Looking for a fight: Pope Francis, a saint for reform

Perhaps the photo above the November 26 Washington Post story says it all about Pope Francis. His views of society are shaking the comfortable stables of the wealthy and the powerful while warming the hearts of the poor, the lost and those of diminished hope.

It’s a profile shot with a circle of light behind the pontiff’s head, reminiscent of the halos depicted around the heads of saints seen in many Renaissance paintings.

Whether or not he is saintly, Francis does appear concerned with reforming the Catholic Church and at a time when the excesses haven’t just bedeviled society, but the church in particular and religion in general.

Francis follows two papal reformers Pope John XXIII, elected pontiff in 1958, and Pope John Paul I, elected in 1978. Both men led short papal reigns. The 66-year-old John Paul I died after only 33 days, leading to conspiracy theories, and John XXIII died, at age 81, five years after his election.

John XXIII, though, was apparently meant to serve, like Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, who served nearly eight years before deciding to retire with the title pope emeritus, short-term, a sort of interim period between popes.

Though their papal reigns were short, John XXIII and John Paul I introduced reforms that set the church in new directions that many welcomed and many, even today, disapproved, but those changes, despite efforts to reverse them, remain and seem un-reversible.

Like Francis, Pope John XXIII wasted no time in abandoning old views and establishing new ones for a church that was already feeling the pressures brought by modernity. One of his first acts was to confess the church’s centuries of anti-Semitism.

His most significant reform, which altered the church, was calling what became known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II. The council has reshaped church teachings and views that many Catholics found liberation in them while others could only find gloom in the change to traditions such as having mass said in English instead of Latin.

According to religion writer and pope biographer George Weigel in a July 2001 article, when John XXIII called for Vatican II in 1959, Cardinal Giovanni Montini, who became the next pope a few years later, said to a friend: “This holy old boy doesn't realize what a hornet's nest he's stirring up.”

John Paul I also wasted no time in instituting reforms in what became one of the shortest reigns in papal history. He made changes to humanize the papacy, referring to himself in the first person instead of the third person “we.” He rejected the “papal coronation” for a simple mass.

He also was preparing an encyclical or papal letter to confirm Vatican II’s reforms before his death hardly a month after his election as pope. The Vatican has never investigated as suspicious John Paul’s death, despite books and articles claiming a conspiracy. The Vatican’s official view has been that he died mostly likely of a heart attack.

Francis appears to be directing the church to a new, perhaps higher level of reforms. He forgoes the trappings of papal power, insists on living sparingly, foregoes accouterments of papal wardrobes, and wades into humanity.

 

He returned to his hotel by bus to pay his bill the day of his election. He cradled in his arms a man whose face was covered in boils from a disfigurement caused by a genetic disorder. He washes the feet of his flock.

Francis is showing humbleness, humility and love – a trinity that he believes is severely lacking in today’s world where he sees a massive gulf between rich and poor, hope and hopelessness, hate and love.

“Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor,” Francis wrote in a statement known as an “apostolic exhortation.”

“God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry and listless. That is no way to live a dignified and fulfilled life; it is not God’s will for us, nor is it the life in the Spir­it which has its source in the heart of the risen Christ.”  

Francis also pointed out what he sees as an imbalance in economic scale and thinking.
 

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.

“This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacra­lized workings of the prevailing economic system … Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”

Francis appears to be striking the right chords and connecting with hearts and minds when he speaks about the social fabric getting torn by economic injustice and inequality, and the academic theories and laws that enshrine such imbalance. A recent poll found Francis, who became pope less than nine months ago in March 2013, the most popular person on the Internet, which is the 21^st century’s version of a world audience.

 

“I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security," he wrote on his exhortation.”

Saint Francis? Perhaps, but from his actions and words attaining sainthood seems the least of his concerns, if it’s a concern at all. One thing is certain about the latest successor to Saint Peter, he’s demonstrating that he lives and teaches as Jesus of the scriptures did.

JFK Remembered: What a Lucky Man He Was

John F. Kennedy’s assassination 50 years ago today seemed to bring the hopes of an aspiring generation crashing down. More assassination and war followed that fateful moment on a Dallas street on Nov. 21, 1963.

Kennedy’s life and legacy is perhaps more complex than most men’s. It was admirable and enviable, yet at times questionable, deplorable, reprehensible. He tried to reach for greatness, to inspire people to achieve greatness, and along the way he did some great things.

 

The Peace Corps comes to mind.

I was four years old when Kennedy was assassinated. What I remember is the aftermath, the arguments and debates and sorrows I heard from my parents and their friends over the years. There was a sense that something was lost, perhaps forever.

In 1988, on the 25^th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, I was listening to a rock radio station in Washington D.C. when the disc jockey noted the date, then played Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s 1970 song “Lucky Man."

 

A British progressive rock group, its singer and guitarist, Greg Lake, wrote the song in 1959, when he was 12, according to a 2012 Horizon Press interview with the singer.

 

“I did write “Lucky Man” when I was 12,” Lake said. “My mum bought me a guitar and I was very lucky in that sense, the answer was yes instead of no. There was the first bit of luck because had the answer been no, my life would have probably been totally different.”

