And What Authors Would You Choose?

I recently answered a Quora question, "Which writers have influenced or inspired you to write?" and three names popped up immediately. 

Three writers influenced my desire to write: Charles Brackett, John Steinbeck, and Antoine de St. Exupery.

Charles Brackett was my grandfather (mother’s father), and he was a novelist, a short-story author, a critic at the New Yorker, and a successful (4 Oscars) screenwriter and movie producer. Growing up around him, watching him write, reading his work, and seeing the final products in print or on the movie screen taught me a lot about the organization a writer has to have in order to move a plot forward and create believable characters and scenes.

My grandfather’s writing routine was consistent and pretty much non-negotiable when it came to distractions; you didn’t bother him when he was writing, and he stuck with a specific routine for years. He was very inquisitive, analytical, and self-critiquing to the point of knowing when it was time to start over again. He wrote diary entries every day from the late 1920s until ill-health forced him to stop in the mid-1960s. I published a book about his diaries, It's the Pictures That Got Small": Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age.

He was good friends with many of the writers and humorists of the early- to mid-20th century, including Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Huxley, Dorothy Parker, and others, many of whom I met as a boy, and whose many kindnesses and support remain with me.

The next influential writer on my short list is John Steinbeck. It would be impossible here to detail all Steinbeck meant, and means, to me as a powerful motivating factor in my own career as a writer, reporter, speechwriter, and ghost writer. I had the pleasure of meeting Steinbeck in the early 1960s when I was old enough to know who he was and had read a few of his books (or, when I was younger, had them read to me). He was working on Travels with Charley: In Search of America, and he stopped by my grandfather’s house in Hollywood to say hello to his old friend. I was visiting my grandfather at the time, and Mr. Steinbeck was incredibly polite and treated me not like a 12-year-old boy, but as a reader of books.

Steinbeck has a way of telling stories that resonate deep in my heart and brain. His pacing, phrasing, sparse use of adjectives and adverbs, his powerful use of verbs and interesting nouns, and his ability to set a scene and tell a short story within a long story just knock me out every time. Go find Cannery Row, then turn to Chapter VI, TheTide Pool, and read this passage:

“Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a grey mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat, while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing colour of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tip of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. 

On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.”

I mean, really? Can you do that? I sure as hell can’t, and I’ve been writing for 50 years! 

Someone on Quora also asked the question, “What is the greatest monologue from any book or movie?” I replied:

"My favorite monologue is drawn from the dialogue between Tom Joad and his mother (Ma) in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath:

Tom: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled. 

Ma: Oh, Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casey.

 Tom: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’d get me for one thing if not for another. Until then…

Ma: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.
Tom: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.

Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…

Ma: Then what, Tom?

Tom: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. 

Ma: I don’t understand it, Tom.

Tom: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.

Again, this is writing at its finest, writing that makes a statement, writing that influences and serves as a beacon for social change. This is Steinbeck.

Finally, I name Antoine de St. Exupery as the third writer in my trio of favorite authors, and it’s not because of The Little Prince, though it’s impossible to speak of St. Exupery without a reverent bow to this line from that little book:

“Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

What is important to know about St. Ex, is that he saw the world from above, as an aviator in the early days of aviation—from World War I to World War II—when he was a military pilot and a mail pilot, flying across hostile and inhospitable terrain from South America to the Sahara Desert to the battlefields of France and Germany. But he didn’t just “see” from above, he described in exquisite detail every sensation of flight (and I know, because, like my father and mother were, I am a pilot, and I grew up in that world).

St. Exupery’s writing is lofty, lyrical, heartbreakingly beautiful, sometimes ruthless, oftentimes deeply introspective, always passionate. Whether you read Wind, Sand, And Stars, or Night Flight, or Flight to Arras, you will be caught up in the world of open-cockpit aeroplanes over frigid mountains or scalding deserts or war-ripped countryside. You will see through St. Ex’s eyes and his pen, the nature of human suffering and human exuberance. And, as with The Little Prince, you will come to look inside yourself for the answers to so many questions about the meaning of life and the purpose of sacrifice.

I began reading St. Exupery before I was ten—and my parents often read him to me before I’d learned to read, and now I own several first editions of his work, and treasure them; they are old, old friends when I need them. And, after all, isn’t that what a good book is there for?

A Quoran's Thoughts on a Rainy December Saturday

So many of my Facebook friends are unfamiliar with Quora (frankly, so many people in general are unfamiliar with Quora), a site that began as a way for people with some expertise in specific fields to answer questions from people who wanted to know more about those topics.

In the four or so years I’ve been a Quora writer (and a Top Writer in 2017 and 2018), with just short of one-million answer views (my son, Carter, a legendary Quoran, has more than 12.6-million answer views and 7,000 followers), I’ve seen the site turn into a strange souk (would that be a bizarre bazaar?) of trolling questions, questions that could easily be found on other search sites, questions about love, classroom behavior, help-me-with-my-homework, off-the-wall hypotheticals about science, wars, foods…the weirdness of the questions has increased exponentially. And yet, there are always some questions that either deserve a sincere reply, or are so silly they beg a snappy retort.

For this But What If I’m Write? column, I’d like to share a few of my replies to Quora questions related to writing and journalism. It will become abundantly clear that many of the questions come from writers new to the craft (or who want to get started), and some questioners whose native language is not English. Given that Quorans represent many languages and cultures, it’s common to see errors in translation. Usually we get the gist of what the questioner is going for.

Anyway, here is a list of the questions; you can just scroll on down through the text.

Table of Contents

If I want to make a comment within a text, should I use parentheses or dash?

How differently do various generations treat email? Should I write much differently if I know the person hiring me or doing me a favor is old or young?

In what way are you influenced by the ambience and atmosphere in whatever environment you are in?

Why have I received so many rejection letters as a budding author? My writing is worthy.

Why should one take courses that require you to be present in a class, while he/she can learn the materials by reading books?

How do you write a sound within a sentence? Do I capitalize like "Crack!" or leave it lowercase? Do all sounds require punctuation after, regardless of place in the sentence?

Is this sentence correct, ‘you are finished with the test’?

What is the greatest monologue from any book or movie?

How can I grow my writing career?

How do I avoid using “I” a lot at the start of my sentences when writing a novel?

How do I avoid starting over 15 times when starting a novel?

What ways has journalism been challenged by culture?

Time Magazine has named “the guardians,” journalists - many of whom have lost their lives - as the Person of the Year. What do you think about that?

How did you become a published freelance writer? What suggestions and/or advice do you have for someone who wants to be successful in this field?

Answers:

If I want to make a comment within a text, should I use parentheses or dash?

You actually have four options: parentheses, dash, i.e., and e.g. Putting the last two aside for a moment, whether you use a parenthesis or a dash depends on the context of the sentence and/or the level of clarity you need to apply to the sentence.

Here’s an example of both in one sentence: “When I first stepped into the cockpit of the P-38 (ducking my head to avoid the lower edge of the upward-opening window), the first thing I noticed was the control wheel—the Lightning was the only American fighter in World War II to use a control wheel instead of a controls stick—and the well-worn steel seat where my father once sat.”

A parenthesis (like this one) can be useful as an aside or a point of clarity when you want something more than a comma, or when a comma might not set the explanatory phrase apart enough.

Using a dash—what we call an em-dash because it’s the width of the letter m as opposed to an en-dash, which, duh, is the width of the letter n—is one of the most flexible pieces of punctuation. If applied sparingly, the dash can take the place of a comma, a semi-colon, a parenthesis, or even a full-stop period. You can get a whole lot of explanation in between two dashes and still not hurt the overall meaning of the main sentence.

I mention e.g., and i.e., only because, technically, they are reserved for comments that show either a specific example (e.g.), or a general similarity that would be a “such as” statement (i.e.).

How differently do various generations treat email? Should I write much differently if I know the person hiring me or doing me a favor is old or young?

Choose One (but note the italics):

I’m young. The time I have left is unlimited (in my mind). Every moment I spend reading your email is a moment taken away from all the fun I’m going to have. Please keep your emails to the point, clear in meaning, brief in length.

Or:

I’m middle aged. The time I have available to read your email is restricted by children needing my attention, a house that needs maintenance, a partner I want to spend time with, recipes I want to try, and a job that pushes every one of my buttons and makes me want to hole up in a box canyon with a good book or great music. Please keep your emails to the point, clear in meaning, brief in length.

Or:

I’m old. The time I have left is relatively short. Every moment I spend reading your email is a moment closer to the grave. Is this how you want me to occupy what might be my last few minutes? Please keep your emails to the point, clear in meaning, brief in length.

