaps, he is glad that he's not around to be mistaken for a political commentator.

 
   

   

God And The Prostate Gland

     Recently I ran across a newspaper article that I found quite droll. The writer argued that there is no God. This is not what made his column droll. His premise did: He noted that the male urethra passes through the prostate gland, making it vulnerable in later life to constriction and urinary difficulties. Aha! said the writer. An "intelligent" creator would never have installed such a faulty system. He went on with notions in that vein.
     Now, adult males recognize certain Principles for Successful Living. One of them is this: In a public restroom, at half time of a ball game or a concert, don't get in line behind old guys. I can say from experience that this precept is valid. However, I had never thought to search it for theological import.
     And in any case, other anatomical mysteries interest me more. If ever I have the opportunity to quiz the Almighty, I'm going to ask about sinuses.  Doubtless my doctor could explain that they serve some purpose. (My doctor can explain a great deal more than he can remedy.) No matter.  I simply don't understand why they must occasion so much misery -- not to mention the television commercials.
     If we think about it in a certain way, God has a pretty good gig. He gets all the credit and none of the blame. He does have to put up with whining about his general failure to abide by standards of human understanding. If He did so, of course, He would be something considerably less than Almighty. In other words,  the whining says that God can be God only by agreeing not to be God. This kind of thinking strikes me as being -- well, droll.
     Nonetheless we persist in efforts to put parameters on deity. At one extreme we have "God is love," at the other "God hates fags."  Off to one side we have my favorite vernacular equivocation: "There ain't necessarily anybody up there, and if there is he ain't lookin'."  This is the spiritual equivalent of going through life shrugging, "whatever."  In youngsters we would call this  adolescent ennui.  In adults we call it agnosticism.
     Some of us claim extra authority in these matters of definition. One is Billy Graham's renegade son Franklin, who apparently considers rage  a pastoral skill.  On the issue of gay marriage, he rants that proponents are shaking their fists at God. As one of those proponents, I think that we are more nearly shaking our fists at Franklin Graham.  Not for the first time, the gentleman seems to be confused about who is Who.
     And the kerfuffle goes on.  Over on the Christian side of matters, the gospels warn that mere rules are not a means to grace. Meanwhile, major denominations specialize in rule-mongering. Pope Francis stirs excitement by declaring that greater room should be made for love. Skeptics say they'll believe he's serious when the Vatican gives all its treasure to the poor and sets up shop in a pole barn.
     Here in America, it  can be hard to tell the preachers from the politicians.  Some of the folks in the pulpit display an appetite for secular power. Some of the pols are ever so glad to have their endorsement.  I suppose they would say they are rendering what is Caesar's unto God.  They seem indifferent to the risk of rendering what is God's unto Caesar.
     Anyhow, what about that newspaper fellow who sees the answer to ultimate questions in his urinary tract?  Better writers would here discuss the pitfalls of false syllogism and circular reasoning. My plain-speaking country relatives might simply say that the guy got fascinated with his own cleverness and outsmarted himself.
     We do get fascinated with our own cleverness. And when the result is downright silly (see urinary tract, above) maybe we do prove something, in spite of ourselves. Maybe we prove that God enjoys a chuckle now and then.

 