To me, the song seemed to capture JFK’s life.
 

 Lucky Man

He had white horses
And ladies by the score
All dressed in satin
And waiting by the door

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

White lace and feathers
They made up his bed
A gold covered mattress
On which he was laid

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

He went to fight wars
For his country and his king
Of his honor and his glory
The people would sing

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

A bullet had found him
His blood ran as he cried
No money could save him
So he laid down and he died

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was
Ooooh, what a lucky man he was

 

Gettysburg Revisited

Seven score and ten years ago, our forefather stood before a divided nation to consecrate a battle ground, blood-soaked from an endeavor to re-unite a people, and to re-establish the proposition of our founders, necessary for a more perfect union, that all people are created equal, and that none are more equal than others.

             Today we are engaged in a great social fracturing, testing whether our nation can hold together that which it spent more than two centuries building, that which it once split apart, and that which it has been mending since war had once torn it asunder. 

            The world has long noted and never forgotten those words of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863. Americans, for whom his speech was meant to heed and endure, have neither noted nor remembered in the spirit for which it was made.

            We often consecrate, dedicate and hallow grounds rather than find courage to sacrifice for the greater good that tolerates all, no matter race, creed, nationality, thought or sexual orientation. This nation cannot long endure in a house that ceaselessly divides for the cause of self-interest.

            A nation that produces greatness cannot continue to self-inflict wounds and think it will become stronger. Its boldness is not in the military venture. It can not hope to last without adapting to change, economic and political.

            We cannot become great without acknowledging our nation is a work in progress, that our work is always unfinished, that we must always devote the last full measure. A government by, for, and of the people must not perish from the earth.

           

War to End War

Nearly 100 years ago today, the guns of World War I went silent at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11 month in 1918.

It was believed to be "The War That Will End War," as British author H.G. Wells first described in a collection of newspaper articles that were published in a book at the outbreak of war in August 1914.

 

Three years later, President Woodrow Wilson, in arguing for America’s involvement in the war, and only months after getting re-elected on the promise not to go to war, stated it would be “the war to end war,” a term he only used once, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s “Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking.”

Next year we will observe the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I, which lead to nine million combatants killed and another nearly eight million missing. In France, at the battlefield of Verdun, a battle that raged for 300 days and took an estimated 250,000 lives, there is a national cemetery containing the remains of 130,000 unknown soldiers.

World War I was the first conflict of the industrial age and with it came industrial horrors, machine-driven weapons – tanks and aerial bombardments – and chemical weapons, which, as recently seen in Syria, remain with us today.

As the last century has shown, it was not the war to end war. The peace negotiations in Paris that followed the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918 ensured there would be a Second World War by how the victors treated the vanquished.

The allies had little concern about the consequences of leaving a nation like German nearly destitute and little thought as to how a family of nations should behave toward one another. It would take World War II and the creation of the United Nations to begin dialogue on that concept.

In scope of nations involved and scale of destruction, World War I was unprecedented in history until World War II. Since those wars, America’s involvement in conflicts has become longer. The United States was in the First World War for 18 months before that war ended. It fought in the Second World War for three years and eight months.

The Vietnam War, 1955-1974, was 19 years and five months and our fighting in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been going on nearly 13 years.

All of these wars and so many smaller ones not mentioned have links, directly and indirectly, to the outcomes of World War I. It wasn’t a war to end war; it was a war that spawned wars.

The More the Gun the More the Violence

Just the last month alone, the reports of gun violence, nationally, regionally and locally, from home to classroom to workplace, indicates gun violence is permeating our way of life.

Here are a few of the incidents:

* A school teacher is shot and killed in Nevada trying to protect students from a gunman. Two students are wounded.

* A coach at Missouri Southern State University is shot and killed coming out of a movie theater, prompting cancellation of the school’s homecoming weekend.  

* Shots were fired at North Carolina A&T State University’s homecoming and one of the bullets wound a 21-year-old man.

* A troubled man goes on a shooting rampage at Los Angeles International Airport and kills a Transportation Security Administration officer. The shooter wounds two others and is also wounded.

* Another troubled man kills his family and then himself in South Carolina, just one of many incidents recently of family murder suicides.

  
As this dispassionate blog on gun facts by The Guardian’s Simon Rogers’ shows, the United States ranks as having the highest rate of gun ownership with the second highest percentage of homicides by guns.

The social and economic impacts of gun violence are enormous, according to Small Arms Survey, another dispassionate collection of data from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

And FactCheck.org keeps a tally on whose providing accurate information and perspective on the issue in its “GunRhetoric vs. Gun Facts.”

As reported in local newspaper and national news media, gun violence is routine in society today. Joe Nocera of the New York Times offers a daily rundown on his blog GunReport, which just provides facts, nothing more.

Perhaps it’s time to decide whether gun violence is an acceptable way of life in a free, wealthy and democratic country. Before letting your knee jerk, either right or left, read the reports, check the facts, and study the data.

Why Kill Her?

            From what is known from news reports, Miriam Carey tied to ram a White House barricade and then fled police in a high-speed chase to the Unite States Capitol where they cornered her and shot her to death.