In what way are you influenced by the ambiance and atmosphere in whatever environment you are in?

If one subscribes to the categorizations of the Myers-Briggs form, I am an INTJ, summarized as:

INTJs, as introverts, are quiet, reserved, and comfortable being alone. They are usually self-sufficient and would rather work alone than in a group. Socializing drains an introvert’s energy, causing them to need to recharge. INTJs are interested in ideas and theories. When observing the world they are always questioning why things happen the way they do. They excel at developing plans and strategies, and don’t like uncertainty.

Oddly enough, despite Myers-Briggs, this is an apt description of my general outlook and operational motif, and has been for at least 50 of my 70 years. The ambiance and environment of any situation I approach will cause me to pause, examine, analyze, and then, if necessary, act in a long-term way. I don’t do short-term strategies very well, much preferring the much longer, or higher (30,000′) point of view.

Why have I received so many rejection letters as a budding author? My writing is worthy.

Please don’t take this the wrong way—no insult intended—but it’s quite likely that your belief that your writing is “worthy” may be getting in the way of your success. I’ve been a professional writer for more than five decades. I’ve written books, thousands of speeches for high-level U.S. government officials and Fortune 500 CEOs, hundreds, if not thousands of editorial columns and blogs, and I count among my professional colleagues men and women with far greater output than mine.

All of those colleagues, and I, never described our work as “worthy” before we had any publishing experience. At best, most of us would have used words like “struggling,” “difficult,” “frustrating,” “not-yet-good-enough,” “barely there,” “horrible,” “terrible,” and even, “crap,” as we worked our way toward some measure of publishing success. We worked hard on everything we wrote, tossed a lot of it in the trash bin, ripped up hundreds of drafts, edited, edited, and edited some more—and then still thought we were a long way from becoming successful writers.

Even today I would never describe my work—or myself—as “worthy.” That is a puffed up word that means nothing in literary circles or in the editorial world; its only purpose as a word in your context is to elicit sympathy, and it fools you into thinking something about yourself is true when, in fact, it is not. Again, I am not insulting you; I am offering a hard lesson, learned over years of hard experience.

There is not enough room here to list all the great writers who received dozens, if not hundreds (I’m think of John Steinbeck) rejection letters and poor reviews of their early manuscripts. How did they overcome what you are facing? They kept writing, editing, writing some more, editing some more. 

Some hired or at least turned to trusted editors; some went back to school to learn more about the craft; some went through incredibly difficult personal and financial times on their way to their first book or article acceptance. I had mentors who helped guide me along my writing path; they were editors, other writers, publishers, and well-read friends and teachers who believed in telling me the hard truth about my work without pushing me off my path—in fact, by being tough on me, they forced me to keep to my chosen road. If you want to use the word “worthy,” then those men and women who guided me and encouraged me and stuck with me are worthy of my everlasting praise.

You describe yourself as a budding author. Fine. If you are to fully blossom from the budding stage, then reach out to experts, teachers, mentors, editors, honest critics who can help you past this difficult time. Accept the fact that no matter how much help you get, though, you will still receive rejection notices; they are, to strain your metaphor, part of the fertilizer that all budding authors need.

Why should one take courses that require you to be present in a class, while he/she can learn the materials by reading books?

It is one thing to “read” a book to gain knowledge about a given topic. It is another thing to participate in a class discussion, or listen to an expert (a professor), to understand the context of the book’s contents.

Reading is all well and good, and it serves to support rote learning—seeing something over and over until it sinks in—but many books underpinning a classic and formal education are meant to be analyzed with the help of a teacher familiar with the book’s background, author, and place in history or technical field.

If I were your English Literature professor, I could assign you, say, “The Grapes of Wrath” (to choose a favorite), and let you just read it at home and quiz you on it when you were done. Or, I could assign “The Grapes of Wrath” and, over the course of a couple of lectures, discuss and debate the society and politics of the early 20th century during the Dust Bowl, and wrap in all sorts of connective socio-political conditions that inspired John Steinbeck to write the book in the first place.

Now, you tell me: do you really believe you could glean more salient information about the foundation for “The Grapes of Wrath” (no Googling allowed, by the way) by reading it alone at home or in the dorm, than you could if you had the benefit of a robust discussion in class? Not a chance.

Let’s look at a slightly more modern and incredibly popular book, “To Kill A Mockingbird.” You could read it at home and probably really enjoy it as freestanding book—the language is beautiful, the scene is carefully set, the characters quite real, the society of the time portrayed perfectly. And you would enjoy it.

But, if you were in my class, with “Mockingbird” as the centerpiece of a lecture open to discussion and debate, you would learn more about the conditions in the South at the time, about the meanings behind Atticus’s decisions, about the unfairness and inevitability of the outcome. You might better understand the thoughts that run through a child’s head and how adult examples can shape his or her worldviews for years.

I could go on and on here, but my point is, when it comes to education—not just reading for fun—having a professor or teacher who can help you drill down into the deeper meanings of a book—any book, be it science, history, literature, business—can make all the difference in what you take away from that experience. Education—the kind I think you are referring to—is rarely a solo journey; you can learn a lot alone, but you learn so much more, and put yourself in the experience, when you are in class.

How do you write a sound within a sentence? Do I capitalize like "Crack!" or leave it lowercase? Do all sounds require punctuation after, regardless of place in the sentence?

Let’s begin with one of the most famous uses of non-capitalized sound in all of writing, this first stanza of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells”:

“Hear the sledges with the bells—

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle

All the heavens, seem to twinkle

With a crystalline delight;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells—

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.”

It’s pretty hard to beat the onomatopoeic “tintinnabulation” as a written sound. But then, you asked about a sound like “crack” or “Crack,” not something quite so mellifluous as the jingling and tinkling of bells. For the most part, context will inform the use of upper or lower case and additional punctuation. It’s a common sense thing, really. 

You can put a sound anywhere in a sentence and treat it as you would either a noun, verb, or a quote (the crack of thunder was heard deep in the bunker; the thunder cracked across the valley; The thunder filled the room with a mighty “Crack!”). You can see by the last example that when you choose to use the sound as a primary quote (after all, a quote is a noise) you capitalize it. If the word “crack” was used as part of a quote, it would normally be lower-cased (“I tell you, I heard that thunder crack right on top of the house…I mean, it was a loud crack! that shook the painting right off the wall!” The exclamation mark after the second crack is just a device to show how excited the speaker was about the thunder’s sound. The writer could have capitalized it, too, but that might have been a little too much drama in the sentence.

Here are a few more off the top of my head examples:

“I was looking out the window, through the driving rain, when the sky lit up in electric blue-white, accompanied a nano-second later by a tremendous “Crack!” followed in a few jazzed heartbeats by echoing thuds, rumbles, and reverberating, distant, booms.”

Or: “I’d barely had time to take in the brilliant blue-white blaze of the lightning when the crack of thunder jarred the house and shook the painting from the wall.”

There are dramatic uses of punctuation and capitalization, and there are times when just the name of the sound is sufficient:

“He pulled the howitzer’s lanyard, and, with a deafening wham, the round was sent on its way to the distant target.”

Which could also be written, “He pulled the howitzer’s lanyard. With a deafening “Wham!” the round was sent on its way to the distant target.”

Or, it could be written like this: “The deafening wham of the round leaving the barrel of the howitzer got the soldier’s full attention.”

Maybe even thus: “The soldier pulled the lanyard. Wham. The round left the howitzer and arced to the target two miles away. At the same time, the other four cannon sounded off: Wham, wham, wham, wham.”

Now, there are totally made-up sounds like hmmmmmmm, and bzzzzzzzz and glump that you can use any way you want. For instance:

“He walked into the galactic bar and heard the monotonous hmmmmmmmmmm of the Quintellian trio. ‘Now there’s a catchy tune’, he thought.” The cute (if three eyes and a tail define cute) hostess led him to a corner table, and he selected a drink from the duplo-menu. With a soft bzzzzzzz, a nice dry Martini slid out from the wall. He’d not gotten the glass to his lips when Decladeathman dropped down next to him with a heavy glump.”

Or, if more Earthbound stories with sounds are to your liking, you can try something like this:

“The two ’56 Chevys, lined up for the last race of the day, were being totally tached up by their teen drivers. The yellow handkerchief dropped. As the RPMs jumped past their redlines, the cars leapt off the line, tires screaming, tailpipes crackling, the crowd roaring! At the halfway mark, the townie’s Chevy passed the onlookers in a blur, a Dopplered whine of crimson and white. But the farmer’s blue Bel-Air was right there with him, and with a tremendous dynamite-jolted “wham” of acceleration, the country boy took the lead at the three-quarter mark.