Dancing With The Devil

     An old mentor said human organizations can develop an institutional self-interest that conflicts with their supposed purpose. Labor unions were among his examples, along with religious denominations. And of course political parties.
     In this presidential election year, I'm sure, he would cite the Republican Party for contemplating the nomination of Donald Trump. While time remains for leaders to join the few Republicans who've displayed a gag reflex, the possibility may be remote. Instead, key figures have placed party above country by endorsing Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tops this list. Close behind is House Speaker Paul Ryan.
     Even supposing base motive, one struggles to understand their logic in embracing a walking, talking fraud.  And base motive is not an unfair supposition. As leader of an eight-year effort to undermine a duly elected president, McConnell has already shown he is impervious to shame. Ryan staged a brief flirtation with principle, then tried to camouflage travesty by weaseling an endorsement out of the side of his mouth.  To put the matter with utmost charity, these are not statesmen.
      Both had a chance to redeem themselves when Trump engaged in a prolonged racist rant against a jurist of Mexican descent. Both failed -- and did so in revealing fashion.  McConnell  objected, but not on principle. Rather, he worried that Trump would poison the GOP's relations with Latino voters. Ryan equivocated until the sheer vulgarity of Trump's behavior forced him to call it by name. The message in their behavior? Bigotry is acceptable if you can get away with it politically.
      Some experts speculate that McConnell and Ryan see things this way:  Opposing Trump would divide the party. This would discourage Republican voters and dampen turnout in the fall.  Poor turnout would weaken Republican candidates across the ticket and increase the chances of a Democratic sweep.  Thus the incentive to stand united, even behind the likes of Trump.
     If this is their thinking, they've disgraced themselves in hopes of short-term partisan gain. And disgrace of this sort is a long-term stain. They've attached their party's reputation -- and their own -- to one of the lowest figures in American political history.  As the 21st  Century electorate moves steadily toward diversity and inclusion, the GOP's leaders are embracing a man who is rabidly hostile to the very concept.
     I'm reminded of what another mentor said: People who behave foolishly are apt to be deemed fools. People who exercise power foolishly are apt to be deemed dangerous fools.
   

Clown Prince Donald

     My favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, says the rise of Donald Trump is "the most repugnant political phenomenon in recent American history."  The folks at The Post have been in high dudgeon over Trump for a while now. Along with other commentators, they are suffering an acute case of chagrin. According to political rules they  thought they knew, this Trump thing wasn't supposed to happen.
    By standards in the media world, The Post is reasonably good about maintaining arm's length from the people and events it covers. Still, we are all shaped by our environment. The Washington environment is full of political careerists, and political journalists who've reached a professional mecca. Together they make a caste whose members have more in common with each other than with the voters and readers they supposedly serve. Nowadays, these seasoned pros have a particular thing in common: A duplicitous buffoon has put egg on their faces.
     And how, in fact, did this happen?  The first parts of the answer are: Voter apathy, and vagaries of arithmetic in a Rube Goldberg primary system.  Trump gained momentum by running well in a splintered field of crackpots, opportunists and has-beens. Through March, a steady majority -- about 65 percent -- voted against him. That is, he "won" primaries with about 35 percent of the votes cast. And 80 percent of those eligible to vote didn't bother.
     Even most recently in Indiana, where his majority passed 50 percent, nearly half those who went to the polls voted against him. (And about three percent voted for candidates who had long since dropped out of the race.  When Chris Christie is finally through in New Jersey, maybe he can get work as a county official in Kokomo.)  Turnout data won't be available until May 17, when county election boards have filed their official reports.
     Still, results are results. The party of Lincoln is close to nominating a man who exhausts our vocabulary for comprehensive dishonesty.  A Trump presidency is extraordinarily unlikely.  But we already know that a Trump candidacy is a shame in every sense.  If he is the nominee, what follows won't be a proper and useful election campaign.  America will be betting national policy on the outcome of a knife fight.
     Expert commentators, ever game, say that Trump is destroying the Republican Party. I would say that the party was already well along toward destroying itself, with far-right bigotry and reckless indifference to the principled obligations of high office.  In any case, Trump may become clown prince of a political graveyard.
     Before the late 1960s, party conventions were the mainstay of candidate selection. But shenanigans discredited the Democratic National Convention of 1968.  The climate of attitude turned against decisions made in "smoke filled rooms."  Primary elections gained favor as a more democratic means of choosing nominees.
     In this year's menagerie of Republican hopefuls, several set out to exploit an inherent weakness in the primary system. They aimed to succeed by inflaming a cohesive faction. They didn't fear their cynicism would hurt them, because they knew that a whopping majority of voters were not paying attention. With his swindler's ethics, Trump proved to be the best exploiter.
     He and the likes of Ted Cruz did not invent the manipulative style of politics, alas. Years of partisan bickering in Congress have held up a vivid model. In it, voters need not be led if only they can be swayed.
     Perhaps coming to the brink with this profoundly corrupt man will move leaders and voters toward paying better attention to each other.
 