            Why?

            Carey had no weapon. She hit a Secret Service agent with her car at the White House, and then rammed a police car when she put her black Infiniti into reverse. A Capitol police officer was injured, but reports are unclear as to whether Carey was directly responsible for the injury.

            So why kill her? Was there no other way of stopping her from whatever she was trying to do?

According to one video clip, the police had managed to stop her car in front of the Capitol and surround it with guns drawn before she sped off. Couldn’t they have disabled the car by shooting out the tires? There must be other ways to stop a speeding vehicle.

Many questions remain about Carey. Why did the 34-year-old dental hygienist travel 275 miles from her Connecticut home with her 1-year-old daughter, who was not hurt during the incident, and ram a White House barrier?

News reports claim she had mental health issues related to postpartum depression, but again, why was it necessary to kill her?

As one expert on police use of force, Geoffrey Alpert of the University of South Carolina, told the Associated Press, “I think the question we have to ask is, ‘What threat did she cause? What threat was she to the officers, to the public, to the politicians?’”

From news reports and videos, it didn’t seem like a great threat, but without more facts it’s just second guessing. An investigation is planned, but that doesn’t guarantee we will get satisfactory answers. We hope we do.

The concern is this: Has our fear of terrorism become so great that we are seeing terrorists everywhere we look? Have we now decided to shoot first and ask questions later? Miriam Carey’s death seems so significant to these issues.                                                   

Atlas Shrunk

            The government shutdown brings to mind “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s mammoth 1957 novel about one man, John Galt, shutting down “the motor of the world” because government taxes and regulates too much, depriving men of realizing their full potential as individuals.

            “This is an epic tale about a man who said he would stop the motor of the world – and did,” is one of the blurbs on the “Atlas Shrugged” website. “A thrilling mystery about what might happen if the world’s producers disappeared,” is another, and a third: “A story that shows how ideas have the power to shape the world we live in.” 

            Anyone who has read the novel knows it’s long, 1,168pages, and about many things including romance and sex. Its plot and theme, though, are essentially vehicles to espouse, at least in my perspective, an ideology rather than philosophy. It’s called “objectivism.” This ideology essential states that individuals should be selfish and should never compromise – on anything.

            Rand described objectivism in 1962: “Man – every man – is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”

            Sort of sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In fact, there are many, some of whom are in government, who believe this. Some politicians believe some issues are so sacrosanct that compromise is impossible. But there’s compromise, and then there’s selling your soul for ambition and avarice.

As is commonly understood, compromise is where parties, none of whom is entirely right or wrong on an issue or in a dispute, give up something they believe in and accept something they don’t (sacrificing?). They do this in order to move forward on finding a common ground that would benefit the whole rather than the individual.

Good things have come from compromise, like the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights – each filled with ideas from a lot of people who didn’t always agree but that have nonetheless shaped the world.

 

 

            In “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s hero, Galt, succeeds in bringing the world to a halt in order to broadcast, using his technologically advanced radio, the philosophy of objectivism. He is cheered by supporters who believe the world will see the wisdom, adopt the philosophy, and life will be good. People will go about doing what they want without interference or critical appraisal from anyone, particularly the government.

            That sounds well and good for fiction, but it doesn’t seem to be a realistic way to go about things like raising a family let alone running a government. But then, who am I to say? In the words of Graham Green’s foible-prone Holly Martins, the protagonist in “The Third Man,” I’m just a hack writer.

            America is the Atlas of the world, but when the nation’s democratically elected leaders allow the nation’s engine to stop because they can’t compromise, America then no longer looks like the Greek mythological figure that holds up the celestial sphere. It looks like a puny being unable to realize the folly in failing to compromise and the hard truth that everyone is replaceable – even John Galt.  

             

Fifty in Five: Will We Be Marching in Place?

This year’s 50^th anniversary of the civil rights March on Washington and the accompanying “I have a Dream” speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been inspiring, but also reminds us of the next 50^th anniversary that the nation will mark in five years: King’s assassination in April 1968 and the assassination two months later, in June, of Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for president that year.

What these approaching anniversaries tell us is that some of the contentious issues of ‘68 continue to haunt us today: gun violence and economic inequality.

Both King and Kennedy were shot to death, King by sniper rifle in Memphis, Tenn. An escaped convict from Missouri, James Earl Ray, was convicted of the killing. Kennedy was killed at a campaign event in a California hotel by a handgun, a .22 caliber revolver fired by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian.  

Gun violence today is pervasive. In the last month alone there has been several mass shootings including 12 dead at the Washington Naval Yard, 13 injured including a 3-year-old in Chicago, followed by four gun deaths in that city a couple of nights later. In fact, hardly a month goes by when there isn’t some level of gun violence and mass death somewhere in the United States. No one seems to know of a solution other than to sell more guns.

Economically, the middle class, based on economic data including lagging wage growth and rising health care and food costs, is declining while the ranks of the very wealthy and the poor are increasing, creating, as many economists believe, an inequality of opportunity and outcome that could lead to a destructive divide in our society. Already, even discussion of this seeming imbalance draws cries of class warfare.

