Moonshine, Family Values And Donald Trump

     I got a letter from my Uncle Barlow the other day. He still lives way out in the countryside, where the county is named Barlow and many of the people are, too.
     It's been quite a while since I heard from him, so he had some catching up to do. And as he often does, he wanted my advice about some questions.
     Here's what he had to say.

     "Dear Nephew,
     "I am sorry I have been so long about writing you.  I did some traveling with Millie from over at the library (and that is a whole nother story, let me tell you. Hoo boy). And so I had been neglecting my little beverage business, if you get my meaning, and had to buckle down and fix up my equipment, because some of my customers were starting to grumble about taking their trade elsewhere.
     "Anyhow, I've been busy, and I got overdue to write you, and I do apologize.
     "I guess you might be wondering whatever happened with Scooter and his wife Ida, the folks who run the cafe. You remember they got into a rough patch with each other when Ida got all carried away with operas and started calling herself Dulcinea. She kept dragging Scooter up to Charlotte to see them, and he pretty quick got about all of that he could handle.
     "Well, one day Scooter was complaining to Floyd over at the grain elevator, hardware store and auto repair. He said he'd as soon listen to a bull fart through a bugle as hear another opera. He didn't know that Ida was right over in the next aisle getting some new lids for her Mason jars. And she just clouded up and rained all over Scooter. Threw him out of the house.
     "He started bunking at the cafe. After closing time, he'd pull some tables together and throw a sleeping bag on top. He had a lot of time on his hands every evening, so he started thinking about how he might spruce up the cafe's business a little. Decided he'd add some Mexican stuff, and started practicing on new dishes.
     "Well, one night he got up to go to the privy, and he slipped on a leftover chalupa and gashed his forehead pretty good. He was too proud to go home for help, so he just patched himself up with a bunch of band-aids and opened up as usual the next day. Looked like he was that character in those Frankenstein movies.
     "Some of the customers told Ida, and she got to feeling guilty. Came over at closing to see what she could do for him. They started kissing and making up, and one thing led to another, and they got  pretty noisy about it. The sheriff was passing by, and overheard them, and got concerned about what might be going on, because Ida is a big old girl and Scooter is kind of a runt.
     "Well, the sheriff walked in on them, and things went straight to the dickens. Ida was naked as a jaybird, and that's some bare acreage, let me tell you. She  dove behind the steam table and screamed at the sheriff to get out. Scooter tried to cover his privates with his John Deere cap, because they had kind of thrown their clothes all over the place and it was the only thing he could reach.
     "The sheriff was mortified. He just high-tailed it right out of there, and the next thing anybody knew, Scooter was back home, and everything seems to have quieted down so far.
     "But anyhow, while I'm writing, I sure would like to ask your advice about a fix I'm in. You see, the people who say this fellow Trump has caused a lot of division among folks could be talking about me, if they only knew.
       "It all started when Delia Throckmorton came by my place to buy some of my beverage. Her husband is Elwood Throckmorton, the pastor over at the First Barlow Community Church.  The views there are pretty much over on the right-hand side of things. Family values, pro life, anti gay. That sort of thing.
     "Ordinarily they don't hold with drinking.  But Pastor Elwood allows himself exceptions. People just don't understand the stresses involved in keeping an entire congregation on the straight and narrow, Delia says, and he takes a nip now and then, strictly for medicinal purposes. (Looks to me like he has a lot of medicinal purposes, if you get my meaning.) He doesn't want to risk being seen at my place, so he sends her.
     "Anyhow, while Delia was there, my cousin Jimmy Frank came over to buy a jug for his own self. Now he's a good old boy, but he doesn't have the manners God gave a goat.  Just barged right in and sat down.
     "Delia couldn't let on to why she was really there, so she started rattling on about how much she enjoyed our tea and our chat about the strong leadership President Trump is providing our country. When Jimmy Frank heard that, he got about half bug-eyed and made a noise like he'd swallowed his tobacco plug.  She noticed, and said didn't he agree.
     "Jimmy Frank said hell no, that Trump is a crooked lying bastard. Said if Trump didn't launder money for the Russian mob he'll kiss her backside in the public square at high noon.  She commenced to sputter, but Jimmy Frank plowed right on. Said on top of that, Trump is crazy. Nutty as a truck stop candy bar.
     "She got red in the face and sputtered on about how Trump had surrounded himself with principled people and cultivated strong allies in Congress. Well, Jimmy Frank kept plowing. Said that fellow Pence would have to get ten times smarter to be a wooden Indian, and that fellow McConnell is the kind of grifter who'll hug you so he can pick your pocket.
     "Well, I figure Jimmy Frank has got the better side of this conversation by a country mile, but I don't want to say anything, because several of my better customers are members of that church congregation and I don't want to get on the bad side of Delia and Elwood. I mean, those folks are willing to wink at a little drinking, but they are dead serious about wanting the government to enforce the rest of their religion. They'll side with a snake if it claims to have family values.
     "They both noticed that I was keeping mighty quiet, and they both gave me the stink eye, like a woman who's caught her husband smooching a neighbor lady. And they both stalked out.
     "So you can see, through no fault of my own, I have truly got between a rock and a hard place. Jimmy Frank is family, so I'm pretty sure he won't say anything, but I'm not so sure about Delia. I'm afraid that if I want to keep my moonshine business up to snuff I may have to start going to church. That wouldn't exactly square with the way I really live, but the same is true of a lot of those folks over there, so I guess nobody would downright object. Still, it just doesn't seem right.
     "And that's how things are down here right now. I promise to be better about writing, and I'll let you know how all this turns out. I'll keep you posted about Scooter and Ida, too. There may be more happening there. I dropped into the library the other day to say hello to Millie, and I spied Scooter in the reference section. I asked him what was up, and he said that Ida has gotten all interested in something called haiku. He said he doesn't know what that is or how it works, but Ida has started talking mighty funny sometimes.
     "I told Scooter I thought he should hang on to the sleeping bag.
                                                                         