A Fogey's Lament

Reflections On The Inevitability Of Change In The Human Condition ...

Or...

Thoughts On Stuff That Ain't Like It Used To Be, To Wit:



   
-- Bars and barber shops.
     I had a soft spot for these. They were havens of a sort, where strangers could josh each other and marvel at the failure of the larger world to align itself with principles radiantly apparent to the patrons of said bars or barbershops.
     The barbers were craftsmen. They knew every bump and curve of every head. They knew the eccentricities of every head's owner.  A good bar tender was said to be the next thing to a priest, and I guess that was about right. But my favorites were the regulars on the customer side of the bar.  The ones who always sat in the same places and always had the same agenda.  If you wanted conversation, you could talk sports with this one or politics with that one. If you wanted to be left alone, you could sit next to the one who wouldn't speak to you if the earth cracked open.
     I don't go to bars much any more. There seems to be a rule that the walls must be lined with television screens. The barkeep can be seen only in glimpses between the tap handles for 50 different kinds of beer. I've tried. I really have.   But I just can't get comfortable with seeing the walls move in my peripheral vision. And who knew that one day the question What'll you have? would require an elaborate decision?
     Barbershops also have become alien territory.  The other day I saw one where the barbers were costumed as sports referees. Being unsure what this was meant to imply about tonsorial skill, I passed on by.  Methods have changed as well. Barbers may simply attach an appliance to electric clippers and apply technique they can practice by mowing their lawns. Perhaps this explains why I see young men wearing hair styles that remind me of cow pies.
     Pity.



-- Banks.
     I understand that business imperatives change.  But I do wish that going to the bank didn't make me feel quite so much like a gazelle visiting a pride of lions. The sales pitches are dogged in behalf of services I clearly don't want, because I still don't have them despite the fact that they are pushed on me every time I darken the door.
     My bankers are particularly ardent about on-line banking. The teller always asks me if I do it.  I always explain that I prefer not to.
     Here, the teller's eyebrows soar. I am convinced that they emphasize this tactic at teller school.  In tones one might use to explain that the earth is not flat, the teller assures me that on-line banking is ever so convenient, and absolutely safe and secure. I forbear to say that I have never needed to check my balance at 3 a.m., and that believing in foolproof technology is the modern equivalent of believing in unicorns. I simply explain -- again -- that I am comfortable as I am.
     Eventually the teller relents and permits me to approach my own money.  I always leave with a feeling that I've disappointed my bank.  Time was, my bank would have worried about disappointing me. I liked it that way.



-- Language.
     With many people, I'm like, you know, totes aggro at the slovenly pidgin that passes for spoken English. Even beyond this I have a special peeve. I hate the use of acronyms in lieu of plain speech.
      Perhaps it began with government agencies. Goodness knows they are vigorous exemplars -- and can have good reason to cloak their performance in a bit of camouflage.  But when did it become a TROUT ( a Thing for the Rest Of Us Too)?
       Now, I suppose we could cut a little slack for Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Drug Abuse Resistance Education. The causes are worthy, and the acronyms do make marginally useful sense. (In some quarters, D.A.R.E. stands for Dykes Against Racism Everywhere, but perhaps we can agree that this is not general usage.)
      Others, in numbers that Google lists in the thousands, are just too cute. Could a bunch of Midwesterners in the beef business be a trade association of some plain sort? Nope. They had to be Cattlemen Of Wisconsin.
     And speaking of "nope," that word's been hijacked by the National Optimum Population Effort. Just say NOPE!
     Peace? That's People Expressing A Concern for Everyone.
     And so on.
     I think the practice should be outlawed. But given the state of things, not before I have formed the founding chapter of Citizens Raging Against Politicians.