To address economic disparity in ’68, the Poor People’s Campaign, a march on Washington to essentially petition the government, was being organized by King before he was gunned down on April 4. Despite his death and the wrenching sorrow it caused, the campaign went on as planned, which is how King had wanted.

Resurrection City, 1968

 

In June, more than 3,000 marchersdescended on the nation’s capital, demanding “economic justice” for America’s poor, which included blacks, whites, Native Americans and Hispanics. They set up a tent encampment, which they named Resurrection City, on the Mall and endured heat, rain and mud for six weeks as campaign organizers sent out groups to various federal agencies to lobby for economic equality and jobs.

Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, attended the Mother’s Day opening of Resurrection City. Less than three weeks later, her husband, who had urged King to have the poor march on Washington, was assassinated, on June 5. His funeral procession traveled through Resurrection City on its way to Arlington Cemetery.   

The campaign was not as successful as the organizers had hoped, marred by lack of coordination, leadership conflicts and racial tension. The most it achieved was free surplus food distribution in about 200 counties, but it never reached its goals of giving low-income wage earners access to land and capital, unemployment assistance, and meaningful jobs at strong wages.

By late June, the federal Department of Interior closed down Resurrection City because the organizers’ National Park Service permit had expired. Some violence and arrests occurred, but the six-week campaign was largely peaceful. It continued in small groups meeting outside that year’s political conventions in Miami and Chicago.

The contemporary reflection of the Poor People’s Campaign of ’68 is the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, which advocated for the same issues of social and economic equality, but also protested against perceived corporate influence, particularly by the finance industry, on government. They set up tents in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district and after two months were forced to leave.

Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, 2011

 

 

Occupy Wall Street spawned Occupy movements in cities, college campuses and outside corporate headquarters across the country. But like the Poor People’s Campaign, Occupy Wall Street had little effect on public policy other than to raise political awareness of the issues, the importance of which now registers in polls.

Let’s hope that five years from now we’re celebrating progress on the issues of gun violence and economic inequality instead of noting how little has changed in 50 years.

 

 

The Powers That Were

In 1979, at the pinnacle of the once great era when print media dominated news, opinion and advertising, the late author and journalist David Halberstam published, “The Powers That Be,” a thick book that featured profiles of the nation’s five media titans in the last half of the 20^th century.

These five men – one would later be replaced by a woman – and their powerful media empires provided the news and opinion that informed the nation and contributed, at times significantly, to shaping political agendas and directing the course of government policy.  

They could afford talented editors and journalists whose beat and investigative reporting was extraordinary, from exposing corruption in the White House that led to President Richard Nixon’s resigning office in 1974 to revealing failed policies that shifted public opinion against America’s military involvement in Vietnam.

They were Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger of “The New York Times, William S. Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of “Time” magazine, Otis Chandler of the “Los Angeles Times” and Phil Graham of “The Washington Post.” Graham’s wife, Katharine, would assume the paper’s helm in 1963, after he shot himself in their Virginia home.

Not only were they the king keepers at the information gates, their media empires made vast fortunes, providing them resources to pay for talent and bureaus. As late as 1992, they still held dominion, but like an earthquake under the ocean, a tsunami was coming, and none of the men and women running these institutions of journalism appeared prepared for understanding what it could mean to their business models.

Twenty years later, the empires are shadows of what they once were, struggling to right their ships, which have been battered by giant waves of technology, innovation and competition. The titans have all passed away – Luce, born in 1898, died in 1967; Paley in 1990; Katherine Graham in 2001; Chandler in 2006; and Sulzberger in 2012.

Under Graham’s son, Donald, “The Washington Post,” once valued at more than $1 billion, sold this summer at a fire-sale price, $250 million, according to the Post. It went to one of the 21^st century’s media titans, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. Three years ago, in 2010, the Post sold one of its signature properties, 80-year-old “Newsweek" magazine, to audio pioneer Sidney Harman for $1. He also assumed the magazine's financial liabilities.

Harman would die a year later, signaling, as if any more signaling was needed, the growing turmoil in the world of print news publications. The Internet continues to explode with news and information sites, legitimate and non-legitimate, and the innovative, all-consuming social media. Digital technology appears to never lack for invention and innovation.

 
Technology has effectively shattered into millions of small pieces the once enormously profitable adverting market that little more than 20 yeas ago the five titans could once count, collectively, as practically their own.

Within 18 months after “Newsweek” was sold, the magazin had merged with The Daily Beast, a news and opinon website, dropped its print version in December 2012, and went digital. It’s delivered via e-mail once a week. For print readers, and journalists who built their careers on print, “Newsweek’s” decision was akin to raising the flag of surrender to a still unproven delivery platform.

It was the same response when the smaller dailies such as those in the Newhouse chain, including my local paper, The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, took the printed versions of their daily newspapers from seven days to three days a week in what appears to be an eventual move to eliminating print. Yet, delivery platform isn’t the problem. As long as the “platform” is accessible – whether print, tablet, iPad, laptop, etc. The problem is how to develop a new business model that was as lucrative as the old one.