Up ahead, waiting at the finish line, a county sheriff’s black and white cruiser waited, the clicks and hiss of the lawman’s radio the only sound until the Chevy drivers hit their brakes, and then the squeal of tires, the grinding of downshifting gears and the agonizing hemorrhaging of popping pistons, tearing rings, and clattering valve lifters filled the night air.”

As the two cars slid to a halt just feet from the deputy, the spitting and clicking of overheated engines died away. The deputy made a gun with his fingers and pointed at the boys. “Bang,” he mouthed. The handcuffs made a very satisfying snick-snick as they closed over the wrists of the racers.”

Is this sentence correct, ‘you are finished with the test’?

It could be, if in this context:

I put my pencil down and closed the composition book. There was still time on the clock, but I’d done all I could and saw no point in dragging it out with needless writing. The proctor, who had been watching me, came over to my desk. He stared at the closed comp book, and then, in a whisper, spoke to me. “You are finished with the test?”

“Yes,” I replied. “May I go now?” I handed him the composition book and walked out of the classroom.

What is the greatest monologue from any book or movie?

My favorite monologue is drawn from the dialogue between Tom Joad and his mother (Ma) in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath:

Tom: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled…

Ma: Oh, Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casey.

Tom: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’d get me for one thing if not for another. Until then…

Ma: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.

Tom: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.

Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…

Ma: Then what, Tom?

Tom: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.

Ma: I don’t understand it, Tom.

Tom: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.

How can I grow my writing career?

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, and it’s not with humor I reply, but in order to grow your writing career, you must write…every day. That’s it. Writing, if done right, is hard work, requiring what some of us refer to as “butt glue,” which is really just commitment in a funny phrase.

There are many days—the bright, sunny ones, filled with outdoor laughter that filters into my writing room—that call to me to get up from my chair and go have fun. Were I not a serious writer—or, at least were I not serious about my writing—I would get up conscience-free and answer the beckoning calls of friends and pets and cameras and consume, gladly, the whole of nature dancing past my house.

But that is not how the hard work of writing for a living, or writing to build a writing career proceeds. There is a very straightforward formula for becoming a writer whose career is writing (as opposed to the vast bulk of writers who strive either lamely, modestly, or mightily to break the bonds of other careers to become a writer whose career is writing). That formula, simply stated, is: writing x words daily = the possibility of life as a writer. The greater the x, the greater the possibility. My x = 5,000 words. And that’s a minimum.

If you want to hedge your bet, and add to the potential of becoming a writer with a writing career, you should (not must, but if I had my way the word would be “must”) read as many different genres and eras and authors as you can. Read, read, read. You will learn so much from the great works of the past 2,000 years, and you will, at the same time, expand your world view, and, thereby, your willingness to consider so many possible plots, characters, scenes, loves, victories, heartbreaks, defeats, and the movements of humanity across the face of the Earth. That’s what reading does.

If you apply butt glue, and then couple the writing formula with a hefty dose of reading, you may stand a good chance of growing your writing career. Good luck.

How do I avoid using “I” a lot at the start of my sentences when writing a novel?

Write in the third person. Use “I” and “he/she said” for direct quotes. Or, you can just be more imaginative in your first-person approach, and begin sentences with constructions like:

On the fifteenth of February, I met a man in the subway station. He was a pushy sort, wanting to know all about me right from the get-go. Not being inclined to encourage him, I decided to be blunt. “Sir,” I said, “you are bothering me, and if you don’t leave right now, I will call the police.” He gave me a look, and I stood my ground. “You can leave now, sir, or I will make good on my word to have you arrested.” He ambled off into the depths of the station, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

How do I avoid starting over 15 times when starting a novel?

Start over again; that way you will have started over 16 times.

What ways has journalism been challenged by culture?

There probably is a very long answer to this—I’d even think about crafting one after a lot of research—but there is also a relatively short reply that seems intuitive to me:

America’s cultural landscape, or fabric, is in constant flux, with new arrivals bringing new languages, habits, norms, mores, expectations, educational outcomes, and sense-of-community all serving as key elements for any journalist to consider when reporting on, or offering opinions about, the state of the nation at any moment in time.

Although the U.S. has been a melting pot of cultures throughout its history, newspapers and other journals were, until the post-Depression, pre-World War II era, generally written for a specific audience, and that audience was predominantly white, male, generally Christian or Jewish, more-or-less educated (at least literate), urban or urban-connected, and usually income-comfortable or at least income-earning. Some very fine reporters of the late 19th and early 20 century did cover a broader front than that, and several were responsible for exposing the financial excesses and illegal corporate dealings of the king-makers and robber barons. But that kind of coverage was not so much cultural in the large social/immigrant sense as it was cultural in the economic divide and inequality sense. Government scandals (think Teapot Dome) were also fodder for many journalists, not just in yellow journalism, but in the mainstream media of the time.

It was sufficient for the major daily papers and the wide array of local dailies and small-town and rural weeklies to publish stories about and for that audience. Reporters worked on stories that directly affected that demographic—offering coverage of sports, finance, government, world news, farm and industrial markets, and entertainment. Ethnic populations—Irish, Italian, German, Polish, etc.—were reported on as well, but not as robustly as the newsstand and subscriber base of white, Anglo-Saxon readership. Regional reporting—more specifically papers representing the Southern tier of states and states associated with Jim Crow attitudes—presented white-leaning stories while rarely, except in cases of crimes committed by blacks against whites, reporting on black Americans. That approach would undergo major shift during the black migration from the south into the North, Midwest, and West throughout the first half of the 20th century, and well into the 60s.

In my time as a journalist—beginning in the late 1960s—the influx of newcomers from central Europe, Mexico, and Southeast Asia caused communities across the nation to revamp their once-granitic social, economic, educational, and law enforcement models. Journalists who had covered Europe and the Pacific Rim during World War II, now saw those same nations’ populations taking up residence in large- and small-town America. Younger journalists, like I was at the time, had to adjust to covering town halls and school boards that now represented dozens of ethnic tributaries, each with their own languages and perceptions about the media. We had to understand the cultural sensitivities of these new populations—often non-English speaking parents and/or grandparents, with first-generation children attending local schools.

Here in Northern Virginia, the influx of Vietnamese and Korean families, along with a slowly rising population of Central American and Middle East families, presented reporters and news organizations with the challenges of fairly reporting the activities and cultural adjustments of these new arrivals. By the 1980s, when my children were in pre-school and elementary school, more than 100 languages and/or their derivatives, were in place in schools and communities across Northern Virginia. In just a few short decades, the old paradigm had shifted from covering a world of white and black English-speaking citizens, to reporting on news flowing from and about dozens of cultural enclaves and demographic resets.

In addition, the global nature of news, enhanced by the Internet, focused by wars, and demanded by competition, forced news organizations to expand their reporting resources to the far corners of the world, where cultural and political norms rarely mirrored any of the American models.

News organizations that hire and feature a culturally-representative cross-section of reporters, editors, columnists, and on-air personalities are more sensitive to the information needs of those cultures, and their biggest challenge is to maintain a deep pool of culturally-astute resources necessary to enrich the news gathering and dissemination model of the 21st century.

Time Magazine has named “the guardians,” journalists - many of whom have lost their lives - as the Person of the Year. What do you think about that?

As a journalist who has many friends in the business who have lost colleagues in war and in oppressive countries where journalists are targets of hate and harm, I think Time’s decision is one of the best “Person of the Year” calls in a long time.

The Washington Post’s motto, printed right on the front page banner, is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Without a free, unrestricted media, comprising men and women who are dedicated to reporting facts—no matter how inconvenient for some subjects—no society will ever be properly informed about the workings of government, the operations of industry, the financial systems of economic centers, etc.

Whether you believe media leans left or leans right, whether you believe reporters are unfair to your side or to the other side, whether you hold fast to your own biases and set of “truths,” one thing is certain: without a healthy, inquisitive, analytical, and unafraid community of professional journalists, you would be walking through life ignorant of the world around you, with no means of understanding the who, what, why, where, when, and how of dark-motive people who would be happy to shape your ignorant life in their own image.