-- Instructions And Programming, Part One
     A few years back, I was programming a new gadget. The instructions told me that if I wanted to enable a certain feature, I should go to line six on page eight.  But there was no line six on page eight. There was no line six remotely near page eight.  I learned to do without that certain feature and, consequently, soon learned to do without the gadget.
     Little did I know this was a dark omen for a coming time when everything would have to be programmed. If I'm told someday soon that I must program my trousers, I won't be terribly surprised. And the trouble is,  the instructions for our labor-saving devices may be, in my experience,  labor-creating devices. They may be opaque.  They may be rendered in pictographs too small to make out.
      They may be simply dead wrong.  Lights may not blink as they are supposed to. Beeps may refuse to beep at the prescribed time.  Outright guesswork can be more useful and considerably less stressful.
     As one seasoned by time, I have learned to manage the frustration of being buffaloed by electro-mechanical devices.  I have not learned to understand why major companies hire writers who think that grammar,  syntax and accuracy are exotic disciplines.




--Instructions And Programming, Part Two
     I have a hankering. It won't go away.
     I long for an opportunity to tell the people who program those telephone trees:  If I knew my party's extension I would have dialed it to begin with.


   
   
   
   
   

Of Sowing and Reaping

     The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

     Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
                                                                                       Edmund Burke


   
     When I was a youngster, one of my grandmothers had a certain way of praising me to others. She would say, He's going to be the governor of North Carolina.  In her final years, when she lived in a dream world, she would say that I actually was the governor of North Carolina.  I tried to look gubernatorial in her presence. I couldn't bear any notion of disappointing her.
     My grandparents were of the yeoman class who gave this state much of its character.  These folks were resourceful in wanting to transcend the worst of Southern history and the systemic poverty of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  City people supported the development of farm-to-market roads for the sake of all.  Country people supported a distinguished state university, seeing in it a means for everyone's children to choose a better life. State leaders developed programs to open doors for the poor.
      In these and other undertakings North Carolinians  nourished a political ethic that was, by and large, pragmatic and goal-oriented.  At key junctures they displayed a shrewd skepticism of labels and ideology.    They didn't write the state's official motto, but they could have. It is, "Esse Quam Videri."  --   "To be rather than to seem." They valued leadership. They valued character.  My grandmother thought the governor's office should be a pinnacle of both.
      I have all this in mind because the leadership of my state has fallen into the hands of low people.  One recent development highlights this, for us and for the nation. We now have a law that fosters discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
     This legalized bigotry is a vividly mean-spirited piece of work.  Until the last minute our legislature handled it behind a cloak of secrecy.  Our governor signed it literally in the dark of night.  They knew that it couldn't stand scrutiny, and it has in fact created a groundswell of disgust.
     If this episode is especially dramatic, it is only one in a shabby pattern.  Connivance and dereliction have put our state government in the control of people who give the back of their hand to the long-manifest values of the broader electorate.  Our legislature has gone to the outskirts of the Republican right, in campaigns heavily underwritten by a wealthy extremist. Along for the well financed ride was the fellow who became our rookie governor, a pliable wannabe so covetous of office that he has disgraced himself as a public official and as a man.
     And where were the rest of us? Asleep at the switch, alas. Complacent about developments in gerrymandered districts where the real elections take place in low-turnout primaries controlled by small minorities of voters.  Complacent when the Democratic Party bothered to offer only a cipher as alternative to the bag man's guy for governor. Complacent about the aims of a cohesive faction zealously contemptuous of the values -- and the rights -- of others.
     And so my state must live for a time with the hard lesson that neglect is a stealthy predator on democracy. The nation may be flirting with the same lesson. The Republican Party's presidential nominating process is in the grip of two genuinely bad men who advance by inflaming an emotional minority.  Much lament has been focused on their demagoguery. Less has been focused on the statistic for which the United States is notorious among world democracies: Eighty percent of the people eligible to vote in the Republican primaries have not bothered.  The zealous few have so far controlled the agenda and damaged our country.
     In North Carolina, the zealous few have given us leaders who betray their sworn obligation to serve the better interests of all the people. They have tried to deter voting. They have tampered with the university. The list goes on, and now includes a comprehensive affront to common decency.
     Many of us have watched this vandalism with a mixture of outrage and heartache.  Genuine citizenship is hard work. Generations of ordinary North Carolinians believed in it and labored at it. They produced government that was clean and diligent. Now, in just a few years, their achievement has been sneered away. It is an epic shame.