“Newsweek’s” competitor, “Time,” remains in print with an online version. Yet, it too struggles with a 20^th century business model in the high-tech, digitized, 21^st century, and as a result has been reducing staff significantly, according to Time.

The newsroom at CBS has fared better because of its medium, but it no longer has the influence it once did. CBS was once referred to as the “Tiffany Network” because in 1950 it was the first to embrace new technology, color television. It was home to broadcast news pioneers Edward R. Murrow, William Shirer and Walter Cronkite, names unknown to most people under 40 today.

The last decade has been nothing but upheaval at the “Los Angeles Times” – change of ownership, a rapid succession of editors, declines in circulation, and bankruptcy, according to the Times. 

The New York Times newsroom, 1942

 

In 2009, “The NewYork Times,” which has gone through a series of layoffs that have reduced newsroom staff, went to Carlos Slim, Mexican telecommunications magnate, to help finance its news business with an initial injection of a quarter billion dollars. Slim now owns a significant stake in the company. The Times has sold off media properties, such as “The Boston Globe,” which the company sold this year to Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry for $70 million, also a fire-sale deal, according to the two newspapers. 

While journalism’s former power-houses have adapted to 21^st century change – websites, apps and social media tools from Twitter to Tumbler – the are still symbolically and culturally, “old media.”

It’s not just technology, but it’s how technology is changing how people read – consume – news and information. It’s changing how information is collected and it’s changing how news is written and disseminated. Where print reporters once just needed a pen and a notebook to gather news and a keyboard to tell the story, they now need a video camera, a smart phone and a graphic artist.  

Today, information on a global scale is so accessible and so immediate, and by so many for so many, that little news appears on the front pages of morning papers that already hasn’t been posted online or broadcast hours earlier.

While I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s with the broad-sheet newspapers of the Washington Post and New York Times hitting the porch every morning and finding them wondrous inventions of the modern age, in 2013 they look like relics of a bygone era.

The Internet and rapidly advancing technology such as iPhones and iPads has effectively made it a reality for anyone to custom-make what news and information they want to read and see when they want to see and read it.

The individual now has the power the five titans once had. The reader or news consumer can shape the news and information they want to receive; select from an enormous menu of websites and cable channels for the information they believe they need to understand issues and events in order to form opinions.

Whether another era can occur when a small group of media titans control the flow of information seems doubtful. (Even the international media titan, Rupert Murdoch, has struggled with technological change – phone hacking scandals at his London newspaper, News of the World, forced him to close the paper and split his media empire into two entities that separated the multinational’s entertainment and publishing properties.)

It’s unclear exactly what the future will hold for American journalism. For the moment, news websites like Huffington Post, Politico and BuzzFeed appear to be re-defining journalism and news, which is not unlike what Henry Luce did with Time magazine more than 80 years ago.

“His greatest influence may have been in broadening American culture, in involving millions of middlebrow Americans in the arts, in theater, in religion and education,” Halberstam wrote of Luce. “He had a powerful sense of what people should read, what was good for them to read and an essential belief worthy of the best journalist, that any subject of importance could be made interesting.”

The difference today is, thanks to technology, people can choose to have their own sense of what to read by selecting from a multitude of media instead of relying on just a few.   

A century-and-half after Gettysburg, the nation continues to test its endurance

Many of them stand like pickets along what was 150 years ago the battle lines of the Union and Confederate armies at Gettysburg, monuments, memorials and markers to the estimated 165,000 soldiers who fought there – and thousands who died there – those three days in July 1863.

The South’s monuments appear relatively new compared to many of the North’s weathered edifices, and the reason for this raises the question about national unity since the Civil War divided the country over race and human rights.

America has undoubtedly made significant progress. In the last 150 years, African Americans have made an arduous journey from white men’s property, treated inhumanely and indifferently, to leaders in the nation that once enslaved them.

It’s something to marvel that a century-and-a-half after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the house once divided between North and South is led by a president who is not only African-American, but who is half black and half white.

Yet, since the guns of Gettysburg fell silent, blacks have endured endless battles in order to achieve equality in their own country, despite Lincoln’s proclamation freeing them; despite adoption of the Constitution’s 13^th amendment abolishing slavery; despite the 14^th amendment affirming citizenship and rights to all people regardless of race; and despite court decisions that shattered school segregation and upheld voting rights.

Our nation remains troubled over race. Just look at the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act that ensured states, particularly Southern states, could not deny blacks and other minorities their right to vote. Supporters of the decision seem unable to understand why African Americans are offended by this.

Is there somewhere in the murky recesses of the national psyche the sense that the country remains divided 148 years since the end of the Civil War?

The process of re-uniting the country after the war was hard. Reconstruction of the South was handled poorly by both sides, though could it have been handled any differently? Re-unification also was long; perhaps 100 years long, perhaps still going on in one form or another.

Consider one example: petitions signed by thousands of residents in as many as 40 states calling for their state to secede from the union while other states have pending bills in their statehouses to declare financial sovereignty from the federal government.

Monumental division

            Not long after the Civil War, Northern veterans began to erect granite obelisks, domed-temples and other edifices in Gettysburg. The monuments now litter the placid Pennsylvania farm fields and rocky slopes, where grave diggers collected about 9,000 soldiers of the blue and gray killed during the July 1-3 battle, which became the war’s turning point, leading to the South’s defeat two years later.