Most important—and related directly to Time’s selection of The Guardians—without a press willing to report on the terrors of war, the horrors of genocide, and the deceitfulness and dangers of rogue leaders, despots, and tyrants, the world would, in my opinion, descend quickly into a Second Dark Ages from which there would be little hope of a follow-on Renaissance.

How did you become a published freelance writer? What suggestions and/or advice do you have for someone who wants to be successful in this field?

First, let’s define “published.” When I was starting out fifty years ago, published really meant appearing with a by-line in a print medium—newspaper, magazine, journal, etc. Over time, published included electronic media versions of print media. With the full-blown onset of social media, “published” took on a whole new meaning. Now, almost anything of substance that makes it onto a social media platform—opinions, articles, travel logs, quasi-journalistic coverage of local, national, or world events—can be considered published.

Second, it’s important not to conflate the more traditional concept of published—hard news, articles, opinion pieces, op-ed, etc.—that still constitute working journalism from freelance writers, with part-time blogging, occasional travel stories, long opinion posts that technically meet the definition of published. The Internet is awash in millions of pseudo or wannabe journalists who spend inordinate amount of time pushing out opinions and rephrasing viral stories to suit their followers. That is not journalism, even though it may be, quite loosely, publishing.

If you are looking to be a freelance writer in the former category, that is, if you want to sell your writing as a dedicated journalist covering news, producing long-form articles on important topics, working up well-researched opinion pieces, etc., then you probably should first set yourself apart from the vast social media key-pounders, and create a blog and/or website that is professional-looking and filled with quality work.

Third, while you are working at setting up a suitable site for your work, you must read, read, read as much of the mainstream news, features, profiles, and opinions as you can get your hands (or eyes) on. Monitor local, state, national, and world events; explore the feature possibilities in your hometown; seek out interesting people who will agree to be interviewed and write stories about them—aging veterans, working moms, the local priest, the food-truck operator, a favorite teacher, a first responder…it’s a long list of possible subjects. 

Although you’ve probably heard it many times before, write what you know, and then begin writing what you learn that you didn’t know before. Also…and keep this posted on your front door, on the fridge, on your laptop: Know Your Market!. Before you even think of submitting your work to a publication, you should have read a year’s worth of issues to see if they have ever run something like your idea. And be sure that the publication you want to write for reflects your voice, your editorial bent, your way of looking at life. Again, Know Your Market.

Try a new life experience and write about it—bungee jump, learn to sail, try your hand at pottery or painting, walk a nature trail that challenges you, drive 200 miles from home and explore old country roads and falling down barns, eat at a restaurant featuring food you’ve never had before…if you can, attend a few sessions of your state legislature, or go to town-hall meetings, and traffic court, and similar public government events. Just do stuff and then write about it and put it on your blog and let people know it’s there using all the social media tools at your disposal. I suggest strongly that you keep your camera or iPhone/Droid close by and include images with your text, and learn to incorporate photos with your stories.

Over time (I didn’t say this would happen quickly, did I?), you will amass a reasonable portfolio of work that reflects your interests, your style, and your perspective on life. When you think you have collected a nice variety of pieces—maybe 20–30 hard-news kind of stories, a few dozen feature stories about people, places, and events, and written perhaps a dozen or so serious, well-thought out opinion pieces, you can begin reaching out to the legitimate publishers of work that most closely reflects your own writing.

Fourth, reach out to the professionals. I make it a habit to reach out to my favorite local and national news and feature writers with supportive emails and snail mail—nothing fancy, but a “well-done” note to a local reporter or editorial writer does mean a lot and establishes a link between you and that other person on the end of the journalism chain. Do the same with editors of newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other online publications. Don’t make a pest of yourself, but do try to connect. When you do have a story idea, you will at least have the fringes of a contact to work with.

Fifth (and maybe most important, because it is the hardest part), learn to edit yourself. Every good writer, and I mean every good writer, must submit him- or herself to the hard work of editing their words and allowing professional editors to cut their work to the essential bone. Nothing will spoil your effort to become a working freelancer than work samples loaded with errors. Your ideas may be fabulous, your adventures breathtaking, your opinions revolutionary, but if your writing content is discontented, if your typing is tattered with typos and ungrounded grammatically, you will wander in the wilderness of the unwanted and unread.

Be patient, work hard, and good luck.

Commander-in-Chief? No. Vandal and Thief

For what it's worth (and probably not much), the thing that bothers me most about Trump's South Lawn comments on Thursday regarding his pursuit of business opportunities while running for office ("I might have lost, and then I'd have to dive back into my business), or his follow-on comment about how “cool” his strategy to stay legal while pursuing his golden idol, is that what he is saying is: “I really don't have the desire to serve the country if I have to put my money aside and focus on the needs of the nation.” To put it bluntly, he said to the everyone who competed against him and who ultimately voted for him, “I spit on you and I will tag this nation with my family’s graffiti.

I’d say he shamelessly admits to not caring for the office enough to put everything aside to run, but the word shameless is simply not in his lexicon. Standing there, with the whine of Marine One’s engines for dramatic background, Trump said, essentially, “So what? I am a businessman first, and you all knew that going in. 

So what’s the big deal?”

To me, it's not a legal issue (though it might well end up one); it's a matter of his not wanting to grasp in any way, shape, or form, the hard-work nature of public service. If you really want to serve the public, you bend your every fiber to that end without losing track of your ethical compass. It is no mystery or historically-forgotten truth that many office-holders and candidates over the years have, or have had, large bank accounts, and many come from successful business careers. It is also true that some are pretty rotten folks (I know, I've worked for one or two). But most sincere candidates know that going door-to-door, using up shoe leather, staying up with staff late into the night to get mailers out, or to man phone calls, meeting every potential constituent, or attending town halls, or driving to hell-and-back on crummy days just to shake some hands of volunteers, is what it's all about. It’s about risk, sacrifice, humility, failure, and redoubled efforts—words and concepts so far beyond Trump as to be invisible to his eyes, and immaterial to his self-interests. 

I remember being a photojournalist for People Magazine and joining the late John Warner and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, on one of his campaign tours around Virginia. Say what you will about his politics, the man was not reluctant to travel to the far corners of the state to meet with farmers, small business owners, rural families, urban leaders, servicemen and women. He was up early and worked late because he wanted the job to represent his state and the people who depend on government for services, care, and security. He could be a hard ass—I know, I saw it up close—but you knew he was focused on service.

It was the same when I worked with then-Senator Frank Murkowski and traveled with him around Alaska to attend town halls and show up at early-morning radio station interviews and see to the needs of his fellow Alaskans in the far-flung reaches of that huge state. And I saw the same intensity in him when we traveled to Vietnam in the mid-1990s to open discussions with the Vietnamese about America’s missing in action soldiers; he took the mission seriously and he didn’t grandstand.

And I have countless memories (and some nightmares) of what it was to work on advance teams for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and to help staff their inaugural teams. At every step of the process--from campaign to inauguration--you knew you were working for someone who wanted that Oval Office for all the right reasons--not for self, but for others; not for money, but for country. And when those campaigns and inaugurations were over, both those Presidents made sure to thank, in person, the hundreds of us who put our lives on hold to help them to their victories. Both Reagan and Bush 41, as well as their predecessors and successors (until Trump), viewed political office as a social compact and trust, between government and the citizens.

No, they weren’t saints, nor do I offer any blind veneration simply because they were nice to me and my colleagues. Neither Reagan nor GHW Bush fully understood—or were generationally-equipped to want to understand—the plight of HIV/AIDS sufferers and the terrible way society was treating HIV/AIDS victims. While Reagan instituted (and Bush, as VP, supported) an HIV/AIDs travel ban (upheld by President Clinton), it was Reagan who first ordered a non-discrimination policy for all federal workers with HIV/AIDS.

Were these two Presidents tone deaf to the voices of the underdogs and most vulnerable in our society? I think a case can be made that they were unable to fully associate with the daily crises so many Americans were facing at the time. I don’t think either man was attuned to the daily desperations and injustices felt by and imposed on African-Americans, gays, women, or migrants. I think both Reagan and Bush glossed over many racial and in-the-weeds economic and health fault lines that were cracking across the country. They were more adept in the international arena, though even there, both men overreached with their State Department and Pentagon tools and sometimes did more long-term harm than good with their policies. Neither man was wholly supportive of the Department of Education (and, ironically, I was a Bush appointee working at Education). And there is no doubt that Mr. Bush’s “patrician” persona in the minds of many voters reinforced the impression that he was out of touch with the average person on the street.