   

Wakeup Call?

     Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
                                              First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States



    My brand became more famous as I became more famous, and more opportunities presented themselves.
                                                             Donald Trump


    It doesn't matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say.  There's no one else who can say what I can say.  It doesn't matter what I live.
                                                             Newt Gingrich


    Money is the mother's milk of politics.
                                                            Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh


    I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.
                                           Attributed to  P.T. Barnum and various others.   

    
   The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
                                                           Plato            



     Viewed whole, the Constitution's guarantee of press freedom is a citizens' right, not an institutional right.
    The founders could scarcely have foreseen the newspaper empires of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Less could they have known that television news would introduce the values of show business. And who would have guessed that, in the equivalent of a wink, the Internet would transform communication, and turn the news of the day into a gumbo of fact, propaganda, vaudeville and gossip?
    In the new information age (here we'll tolerate today's loose use of the term "information") retail commerce and politics have undergone a similar change.  In both realms, vendors can bypass traditional brokers and reach the consuming public directly.
    Being unable to lick 'em, traditional brokers have had to join 'em.  On political fronts, mainstream news outlets cover a blizzard of tweets, blog blasts, Facebook rants and cable news flaps. Major newspapers carry regular features auditing their own content and advising readers that some of what they've already reported is, upon examination, simply not true.  Nowadays, not only Alice's Wonderland Queen may have occasion to believe six unbelievable things before breakfast.
     If money has long been the mother's milk of politics, money does not alone control in the new age.  Publicity has emerged as a staple. Not traditional news coverage but mere notice, even notoriety.  The kind that passes muster if only they spell your name right.  The kind that can be ginned up by any performance vivid enough to attract attention.
    In this storm of unfiltered noise, a certain kind of candidate can better thrive.  They are brazen in exploiting publicity, sometimes for publicity's sake. Newt Gingrich was one of these. Shown to be scorning in personal life the values he preached on the stump, Gingrich simply basked in the extra attention.  His faltering presidential run morphed into a thinly disguised book tour.
    Donald Trump is another of the sort, with tactics that would make Barnum gag.  And the high-octane gall of such campaigns is matched by their cynicism, for the candidates need not care fundamentally about winning. Even a failed presidential candidate can look forward to a lucrative career of political celebrity.  Voters who get into bed with such as these may wake in the morning to find themselves alone.
    Trump and Gingrich are not the only ones whose campaign style has suggested a cordial awareness of Plan B. Mike Huckabee comes to mind, among others. All have this in common: Their tactics telegraph a very low opinion of the voters.  Bunco artists depend on the marks' not paying informed attention. While this is too often true of the American electorate, proper leaders would seek to remedy the circumstance, not to exploit it.
     Current  Republican candidates cannot be accused of pioneering this low road. Partisan chicanery has been the stock in trade of the national Republican leaders for years. In turning the primaries into a guttersnipes' squabble, this year's candidates have simply taken the model to logical if sordid extremes.  They have been taught by example that politics is a wildly unprincipled game,  even among those who are tasked with governing in the better interest of all the people.  And so they've said devil take the hindmost, among their opponents -- and among the voters.
     Thus, in an odd way, the new information age brings us full circle to speech rights as people's rights, to be used, or abused ...
     Or neglected.
     At heart the First Amendments simply means that American citizens may have conversation among themselves without obtaining the government's permission. The notion of conversation necessarily presupposes listening as well as speaking.  If free speech is truly to matter, someone must be paying attention.  American voters are notorious world-wide for not reliably doing so.
     Into the resulting vacuum may step the likes of Trump, redolent of grubby ethics, rapacious self-seeking, feral aggression and questionable accomplishment.  To make headway in today's climate, this sort need not display ability of any kind. They need only be loud and shameless. Trump fits the bill on all counts. Amid Republican bouts of dog-whistle bigotry, he hasn't bothered with the whistle. And consider his caricatures of women and minorities. They are stick-figure crude. They would be laughable were they not so cruel. Even as a bigot, Trump is a stumble-bum.
     Yet there he sits, atop the heap.  Television newsies -- cue the furrowed brow -- say voting is heavy. Their cameras show us lines stretching out the polling-place door.  And yes, say settled voices, in primary election terms voting is indeed heavy. On the Republican side, it's the highest since 1980.
     And how high is that?
     It isn't high. It's pitifully low.
     Through the primaries so far, Republican turnout has been 17.3 percent of eligible voters, according to Pew Research. In other words,  about 83 percent of eligible voters have not bothered.  An even among those who've bestirred themselves, whopping majorities have consistently voted against Trump. But the field is badly splintered, and he manages to do better than any other single candidate. He thrives -- so far -- by inflaming a minority faction within a minority turnout of a minority party.  Neither Trump nor Ted Cruz (let's not leave out the other remaining mountebank) has yet faced anything remotely resembling a fully formed audience, even among Republicans.
    Emerging signs suggest that Trump's ranting has backfired by waking the larger electorate early from its traditional primary-season nap. We must hope that the nap habit can be permanently broken. The new information age has sharply elevated the importance of diligent citizenship.