            Initially, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association focused on the Union monuments, buying land along the Union lines. None of the Southern states bothered to participate in securing land or proposing monuments on Confederate lines, according to Ronald Lee’s “The Origin and Evolution of the National Park Idea.”

One group of Confederate veterans did erect a battlefield monument in 1886, but the Southern states, partly because the war had depleted their treasuries, did not begin to erect monuments until 1917, the year the United States entered World War I. That year, Virginia built a massive edifice with a bronze Lee astride his horse, Traveller.     

            It became apparent that what was needed was a national park in which both sides were represented equally. In 1890, U.S. Rep. Byron Cutcheon of Michigan, who fought for the Union, made the first attempt to get a bill through Congress.

            The congressman commended the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association’s efforts as “a work of love and grateful pride to the loyal states,” but, he reminded fellow congressmen, “There were two armies in Gettysburg.”

            For the monuments to accurately reflect the history of the battle, and to properly preserve the battlefield, Cutcheon argued, it should not be left to the states, either North or South: “It must be done by the national government or remain undone.”

In 1895, Gettysburg became the first of the national parks and the overseer of all monuments. Yet, Confederate veterans, even with the battle now 32 years behind them, generally were not eager to erect monuments in a place of defeat for them.

It is an understandable attitude since soldiers are taught to hate the enemy, even if they happen to be their brothers. Long after the war and into the 20^th century, the South’s sons believed they were fighting “northern aggression.”

Northerner soldiers also viewed the conflict in narrow terms. Lincoln found it maddening at times when his generals failed to grasp the aim of the war. It was not to defeat an opposing nation, he would tell them, but to reunite a nation – a nation with a founding principle that all people are created equal.

            As General Robert E. Lee’s army retreated across the Potomac River to Virginia after the battle, Union General George Meade would telegraph the White House that he was pursing the “invaders” back to their country, to which Lincoln reminded him those invaders were his fellow countrymen. 

 

Reunions and reflections

            Sometime in the 1890s, a few veterans of the armies of the Potomac and Northern Virginia began to meet on occasion at small reunions. At one held in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love, the captured sword of Confederate Brig. General Lewis Armistead, killed at Gettysburg, was returned to the South.

The reunions helped to heal wounds made when the nation was split asunder, but they also, perhaps more so, allowed aging soldiers to reminisce. In 1908, a former Union general, Philadelphian Henry Shippen Huidekoper, made the suggestion to Pennsylvania Gov. Edwin Stuart about having a 50^th Gettysburg reunion at the battlefield and inviting as many veterans as possible.

The following year, the Legislature created the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg Commission and established the event’s first program, a “Peace Jubilee,” according to a report to the General Assembly. Congress appropriated $150,000 for the event and directed the War Department to build tent camps to accommodate the 53,000 veterans – only about 9,000 of them former Confederate veterans – who would attend.

At their 50^th reunion in 1913, the now elderly fighters were photographed wearing the blue and gray, standing on either side of a battlefield fence shaking hands. In fact, the former enemies greeted each other warmly, despite concern by one Southern colonel that “there might be unpleasant differences, at least, between the blue and gray.”

It was an electrifying moment, a reflection of national unity, but in 1913 African Americans still struggled in the South to achieve basic human and constitutional rights – living under white-instituted segregation that enslaved emotionally and psychologically.

While Gettysburg’s veterans spent six days reminiscing, parading, and accepting honors from President Woodrow Wilson – “We shall not forget the splendid valor” – the Ku Klux Klan roamed the South, terrorizing African Americans.  

The struggle against this tyranny went on for many decades, well into the middle of the 20^th century. Remnants of this oppression persist even today in the 21^st century as every presidential election reveals efforts to block or restrict minority voting rights.

 

Three Presidents      

            Many presidents have visited Gettysburg to offer gestures of peace and healing, but three – Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt – had led or would soon lead the nation through the crucible of major conflict that in its aftermath re-defined the nation.

            Lincoln arrived after the battle and consecrated the battlefield and the meaning of the war – “the proposition that all men are created equal” – with the Gettysburg Address that resonates as strongly today as it did in 1863.

Wilson, a Virginian born four years before the war broke out in 1861, came on the last day of the 1913 reunion to bless the Confederate and Union camaraderie and make an attempt at healing words: “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather … the quarrel forgotten.”

Yet, Wilson was a segregationist and, many historians believe, a racist, based on his own writings and actions. As president, his administration imposed harsh workplace policies that barred blacks from holding federal jobs. Hardly had the war been a quarrel nor had anyone forgotten it, least of all African Americans.

People are complicated, Wilson no less so. At his insistence during World War I,

African Americans received equal battle pay, but they fought in segregated units. 

            Roosevelt arrived by train from his home in Hyde Park, NY, for the 75^th and what would be the final reunion, in 1938. The battle’s last 25 veterans joined 1,800 veterans of the Civil War, most of them in their nineties. Some had to be carried.