All of their faults, their social blindnesses and blunders, their real or perceived disregard for the slow boil of domestic crises will be shoveled up, turned over and over, composted, and spread around democracy’s garden over the next few years. Neither man’s legacy will rest in peace for quite some time, for that is what we do to so many of our leaders. History, best read at least 50 years down the road, will have to be the ill-resting arbiter of this debate.

From my limited point of reference, as a 35-year federal employee and appointee (under both parties), I respected both Reagan and Bush-41 because they understood the overarching promise a president makes to the country—it’s right there in the Oath of Office: 

“… to faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States….”

Which brings me back to Donald Trump’s comments on Thursday and later about how he admitted—nay, boasted—that running for Presidency was never going to be a top priority if it meant relinquishing his grip on the gold ring of business success (as he wished it was). Whether you like, admire, or hate, any of the previous presidents, whether you can dredge up cringeworthy—even documented—aspects of their public or private lives and post them on mile-high banners, what you cannot do is question the aspirations of so many presidential candidates to become public servants and set aside their private aspirations during their campaigns and time in office. 

A man or woman who sets out to gain office in order to line their pockets, and is willing to lie about their motives in order to stay in the game, is a public cheat and a vandal who defaces the national trust. That would be Donald Trump writ large. He is aided and abetted by the strangest duo of “senior advisors” known to Washington: his daughter-wife Ivanka and her frighteningly dead-pan-faced husband, Jared, who has no earthly reason to be anywhere near matters of state. The rest of the in-house team is no less weird and unsuited for touching any of the levers of national conduct—and yet, there they are. When your Secretary of State and your National Security Advisor refuse to listen to a death tape of a man you helped assassinate, you’ve got yourself a couple of winners, there, eh, Don?

Trump’s comment about covering his bases in the event he might have lost to Hillary is also a huge tell--he cannot bring himself to step inside any arena of fair competition that might expose him as a loser; if he can't cover his bets with other people's money, reputations, or sweat labor, he simply won't play.

That some Americans still have no problem singing Hosannas to a lying, money-driven madman/mobster who embraces three known assassins (Muhammad bin Salman, Vladimir Putin, and Rodrigo Duterte), and who hires thugs and bullies to do his dirty work, is one of the great shames of the 2016 election, and an even greater stain on the fabric of our national conscience..

[As I write this, shortly after the WH announcement that Trump is planning on attending the state funeral for George H.W. Bush, it is my fervent hope that a deep fog and rain showers descend on the White House that morning—because we know Trump will not travel in the rain to honor the dead.]

Where All Are Dignified And Honored

Old Post Chapel, Ft. Myer

Yesterday, November 14, I was at Arlington National Cemetery attending a funeral service for U.S. Army corporal Joseph Spagnoli, 93, a World War II veteran, the father of a good friend of mine. I’ve been to funerals at Arlington before—some funerals for friends or colleagues, one funeral for my own father. Some of the funerals drew national attention and incorporated the full-honors trappings accorded veterans of high rank, lofty political office, or ultimate sacrifice on the battlefield. Most, however, were quiet affairs, like the one I attended yesterday.

Joe Spagnoli, laid to rest in one of Arlington's columbarium niches, was an Army corporal during the war. He was drafted at age 18, trained to be a radio operator, and served for three years in Burma and China as what can best be described as a lookout—a watcher tracking the movements of Japanese forces, and radioing headquarters with his observations. Unlike many soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of his time, Joe's duty was virtually solitary, isolated, far from supply lines, hot chow, and reinforcements. He received three bronze battle stars for his service.

After the war, the young veteran returned to Illinois, took on the mission of becoming an educator, received his Ph.D, and, for several decades, dedicated his life to teaching and improving schools systems in Illinois and Michigan. Like so many veterans of wars past and wars present, Joseph Spagnoli never stopped helping his fellow citizens—taking off one uniform of service to country and putting on the uniform of dedicated citizen, still in service to his community and country.

I mention the Joe Spagnoli's background—which is much fuller than I have summed up—to note that veterans interred or inurned at Arlington are drawn to service—either as draftees or volunteers—from all walks of life, from all ethnicities and skin tones, representing myriad religious beliefs (or none), from big cities, modest townships, island territories, or rolling farmlands. It is fair to say there could be no greater cross section of America’s best and beloved citizens than those who repose in eternal rest across Arlington’s sweeping hills and columbaria.

What always strikes me as emblematic of any memorial service at Arlington is the absolute “fairness” of care and dignity accorded to every man or woman laid to rest there. From the moment a family member, friend, or colleague of the veteran enters the Old Post Chapel on Ft. Myer, the soldiers, chaplains, and staff create an environment of trust and dignity—assuring one and all that the United States military is receiving one of their own into their care, and, regardless of rank or station, the veteran being honored is a coequal in grateful admiration with all of his or her peers who have been laid to rest before.

The honor guard bearing the casket or urn, clicks down the Chapel aisle with atomic-clock precision, escorting the remains of their comrade with no variation in the respect they show a corporal, a sergeant, a captain, a colonel, a general, an admiral…or a president; all are brothers and sisters in their sight. 

The chaplains are invariably warm, comforting, and genuinely interested in the man or woman over whom they will pray, about whom they will speak, and for whom they will mourn as all soldiers do for their fallen comrades. At the service I attended yesterday, the chaplain, an Army captain, was so gracious and her attention to my friend and his family, and her remarks about Joe Spagnoli, were heartfelt, as if she had known him all along.

At the end of the service, as corporal Spagnoli's cremains were escorted out to the plaza in front of the chapel, the waiting honor guard came to attention and received the urn and escorted the veteran to his final resting place with all the military bearing of a state funeral, even though our party numbered only a dozen members of family and friends.

At the columbarium, we assembled beneath a green canvas rain cover, and watched as Joe's flag was properly unfolded and held tightly over him. Fifty yards away, the firing team readied their rifles, and three volleys of seven shots each cracked into the grey overcast, the echoes of the salute intensified by the stone walls of the columbaria surrounding us. Before those echoes faded, a bugler, off to our left, played Taps.

With the same crispness of the rifle shots, the honor guard refolded the flag, each turn and tautly-pulled fold just as beautifully, carefully, executed as if the veteran beneath the Colors had been Chief of Staff of the Army. The honor guard’s senior sergeant cradled the flag and, kneeling, offered it to yet another World War II widow, his words of comfort and thanks for her ears only.

It was short and thought-filled walk to the area of the columbarium where corporal/Dr. Spagnoli would be placed in his niche—a location high enough that his tall son would have to reach up to press the urn into its stone interior. For me, the moment was all the more poignant because my father and mother rested in a similar niche in another part of the columbarium not far from the corporal.

With a final prayer, the tribute to Joseph Spagnoli--soldier, veteran, and citizen, a father, grandfather, a husband, a friend and an educator--was complete; another member of the Greatest Generation was enshrined with honor, as are all veterans who rest at Arlington.

I urge every American who can travel to Washington to visit Arlington National Cemetery. If you don’t know by now, Arlington is the final place of fairness, equality, unalloyed dignity, and unquestioned decency for remains of the nation’s fallen servicemen and women. The ceremonies may be large or small, televised or intimate, filled with pageantry or carried out quietly, but in every case, the veteran who will ultimately lie beneath the grass, or behind a marble plaque, is treated with equal respect and sureness of mission by his or her uniformed colleagues—a cadre of honor for all who served.

It is important that I add this: The Department of Veterans Affairs—separate from the Military District of Washington which oversees Arlington—proudly maintains 136 National Cemeteries across the country. Each VA cemetery is a place of great beauty and dignified and honor-filled care for millions of our fellow citizens who served in uniform. 

In the years I was a VA employee, and during my service on the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees, I had the privilege to visit many VA cemeteries, and at each one there was a loving and giving team of men and women who were no less committed to their mission than are the leadership, staff, and honor guards at Arlington.

Some National Cemeteries are absolutely breathtaking in their design and sweeping vistas; others are less expansive, and often close to major metropolitan sprawl. But in all cases, as at Arlington, honor and dignity are the bywords of those who care for our nation’s very best. Thank you, Corporal Spagnoli, for your service. 

   

We Must, And We Can, Put The Pin Back Into The Trumpian Grenade

It’s a classic war movie scene: in the heat of battle, a soldier pulls a pin from a grenade and flings it over a wall, or into an enemy bunker, and, a few seconds later, “Wham!” the grenade explodes, the audience cheers, and the good guys advance. There are also other classic war movie scenes in which some baby-faced recruit, still learning how to pull pins and throw grenades, pulls the pin, but drops the grenade, now with fuse smoking, the audience cringes, and everyone runs. “Wham!” And, there is the classic war movie scene where, having pulled the pin, the recruit freezes…grenade in hand…and the (always) gruff range safety sergeant calmly puts a pin back into the grenade, the recruit faints, the audience laughs, and there is no “Wham!” 