On Drifting Apart

     A letter to the mavens of American marketing:
     Dear Mavens,
     I tell you this with a heavy heart. In fact, I have avoided saying it for quite a while. But a time comes when we should be honest. And so I must tell you that ...
     You may be losing me.
     There is no animus in this. No collection of festering grievances. I am not angry, only confused. I no longer understand how you want me to respond.
     It began with the cars. I am baffled by the naming of the models. When they were called Impalas and Firebirds, I got it.  I caught the spirit of your temptation.
     But now?
     I found myself in traffic the other day with an Elantra. It crossed my mind to wonder: What am I to  make of a car that could have been named for the heroine of a comic opera? (Furthermore, while I was woolgathering over that, I missed the light.)
      And what about those alpha-numeric designations? They are everywhere. In the established lexicon of letters and numbers, the letter X seems to be big. My own car is an XC60.   I have no idea what this means. Am I supposed to  feel that I have a better model than one called, say,  AB29?  Or should I yearn to own an XX1000? I don't know because I have never asked. I have never asked because I don't care. For your purposes, alas, I am simply numb to the appeal of the letter X.
     In other examples, naming mysteries have reached into the restaurant trade.  After all, what should I expect of the fare at a place called The Rusty Onion?  At The Purple Pea,  I'm probably not interested no matter what the offering.
    And so on. You get the idea. I have episodes of being unsure what I'm supposed to want.
    And do you know what makes them worse? The flashbacks.  Browsing through a catalog not long ago I was arrested -- stopped cold -- by the Fat Max Extreme AntiVibe Rip Claw Nailing Hammer.
     The telltale thing here is, I don't really need a hammer. I have a perfectly serviceable hammer. I have never known it to vibrate.
     Not so far.
     But you see, the people who named the Fat Max knew how to get to the Guy Thing. One of the enduring tenets of Guy Nation is: You have to have the right tools for a job.  And if you don't -- well, who knows? The ad for the Fat Max awakened in me an urge to get right with Guy Nation. To repair something. Perhaps even to build.
     Now, I can hear you saying,  Oh yes, but this fellow is some kind of rube. He is not a marketing expert.  This is true. I am not a marketing expert. I am, however, one of your customers. And let's face it: The economy depends on your stimulating us to buy goods and services that we don't really need. Yet here am I, suffering bouts of Stimulus Interruptus.
     It's sad for our relationship, but it's true. I had to tell you.
     A time comes when we should be honest.
   