                                                                              "Sincerely,
                                                                              "Your Uncle Barlow"

After Trump

               Journalism has been overtaken  by a Biblical plague of dickheads.
                                                                                       Richard Ben Cramer
               We have met the enemy, and he is us.     
                                                   Pogo Possum
   

     As an alumnus of the Fourth Estate, I like the story of a lad who dreamed of being a railroad man.  When he came of age, he went straight to the railroad office and applied for work.
     A manager administered an aptitude test, then sat the lad down for mixed news.
     "I'm sorry," the manager said. "The test indicates you have no aptitude for railroad work."
     The boy was crestfallen.
     "But there's good news," the manager said.  "The test says you are perfectly suited to be a journalist."
     "A journalist?" the boy said.
     "Yes. A journalist."
     "How so?"
     "It was in your answer to question 37."
     "I don't remember the numbers," the boy said. "Which question was that?"
     "Question 37 asked, 'If you were at the master controls of a railroad switch yard and you saw two trains speeding toward each other on the same track at 100 miles an hour, what would you do?'  You answered, 'I'd run and get my brother, because he's never seen a train wreck.' "
     The post-Trump era (it's coming sooner or later) will surely include new consideration of the way we speak to each other as a nation, and the way our town criers speak to us. In a phrase from another writer, saying that a certain quality has gone missing from our national conversation is like using imagery of burnt toast to discuss the Chicago fire.
      Discussion would logically begin with the sewer of propaganda issuing daily from the White House. I think my former colleagues in the press stumbled, at first, in reacting to this manifestation of the President's bone-deep corruption and his retainers' glad complicity.  Perhaps raising a train-wreck alarm early on would have seemed the kind of side-taking that journalists are not supposed to do.   But as venality has settled into the bloodstream of our government, we've seen once again that neutrality in the face of outrage is not neutrality at all.
     Meanwhile, the rise of electronic media has tilted news reporting toward stories that can be told in pictures, charts and graphs. In bites of screen time. This new day has raised the profile of journalists whose employability is conditioned by their capacity to perform well in these media -- and especially on camera. Some of them also have other pertinent talents, but some are merely actors or technocrats.
     In this era of bite-sized news, discourse of public affairs has absorbed changed standards -- I would say diminished standards -- of utility for an English sentence. Diminished standards become norms. Even major news outlets may now feature commentators whose grasp of language is so loose that they mistake invective for appraisal and ridicule for wit.
     It would be wrong to say that today's journalism includes no distinguished figures. But extra searching is needed to find one who can approach, say, the eloquence of Walter Lippman:

      When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. 

     A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable or dangerous to do so.

     Or Theodore H. White's combination of reportage and portraiture:
   
     It was invisible, as always.
     They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose. ...
     By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country -- in schools, libraries, churches, stores, post offices. These, too, were invisible ...
     What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world -- the power to marshal and mobilize, the power to send men to kill or be killed, the power to tax and destroy, the power to create and the responsibility to do so, the power to guide and the responsibility to heal -- all committed into the hands of one man.
                                                                                                 The Making Of The President 1960    