These scenarios are simplified, but they are familiar enough to elicit knowing nods from civilians and military veterans alike. Unlike most civilians, though, veterans and active-duty servicemen and women know that it is possible to put a pin back in a grenade only if the safety lever (or spoon or pan) has not fallen off. The lever, held in place by the pin, is the only thing between “Wham!” and “Not Wham!” once the pin has been pulled. “Once the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not your friend,” is a training mantra best remembered.

Right now, Americans are in a room with a grenade with the pin pulled, but the safety lever has yet to fall off. In the room are everyday folks who worry about health care, job security and equity, national security, international stability, immigration, human rights, civil rights, education, infrastructure, clear air and clean water, national parks, unbiased justice, and many more issues that must be addressed by a leader who can demonstrate intelligence, compassion, a sense of history, fairness, and humility. We have had such leaders in the past—one need only to read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book, Leadership in Turbulent Times, to find such ennobling traits among former presidents.

We are once again in turbulent times, but the president we have now is holding a grenade designed to rip apart our founding documents and more than 200 years of laws and social contracts protecting all of us from the chaos of tyranny.

The grenade of usurpation, division, deception, and mistrust is in Donald Trump’s hand. The safety lever, affixed to the grenade by our Founders in anticipation of a tyrannical leader, is the Constitution. The pin is common sense. Under Trump's sweaty, unsteady, palm lie the Bill of Rights and all the Amendments that hold us together, Rights and Amendments he believes he can circumvent (the Fourteenth), hype and misinterpret (the Second), or debase and discredit (the First). The rest of the Constitution, also in his grip, is slowly inching off the fuse, and once it falls away, all we embrace as a free society will fall away with it.

Two things stand between an unwelcome tension and total chaos: the pin of common sense (which was pulled by the Electoral College two years ago), and the safety lever of the Constitution. The anxiety many of us feel today in the final week before the mid-term elections stems, I think, from not being certain that the pin of common sense, which looks an awful lot like a voting ballot, will be reinserted fully into the Trumpian fragmentation grenade. What I do know for certain is that we must put that pin back in. 

With every passing day—with every passing hour of presidential tweeting and rally bombasts—Trump is releasing his grip on the safety lever. Today’s news that the president is seriously considering an Executive Order to nullify the birthright provision of the Fourteenth Amendment—even if his desire is thwarted ultimately by Congress and/or the courts—should send shivers down the spines of all citizens. He will not be satisfied until he has shredded every ethical, moral, and social norm holding the fabric or our nation together.

Finding the grenade’s pin is a relatively easy task. If you are a thoughtful, concerned, pro-active, open-minded American of voting age, you are part of that pin that was jerked crudely out of the safety lever in 2016. As for inserting the pin, when you vote (not if, but when), you will join with others to form a pin long enough to once again secure the safety lever. Keep in mind, a short pin won’t do; only a long pin, formed from the votes of tens of millions of Americans who want to take the grenade out of the president’s hand, will achieve the desired “Not Wham!” result.

We are, collectively, the pin of common sense that must be reinserted to buy us time to wrest the grenade of Democracy’s destruction from Mr. Trump’s control. Once taken from him, it must be defused and its explosive innards discarded, its exterior shell melted down, never to be reassembled. Vote next Tuesday; put the pin back in its rightful and safe place.

The Cancer of Loneliness and the Need to Vote

“But no one in a position of authority showed any interest in identifying or arresting those responsible for the assault. No one wrote down the license numbers of the Klansmen's cars and pickup trucks, and no one seemed in any hurry to call an ambulance.” 1961 

A friend of mine who has been watching the slow decline of comity, collegiality, dignity, and respect in the national dialogue, asked me this:

“For us folks who are feeling trampled and flattened by a group that has no morals, what are we supposed to do? What is the most effective way to respond other than vote? Because right now I don’t trust that system either. I know I’m being a paranoid downer, but I’ll let the process prove me wrong after Election Day, but we may be in for a huge disappointment come November. Or this all may be just fever-addled despair on my part and I’ll be fine in a few days.”

Let me start with what might seem to be a totally irrelevant story. When I was a teenager—13 or 14—I was on vacation with my family on the island of Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. We waterskied a lot; took out a Boston Whaler and fished, a lot; we enjoyed our relative isolation under the bright sunny skies…a lot. And then, it was too much. On the day before our trip was to end, I waterskied for hours, protected by no SPF lotions (they didn’t exist), but covered in Bain de Soleil, an orange sun-tan goo (or gelee, as it was called then) which was one of the most popular suntan products at the time. By mid-day, I began to feel a burning sensation on my upper body unlike anything I’d experienced, and returned to the beach house, where, it was all-too-easy to see the deep burns across my shoulders, back, face, and chest—burns so deep that the skin on my shoulders looked to be melted into the deeper tissues, and my face was swelling bright red. My back was crisped, and my upper chest had red streaks and patches.

A local doctor was called, and, with limited supplies available, he packed my shoulders with some sort of ointment and layered them in bandages. Portions of skin on my face, back, and chest had to be debrided and bandaged, carefully, but sufficiently enough to get me through the next two days of air and car travel home to Nebraska where we lived on and Air Force Base. Memory has, thankfully, filtered out the pain, but I do remember being treated for several weeks until my skin began to recover—though some scarring and traces of damaged skin remained for the next 55 years or so.

Fifteen years later, I began paying the real price for my unprotected days in the sun: basal cell carcinomas (BCCs) started appearing like bubbles on the bottom of a near-boiling pot of water. My dermatologists found more than 30 them on my chest, my back, my shoulders, and across my face. Not all at once, of course, but over time…over 40 more years, and still counting. And those that have been found so far are the kind that have to be cut out, not frozen (I’ve had enough stuff frozen off my face and back to qualify for Nitrogen-Ice King).

One reason I describe myself has having a face made for radio (and audiobooks), is due to the crisscrossing lines and scars that have been surgically etched across my sorry mug for the past four decades. The downside is that the effect is not pretty (or handsome); the upside is, nothing so far has turned bad—no melanomas or worse—and that is due in great part to the skills of the doctors who have spotted and excised the basal cell eruptions long before they had a chance to become something worse. But their vigilance and their handiwork will continue because they and I know that what happened 55 years ago calls on me to be watchful every day, and to submit to a scalpel on a regular basis.

But, what does that story have to do with my friend’s question? Everything.

Anniston, Birmingham, and the Freedom Riders, 1961

A few years before my sunburn incident, on May 4, 1961, two buses—one a Greyhound, the other a Trailways—which had started out together in Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans, became burned and beaten focal points for the kind of racism and hatred most of us thought would have faded from memory by the 21st century. On board the buses, were 13 men and women—six white, seven black, young and old—brave and scared, terrified, but determined that their Freedom Ride through the Deep South would send a message to segregationists and integrationists alike that the days of Jim Crow and the forced separation of races were not going to be tolerated and accepted as the norm. Someone had to take a stand, and the thirteen Freedom Riders were the vanguard of that movement. Their rides did not go well.

I don’t need to recount here the full details of those fateful 10 days—or even of that horrible day, May 14, 1961 (Mother’s Day), in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, when the Greyhound bus was stopped by the KKK, its passengers assaulted, and the bus burned outside Anniston, and the passengers of the Trailways bus were savagely attacked and beaten by KKK thugs in the bus depot in Birmingham where the infamous Bull Connor directed the brutality from behind his dark curtain of hatred. I urge you to read the transcript of an NPR program, Get on the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961, by Terry Gross, supported by the must-read, “Freedom Riders,” by Raymond Arsenault.

I am going to quote several passages from Arsenault’s book, but I have edited it to truncate the N-word that is fully-spelled out in the book because it is still so abhorrent to me, even as a journalist (or maybe because I’m a journalist), and to use the word here would not educate more than it would distract from the larger point I’d like to make.