On the last day in the northwest corner of the battlefield, two veterans, one Union and one Confederate, let fall the drape that covered the tall Eternal Light Peace Memorial that Roosevelt dedicated.

In his speech paying homage to the assembled veterans FDR was surely thinking about and seemed to even hint at, Europe’s gathering storm that would engulf the world in little more than a year: “It seldom helps to wonder how a statesmen of one generation would surmount the crisis of another.”

Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt understood the Civil War and Gettysburg’s symbolism was about how the nation would meet the endless challenges to its declared principles of equality and justice:

“The task assumes different shapes at different times. Sometimes the threat to popular government comes from political interests, sometimes from economic interests, sometimes we have to beat off all of them together. But the challenge is always the same – whether each generation facing its own circumstances can summon the practical devotion to attain and retain that greatest good for the greatest number which this government of the people was created to ensure.”

The 150^th Anniversary

The National Park employees at Gettysburg call the July 1-3 period the “high holy days,” according to recent news accounts. The battlefield and its nearly 1,400 monuments is a hallowed place for pilgrimage, a shrine for the history buff, re-enactor and the curious.  

An estimated 10,000 re-enactors dressed in blue and gray demonstrated the battle last week as part of the 150^th anniversary event, another 15,000 are expected for a re-enactment this week. Tens of thousands from the north, south, east and west are expected to attend the series of events planned this week.

They come to learn about the tactics and strategies of the battle, not whether the national unity and the struggle for equality and justice are causes everlasting. And there will be those with a Northern perspective – why did Lee send Gen. George Pickett into the last desperate charge that devastated his regiment and ended the battle? And with a Southern perspective – how did Mead win that fight?

One thing remains true about the country that, as Lincoln said, was “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We continue to test whether our nation, “so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

IRS tempest: Teapot Dome and Beyond

Like thunder rolling across the plains, the latest political scandal started as a low rumble a year ago and exploded with sound and fury two weeks ago. The congressional hearings have begun with the jawing and snapping from partisans out for blood.

            What can either side expect (hope) to find in the Internal Revenue Service’s practice of focusing on conservative political groups, notably the Tea Party, who sought nonprofit, thus tax-exempt, status as so-called social-welfare organizations?

            More precisely, what can they uncover that the investigation conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration didn’t find? A missed memo that has the president ordering the practice? A liberal grand conspiracy to destroy America?

            Perhaps, but the hearings and investigations also could lead to the less nefarious, nothing more than bureaucratic incompetence; even, dare say a tempest in a teapot?

            This political scandal, as with many, has scale and headlines – “IRS targeted conservative groups” – that compel partisans and pundits to over-react with one hearing after another, one investigation after another, and one expose after another.

            Often, there is no there there, as the White House has said about the endless Benghazi terrorist attack hearings, but congressional investigations can sometimes uncover wrongdoing, even when they look like partisan point-scoring in the lurch-for-power game.

            The precedent was set for this nearly a century ago during the presidency of Republican Warren G. Harding, who had one of the more scandal-ridden administrations in American history. The scandal du jour then was known as Teapot Dome.

The leasing of U.S. naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills in California to two private oil companies seemed suspicious to Montana Democratic Sen. Thomas Walsh because Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall had not sought competitive bids.

In 1921, Harding ordered control of Teapot Dome and Elk Hills transferred from the Navy Department to the Interior Department. The navy, after Secretary Fall’s persuasive insistence, transferred control in 1922.

That same year, Fall leased the oil production rights at Teapot Dome to Mammoth Oil, a subsidiary of Sinclair Oil, and Elk Hills to Pan American Petroleum. That neither lease was competitively bid was legal under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920.

 Nonetheless, a Wyoming oil producer complained to his senator that Sinclair got the rights through a secret deal. Republican Sen. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin lead an investigation, during which he initially believed Fall innocent, until his Senate office was ransacked. Then he, too, became as suspicious as Walsh.

For two years, Walsh conducted a fruitless inquiry into Teapot Dome, uncovering nothing illegal, even though records kept disappearing mysteriously. Just as things were about to wrap up, the Montana senator uncovered evidence that revealed Fall had gotten kickbacks from the oil companies – a $100,000 loan to start.

That broke open the scandal. Civil and criminal lawsuits ensued; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the contracts were obtained through fraudulent and corrupt means, and the oil reserves were returned to the navy.

Fall was found to have received more than half a million dollars in kickbacks. He was fined $100,000 and sentenced to one year behind bars, the first time in history that a presidential cabinet member was sent to prison for his actions while in office, according to historical accounts.

Since then, scandal and investigation have become part of the political diet in Washington because, as the Teapot Dome scandal showed, no matter how thorough an investigation, there could still be something damning that was missed or not yet found.

Expect the congressional investigations into the IRS’s targeting practice, and the Benghazi scandal, and whatever other scandals come our way, to continue for a long time because there could be that bit of yet unfound evidence.

 Incidentally, the Teapot Dome scandal had no political effect in the following elections of helping Democrats win or Republicans lose. 

 

Gun Crazy

           Listening these many weeks to the gun debate within the gun culture brings to mind a little known 1950 film noir called “Gun Crazy.”