     The air these days is heavy with the language of distemper. Political figures urge us to fight with each other. Sectarian voices urge us to condemn each other. Even we who don't want to listen  can't help hearing, being affected and perhaps being infected.
     Should the shallowing of public vocabulary be laid to cause or to effect? Future historians will probably have to answer that one. Either way, they will surely note that,  in the early part of the 21st Century, the constructive expression of disagreement became a neglected art.
     The country will eventually be rid of a president who is, surely, a lifelong white-collar criminal. He can be gone soon if voters will only bother to make it so.
     Cleanup will be an arduous, top-to-bottom chore. Perhaps we could imagine it this way:
     The next president provides a fresh beginning simply by not being a daily disgrace; by returning common decency to behavior and public language.
      Legislators, not only in Congress,  embrace deep reform. They wake to the difference between leading people and herding them. Republicans in particular resolve that party loyalty does not supersede their oath of office, and that systematically frightening and deceiving the electorate is a poisonous kind of corruption.
     We the people -- to borrow another phrase -- resolve to improve our focus on several realities. They are: We get what we demand -- or worse, what we tolerate. Citizenship is work, and politics is not a parlor game. The purpose of a vote is to belly up to a real-life choice of governance, not to make a gesture. A vote not cast is license given to nameless strangers.
      In particular, we resolve to deny demagogues their staple food: The attitude that whoever disagrees with me is immoral or stupid by virtue of that fact.
      The institutional press, which has always been an evolving creature, becomes a little quicker to name fools and scoundrels for what they are. Evolution continues in its influence on the quality of public language, inescapably and not entirely for the better. Yesterday's journalism provided a variety of cultural nourishment. Today's version can be thin soup.
     But those voices of cultural nourishment do not disappear. They explore new outlets, new venues, new methods. And better days come because they can, if we the people -- that telling phrase again -- buckle down to the workaday chores of bringing them on.
   
   

A Life Gift

     The people who most care already know, but I want to write this anyway. I want to do it because some things just need to be said, or sung, or written down.
     It's about teachers. The good ones, in school and in life. The ones who know that some lessons can change you; who recognize these when they come along; who bear down on you when one does come along, because they know that you may not see it for yourself, and they don't want you to miss the nourishment of it.
      Also, it's about friends. Real friends. The ones you can turn to, and who can turn to you. The ones whose friendship never wanes, no matter time or distance.
      If you are hugely blessed in this life you may have one person who is both a friend and a teacher.
      I've been blessed.
     For his privacy I'll just call him R.C.  He was my first boss. I was fresh out of college, a rookie on a good local newspaper. (It was not an oxymoron in those days.) Conditioned by the intellectual caste systems that academe likes both to foster and deny, I was flustered by the open-ended simplicity of his very first question.
     Him: What do you like to read?
     Me, apologetically: Uh, well, actually, I love to read, but my reading habits are pretty undisciplined. I'll read just about anything.
     Him: Oh, good.
     It was an auspicious beginning. The two of us had to fill a whole page, every day, with our own work and that of others. We could afford to have no limits on what we read and wrote about, thought and talked about. It was postgraduate education in a sink-or-swim school with a skilled and patient mentor right at hand.
     The strains of workload were leavened with salty humor (Spencer, you have fucked up this word so badly nobody will ever be able to spell it again.) Also  with strategic breaks. To hell with this, he would exclaim, bolting up from his chair. Let's go to the movies.
     And go we would, to the critics' latest favorite, or to new trash at the naughty movie house uptown.  Sometimes we'd duck out to shoot a little pool at the beer and burger joint down the street.
     The learning side of life was filled with politics, history, literature, drama, art and music. On the fun side we got into some mischief, he and I and a circle of friends.  Once, when a drunken party notion turned into a dare, we smuggled a bogus sketch into an exhibit at the local art museum and then had nervous fun betting each other that the lifted-pinkie crowd wouldn't spot it. (They didn't.)
     I learned about writing, because R.C. has the gift and cared enough to teach. And I learned about the power of story.
     Several deep-thinker types and even a few theologians will tell you that storytelling is a primary human drive -- right up there with sex and hunger. We trade stories, they say, from in inborn need to make sense of life, and to tell each other what kind of sense it makes.
     R.C. didn't need deep thinkers to tell him that a proper story is a treasure. He knew that some things can be said through no other means, and that the most important writers are first good storytellers.
     So he was not being entirely facetious, I think, in our later conversation about a memoir he'd written for his grandchildren.
     Me: Wow. You've led an interesting life.  There are a lot of good stories in here.
     Him (grinning): Yes. And most of them are true.
     We are old men now, both of us, and he has touched many more lives than mine. He has also touched the lives of people he never met or even heard of, for it became my privilege through the years to bear down on a youngster who seemed to be missing a life lesson, or to tell a story that made something click into focus for others.
     The people who care most about R.C. would not be surprised by anything here. They already understand. But I think they would also understand that some things -- even things you already know -- just need to be said. Or sung. Or written down.