Here is Arsenault’s description of the scene outside Anniston, Alabama, where the Greyhound bus had been waylaid by Klansmen, and the passengers were being taunted and threatened as the bus was being beaten and rocked—its windows shattered—on the side of the road:

“Eventually, however, two members of the mob, Roger Couch and Cecil "Goober" Lewallyn, decided that they had waited long enough. After returning to his car, which was parked a few yards behind the disabled Greyhound, Lewallyn suddenly ran toward the bus and tossed a flaming bundle of rags through a broken window. Within seconds the bundle exploded, sending dark gray smoke throughout the bus. At first, Genevieve Hughes, seated only a few feet away from the explosion, thought the bomb-thrower was just trying to scare the Freedom Riders with a smoke bomb, but as the smoke got blacker and blacker and as flames began to engulf several of the upholstered seats, she realized that she and the other passengers were in serious trouble. Crouching down in the middle of the bus, she screamed out, "Is there any air up front?" When no one answered, she began to panic. "Oh, my God, they're going to burn us up!" she yelled to the others, who were lost in a dense cloud of smoke. Making her way forward, she finally found an open window six rows from the front and thrust her head out, gasping for air. As she looked out, she saw the outstretched necks of Jimmy McDonald and Charlotte Devree, who had also found open windows. Seconds later, all three squeezed through the windows and dropped to the ground. Still choking from the smoke and fumes, they staggered across the street. Gazing back at the burning bus, they feared that the other passengers were still trapped inside, but they soon caught sight of several passengers who had escaped through the front door on the other side.

They were all lucky to be alive. Several members of the mob had pressed against the door screaming, "Burn them alive" and "Fry the goddamn n---s," and the Freedom Riders had been all but doomed until an exploding fuel tank convinced the mob that the whole bus was about to explode. As the frightened whites retreated, Cowling pried open the door, allowing the rest of the choking passengers to escape. When Hank Thomas, the first Rider to exit the front of the bus, crawled away from the doorway, a white man rushed toward him and asked, "Are you all okay?" Before Thomas could answer, the man's concerned look turned into a sneer as he struck the astonished student in the head with a baseball bat. Thomas fell to the ground and was barely conscious as the rest of the exiting Riders spilled out onto the grass.

By this time, several of the white families living in the surrounding Bynum neighborhood had formed a small crowd in front of the grocery store. Most of the onlookers remained safely in the background, but a few stepped forward to offer assistance to the Riders. One little girl, twelve-year-old Janie Miller, supplied the choking victims with water, filling and refilling a five-gallon bucket while braving the insults and taunts of Klansmen. Later ostracized and threatened for this act of kindness, she and her family found it impossible to remain in Anniston in the aftermath of the bus bombing. Even though city leaders were quick to condemn the bombing, there was little sympathy for the Riders among local whites. Indeed, while Miller was coming to the Riders' aid, some of her neighbors were urging the marauding Klansmen on.”

And here, Arsenault describes the scene at the Trailways bus station in Birmingham:

“But one of the white "hoodlums" soon answered for him: "N-----s get back. You ain't up north. You're in Alabama, and n-----s ain't nothing here." To prove his point, he suddenly lunged toward Person, punching him in the face. A second Klansman then struck Harris, who was sitting next to Person in the front section of the bus. Both black Freedom Riders adhered to Gandhian discipline and refused to fight back, but this only encouraged their attackers. Dragging the defenseless students into the aisle, the Klansmen started pummeling them with their fists and kicking them again and again. At this point Peck and Walter Bergman rushed forward from the back to object. As soon as Peck reached the front, one of the attackers turned on him, striking a blow that sent the frail, middle-aged activist reeling across two rows of seats. Within seconds Bergman, the oldest of the Freedom Riders at sixty-one, suffered a similar blow, falling to the floor with a thud. As blood spurted from their faces, both men tried to shield themselves from further attack, but the Klansmen, enraged by the white Riders' attempt to protect their "n----r" collaborators, proceeded to pound them into a bloody mass.”

“By the time Peck and company arrived, the Klansmen and their police allies were all in place, armed and ready to do what had to be done to protect the Southern way of life.”

What happened in Anniston and in Birmingham, and in all that followed—the marches, the flames, the bombs, the mobs, the deaths—in Selma, and in Montgomery, and in Memphis and in Watts, and in Detroit and in Dallas, and in Washington, D.C., and in the years to come, of late, in Charleston and Charlottesville, was forecast by many, including the New York Times columnist Harrison Salisbury in April, 1960, when he wrote about Birmingham, a city Salisbury noted “was consumed by lawlessness and racial oppression.” Salisbury continued,

“Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground, has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state's apparatus."

Again, you ask, “What has this to do with the original question?”

America suffered deep burns throughout the mid- to late-1800s and well into the 20th century. Not just the burns of the Civil War, but the fiery and divisive invective-burns of post-Lincoln politics, the white-hot brands of Reconstruction, Radical Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, the Depressions of 1873 and 1893, the industrialization of the North, the influx and oppression of immigrants, child labor, the rise of the oil and steel and railroad magnates whose wealth could not be imagined by the average American, heavy-handed unions, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and on and on.

An undercurrent to all of this must also be addressed: the poor state of education and the absence of publicly-shared enlightened thought due, in great part, to the dearth of quality schools in impoverished American communities, and the hard-wired religious beliefs that rejected science (the Scopes trial/evolution) embracing Biblical interpretation over scientific and social progress. Yes, it is true that the Land Grant Education Act of 1862 (The Morrill Act), and the Second Land Grant Education Act of 1890 (establishing Black colleges and universities), opened doors to higher education for young people across the country; but neither act had the ability to reach down to the elementary and secondary schools in rural and impoverished America to help those students achieve any kind of parity with more affluent students, and better-funded schools in the economically secure North. Almost a century would pass before an enlightened president and a cooperative Congress would promote and enact education legislation favorable to young students of color and economic stress.

Once again, to return to my opening example of the long-lasting, insidious effects of a deep burn, the longer America ignored the fundamental needs of all its children to learn on a level playing field—or, more appropriately, in equally-equipped class rooms—the longer the cancer of illiteracy and purposefully-encouraged intellectual ignorance had to do their terrible work beneath the skin of the nation, the greater the damage to the country 50-100 years hence.

A Diaspora Begins

Throughout all these periods, the anger and frustrations of blacks, poor whites, the disenfranchised, under- or un-educated and left-behind Southern, Midwestern, and Western rural and urban citizens who had few resources, fewer dreams, and no place to turn, sank ever-deeper beneath the inflamed skin of the nation.

Not all of the South’s poor accepted that fate, however, and many—a large number of black Americans—took fate into their own hands and moved out…following paths north and west seeking better (or at least, non-violent or oppressive) futures. One book in particular, Isabel Wilkerson’s, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration,” addresses the flight of black Americans out of the South between 1915 and 1970.

As this population journeyed away from its oppressive Southern base, those who remained behind found their communities, and themselves, further disassociated from the progressive movements springing up around the rest of the nation.

The four key presidents who oversaw the long span of American history from 1861 to 1968, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, each witnessed the division of national interests and tides of social and economic calamity.

For Lincoln, it was the splintering of states over slavery and economic tensions, the dissolution of national union, followed by the deaths of 600,000 men and boys. For Teddy Roosevelt, it was the overarching threat of unbridled industrialists and their trusts, business-choking unions, unprotected consumers, and threatened national lands. For FDR, it was the punishing effects of the Great Depression, the structural collapse of middle and farming class, massive unemployment, and the rise of fascism overseas. For Johnson, it was the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the crushing effects of the Vietnam War.

Each of these Chief Executives experienced the deleterious effects of economic and social disfunction, which led to political decay, riots, lawlessness, mob rule, and, in Lincoln’s case, Civil War. And it is quite true that all four of these presidents applied strong, sometimes overpowering hands, to resolve the crises they faced. Lincoln did not back away from war; Teddy Roosevelt did not back away from trust-busting and union-busting, FDR went so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to pack the Supreme Court, and Lyndon Johnson had to push back against his own party and find compromise with the Republicans in order to advance his Great Society agenda.

Pointing to these men and their times—filled with fire and fury, greed and corruption—it is reasonable to conclude that what we are experiencing today under Trump is tame by comparison. Even as great a presidential historian as Doris Kearns Goodwin noted in a recent CNN interview that the times of the past were filled with crises unlike anything we are experiencing today, and that countervailing forces of time and experience will bring the 21st century ship of state back on course.

Goodwin's “Leadership: In Turbulent Times,” is a study of Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. If you cannot agree on the stature and impact of the first three, you might as well stop reading here, and go back into your cave of irrelevance; if you are in doubt about LBJ's legacy, you can be forgiven, but a close read of Goodwin's book may well shift your opinion (I've read Caro's books on LBJ as well, and I recommend them also).