In Praise of Stories

     In what follows, the names have been changed to protect the innocent, one of them being me. Everything else is true. These old newspaper stories are fun, I think. And at the end they may make a worthwhile point. In any case, here they are.
     I remember: Joe, who would sometimes report for work in the newsroom wearing chinos, a T-shirt and a floor-length black opera cape. (Crimson lining.  He made bold fashion statements, our Joe.)  He was a hell-raiser and an oddball and a damn good sportswriter. He could make you feel like you'd been at the game yourself.
     I remember: Jimmy, who could make a story sing, oh my.  But sometimes the words just wouldn't come, and Jimmy had a volcanic temper. Once, when his typewriter was especially balky, he opened a third-floor window and threw it into the parking lot below.
     I remember: Clarence, an affably cranky old fellow. He was a hasty, two-finger typist who chewed paper when he wrote. Sometimes his fingers and his mind operated on different pages.  Editors learned to watch his copy closely for such locutions as "sharper than the hangman's axe," and "now, the worm is on the other foot."
     I remember: Eddie, who one year was conspicuously late returning to his desk from the company's Christmas buffet. He cheerfully confessed that he had taken extra time to boff a business-office clerk on an empty board room table. Jimmy liked to write at length. Advised that a piece was too long, he would simply narrow the margins on his typewriter and turn the same thing back in. It never worked, but Jimmy never stopped trying.
     I remember: Bob, who once lost his grip in an argument with a newsroom colleague. He coated the colleague's desktop with rubber cement and set it on fire. The desk was metal, and the fire quickly burned out. But the smell was a problem for a while.
     I remember: Betty, who cheerfully believed that her little bungalow was haunted. She toppled barriers of gender and industry caste by the sheer power of her inborn talent. She wrote her way out of a proofreader's job, into newsroom work and on to publication as a novelist. Through it all she remained that rarest of creatures, a genuinely loving and generous human being.  I thought that maybe Betty wrote like an angel because she was one.
     Among such folks as these I began my newspaper career. They all had their own quirks and styles, but they had one thing in common. The stuff they put in the newspaper had warm blood in its veins. From them I learned to understand the admonition:  " A good newspaper doesn't print articles. It prints stories."
     I'm not sure when the notion got afoot that our craft would be improved if it were "professionalized." But the notion did get afoot -- and get away with us. Hiring fads favored sober-sided kids with academic pedigrees and superior attitudes. Hither and  yon, newspapers were handed over to executives who were not really newspaper editors but process managers for information and entertainment marketing.  Newspapers printed articles, and talked at their communities rather than with them.
     I suppose these observations sound like the maundering of a codger who misses the good old days. Well, they are, I am and I do. But maybe they also say something useful about the factors that made newspapers moribund.  Were powerful competitive and economic forces mounting against us? Yes. Was decline inevitable?  Probably. But I think we were culpable, too. I think we greased the skids by turning our newspapers into mere merchandise and imagining ourselves a class above and apart.  We became prissy neighbors in love with the sound of our own voices.
     That's my own take. Colleagues from yesteryear might prefer the earthier verdict of a distinguished national reporter, the late Richard Ben Cramer. In the late nineties he surveyed the landscape of American journalism and lamented that it had been "overtaken by a Biblical plague of dickheads."
    Anyhow, we did a pretty good job in our day. And I came away with a trove of stories.
     Buy me a drink and I'll tell you a few:
     -- About the young man who careened through the wee hours searching in vain for a cop to help him with the naked, love-crazed young woman clinging to the hood of his car. (In the end they were briefly jailed by baffled authorities who  couldn't figure out what else to do.)
    --About the United States senator who offered -- on Senate letterhead -- to punch me in the mouth. ( He never succeeded, but he offered more than once.)
     -- About the time in our city hall bureau when Frank lost patience with mouthy Al. Frank tied him to an overhead pipe by his necktie and left him standing tiptoe on a desktop. (Al was soon found and freed by the city manager, who left clucking and shaking his head. He never asked a thing about it.)
     Oh, my word, the stories.
     Heck, you don't even have to buy me a drink.