            It’s actually quite good, and if you get a chance you should watch it, whether you support or oppose guns and gun-control. The plot and its two main characters, Bart and Laurie, seem to capture the dichotomy within the ranks of the National Rifle Association’s members.

            The plot features Bart, who loves guns, they make him feel good inside. So much so that he steals a pistol at age 14 and is arrested. Bart’s family and friends testify in court that Bart is responsible and would never use guns to harm anyone. While the judge believes their testimony he nonetheless is compelled to send Bart to reform school.

            Years later, after reform school and a stint in the army, Bart returns home and catches up with his friends. They go to a field where he demonstrates his sharp-shooting skills with his elegant gun collection. They ask him about his plans for the future, and Bart says he wants to work for a gun manufacturer like Remington.

            That night, Bart meets Laurie, a sharpshooter at a carnival. They burn with passion for each other, but Laurie warns him she’s been bad. For awhile, the lovers enjoy life, performing together as carnival sharpshooters until circumstances leave them out of work. Laurie wants to turn to crime and use their guns to steal, from people and banks.

            Bart rejects the idea, and instead wants to sell their guns and work at Remington, but Laurie argues against it. “There isn't enough money in those guns for the kind of start I want,” she says. “Bart, I want things, a lot of things, big things. I don't want to be afraid of life or anything else.

           Laurie threatens to leave him and he goes along with her. Their crime wave gets out of hand. After trying to stop Laurie from shooting people who get in her way, Bart finds himself firing his gun at a pursuing police car and realizes he’s losing control.

            “Laurie, listen to me, listen close,” Bart confides in her. “Something happened when I was scared. All the time I was shooting that tire, I kept thinking how easy it would be to shoot the driver instead. I kept fighting myself. I'm not a killer. I don't want to be a killer. I don't like this kind of life. I've had enough.”

            Laurie hasn’t and before long she’s killing people without compunction, without the thought that Bart puts into his use of guns.

This is the dichotomy in the National Rifle Association. Its membership seems largely filled with Barts, people who enjoy and appreciate firearms, but also respect guns for what they are – weapons, to handle carefully and safely.

            NRA leaders like Wayne LaPierre and Ted Nugent sound like Lauries, blocking, without compunction, regulations to make a largely non-gun owning society safer – such as universal background checks that most of its members support.

            They claim to fear regulation because it means the government eventually will take away guns. Is that really their fear? Or do they fear having to make concessions – giving up semi-automatic weapons with large ammunition magazines, for example. 

            The NRA leaders' answers to gun safety regulations sound like the reasons Laurie gives Bart when he asks her why she killed people: “Because I had to,” Laurie said. “Because I was afraid. Because they would have killed you. Because you're the only thing I've got in the whole world. Because I love you.”

            Whether or not you agree with this analysis, you should see the movie. It’s good filmmaking.

When our best is not enough

In 1947, after spearheading the defeat of fascism in Europe and, among other things, preserving the system of popular elections, British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill famously said in the House of Commons: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

That observation comes to mind with the recent change of heart by U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican. Once an opponent of same-sex marriage, he now supports it. His decision will no doubt contribute to the eventual law of the land.

But it was a decision based not on policy or legal or legislative considerations. It was determined by self-interest – his 21-year-old son, Will, told his parents he way gay.

According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Portman said his son, a junior at Yale University, told he and his wife, Jane, that his sexual orientation "was not a choice, it was who he is and that he had been that way since he could remember."

The newspaper quoted the senator: "It allowed me to think of this issue from a new perspective, and that's of a dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister would have – to have a relationship like Jane and I have had for over 26 years.”

Portman, who as a U.S. House member backed the 1996 federal “Defense of Marriage Act” – a law now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court and intended to block same-sex marriage – said he has no plans to lead the charge in either reversing Ohio’s 2004 ban on same-sex marriage or pushing for a federal same-sex marriage law.

Yet, he’s seeing the issue in a new light because the issue hit heart and home.

Here is democracy at its worst, rife with self-interest and provincial views, which conspire to block meaningful, often needed, laws that benefit society at large.

Decisions are too often based on how an issue affects a particular legislator or elected official personally, not whether it serves the common good. Same-sex marriage is another step into including – instead of excluding – a group into American society.

A nation that is inclusive, instead of exclusive, is a nation that is stronger morally, socially and economically – the pillars of a just and a secure society.

According to the website, Freedom to Marry.org, 11states (Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington) and the District of Columbia have so far legalized same-sex marriage.

Portman told the Plain Dealer in March that among the reasons he chose now – the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments later that month – to announce his change of view was “getting comfortable with my position and wanting to do this before the politics of these court decisions make it more difficult to have an honest discussion.”

Portman came about his change-of-mind in a decent, human way – the love of his child. But shouldn’t there be more of an intellectual process from a legislator whose vote affects not just his Ohio constituents but the nation?

Fairness and equal rights regardless of sexual orientation as well as race, creed and color is central to our constitutional principles and American spirit. Shouldn’t all legislators, no matter what the issue, decide to vote on what’s best for the nation at large rather than play to the ignorance of the few?
As Churchill also said, “It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required.”