In typical Goodwin style (think "Team of Rivals"), she shares with us the very souls, aspirations, heartbreaks, and frustrations of the four presidents who did more to advance America's higher mission despite deep personal troubles and massive social, economic, and political crises. Here is a passage from the book's preface:

"These four men form a family tree, a lineage of leadership that spans the entirety of our country's history. It is my hope that these stories of leadership in times of fracture and fear will prove instructive and reassuring. These men set a standard and a bar for all of us. Just as they learned from one another, so we can learn from them. And from them gain a better perspective on the discord of our times. For leadership does not exist in a void. Leadership is a two-way street. 'I have only been an instrument,' Lincoln insisted, with both accuracy and modesty, 'the antislavery people of the country and the army have done it all.' The progressive movement helped pave the way for Theodore Roosevelt's 'Square Deal,' much as the civil rights movement provided the fuel to ignite the righteous and pragmatic activism that enabled the Great Society. and no one communicated with people and heard their voices more clearly than Franklin Roosevelt. He absorbed their stories, listened carefully, and for a generation held a nonstop conversation with the people. 'With public sentiment, nothing can fail,' Abraham Lincoln said, 'without it nothing can succeed.' Such a leader is inseparably linked to the people. Such leadership is a mirror in which the people see their collective reflection."

I have no intellectual standing to debate Ms. Goodwin’s assessment that we will weather today’s storms and come out on the other side intact despite our current miseries, but neither do I feel comforted by her outlook because I hear the echoes of the same national discord Lincoln perceived, and so eloquently addressed in his remarks to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield years before he would become president. Here is Lincoln at the Lyceum, as Ms. Goodwin tells it:

“He opened his address with a warning that ‘something of ill-omen’ was developing among the people—a tendency to substitute violence, murder, and lynching for the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution. Two months earlier, the entire North had been rocked when a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois, killed the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy. In Mississippi, a group of Negroes, suspected of inciting insurrection, were hanged, as were a group of whites suspected of aiding the Negroes. If this moblike spirit continued to spread, Lincoln cautioned, the ‘good men, men who love tranquility, would become alienated from a government too weak to protect them. The country would then be vulnerable to the imposition of order from above.

“While the ambition of the hallowed framers has been ‘inseparably linked’ with building up a constitutional government allowing the people to govern themselves, he feared that in the chaos of moblike behavior, men of the likes of ‘an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon’ would likely seek distinction by boldly setting themselves ‘to the task of pulling down.’ Such men of ‘towering’ egos, in whom ambition is divorced from the people’s best interests, were not men to lead a democracy; they were despots.”

Kearns continues, “To counter the troublesome ambition of such men, Lincoln called upon his fellow Americans to renew the framers’ values and to embrace the Constitution and its laws. ‘Let reverence for the laws be breathed y every American mother’ taught in every school, preached in every pulpit. The great bulwark against a potential dictator is an informed people ‘attached to the government and laws.’ This argument takes Lincoln back to his first statement to the people of Sangamon County when he spoke of education as the cornerstone of democracy. Why is education so central? Because, as he said then, every citizen must be able to read history to ‘appreciate the value of our free institutions’.”

Unlike Lincoln and the Roosevelts (and even Lyndon Johnson and Nixon, for whom riots, bombings, campus gunfire, and social warfare dogged them in the 60s and 70s), Trump is not reacting to destructive forces outside the White House; rather, he appears to be encouraging the resurgence of slowly metastasizing destructive forces from his position within the White House—he is not addressing great national ills with the medicines of care and assurance; he is injecting selective sectors of the nation with strains of cancers we have seen and fought before.

Post-World War II

The America of the 50s and 60s saw a diaspora of white and black families moving away from traditional urban nuclear units as more children left to go to colleges, young professionals sought employment far from their hometowns, and older couples, unburdened with children, also began to relocate. The creation of the suburbs or housing tracts (the spread of Levittowns, for example) in the post-World War II era, aided by the GI Bill which offered housing assistance and higher education opportunities for millions of veterans, coupled with the development and completion of the Interstate Highway System unshackled families from the traditional dinner-table model and cast young and old, white and black, low- and middle-income earners alike out across the country. The American melting pot was getting stirred by countervailing forces—the extroverted force of society’s needs to expand horizons and seek new opportunities, was pulling against the introspective force of the human need for stability, family unity, and low personal risk.

As the ingredients of multiple cultures, racial divides, unequal educations, scattershot aspirations, and unbalanced economies began to collide, rebound, collide again, the old guard of the South, and those politicians and citizens who felt threatened by a rising new order of things, made their animus and anti-social feelings heard in often violent ways. This was exactly what Lincoln had feared, and warned about, 100 years earlier: “…in the chaos of moblike behavior, men of the likes of ‘an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon’ would likely seek distinction by boldly setting themselves ‘to the task of pulling down.”

World War II (even with, or despite, the military’s segregationist policies) and the broad economic recovery of the 1950s, provided the national conscience a sort of make-up base to cover the continuing inequities endured by black Americans, many of whom had served the country with great honor, or who, like Rosa Parks, simply wanted to ride in a different part of a bus. School desegregation through Brown v. Board of Education, was a baby step toward racial equity, fought tooth and nail by Arkansas governor Oval Faubus. But, in a nation where even middle-class white women were restrained from job equality, young women were objectified in men’s magazines, and women generally were disenfranchised to a great degree, a Supreme Court ruling in favor of blacks seeking parity for their children in public education was little more than a lurch in the right direction. No court ruling, no executive fiat by a Republican or Democratic president or legislation fought for by leading members of Congress regardless of party affiliation, was ever going to assuage the hurt, anger, and distrust bubbling beneath America’s skin.

By 1961, the South—to be fair, certain forces in the South—had had enough of laws of enforced equity and chastisements shouted from Washington and the national media. White Southerners who embraced the Klan, or who saw the Klan as a motive force capable of standing up for their pent-up hostilities, were more than happy to begin electing local, state, and national officials who would revive and defend the buried honor of a failed state. And the burning began again, this time in earnest, and with real fires, bombings, hangings, and defiant State-house stances against federal orders.

The brutalities imposed on the Freedom Riders by the KKK (and supported actively or tacitly by the local populace and police) were the surface symptoms of the cancers beginning to bubble up beneath the skin of our Republic. Men like Alabama’s George Wallace, South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, and neo-Nazis like George Lincoln Rockwell, either did little or nothing to quench the fires of fear and hatred, or they found ways to stoke the flames. For men like these, fear and division are powerful tools of control, and the more fear and hate they could instill in their constituencies, and the more division they could leverage, the more they promoted themselves as champions of a fearful and divided nation, and the more powerful they grew.

Clearly, some surgery was required to excise the cancers that were surfacing on the nation’s once strong shoulders and remove the unsightly blemishes popping up on the face of America.

Popular music and folk music songwriters, singers, and groups—whose works included “The Times They Are a’ Changing,” “Blowing in the Wind,” “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Find the Cost of Freedom,” “Ohio,” “Fortunate Son,”—and traditional black protest, gospel, and spiritual music like “We Shall Overcome,” “We Shall Not be Moved,” “Oh Freedom,” “Alabama,” “A Change is Gonna Come,” “Mississippi Goddam,” and “Mister Backlash,” dovetailed in a tight fit to raise the social conscience of America writ large. Everywhere there was a transistor radio during the 60s and 70s, the incessant political drone was drowned out by angry, sad, thoughtful, forceful, plaintive anthems dedicated to peace, excoriating the military-industrial complex, or shouting warnings along the path to civil rights.

It’s not as if no one was trying to shake America out of its ignorance—many fine writers and singers were doing their best, but, still too many Americans were not interested in listening. The war was noisy, politics were noisy, riots were noisy, assassinations were noisy. When you’re trying to make a point, shouting above the fray and gunfire is not always effective; you become noise as well.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that the only Americans not listening to the warnings were Southern whites; political leaders of both parties, representing a cross-section of national political behavior and social mores, were often too intent on preserving their own gains and interests and power. From Lyndon Johnson to Barry Goldwater to Curtis LeMay to Richard Nixon to Mayor John Daly of Chicago, the protest movements against the Vietnam War and for Civil Rights were derided and dismissed, and the leaders of the movements became focal points of counter-rage from the highest offices in the land.

Would it be surprising at all to suggest that the animosity leveled from the top of greasy leadership pole against “hippies,” and “long-hairs,” would find a home deep in the poorest corners of the nation? Animosity from families—black and white—whose sons could not avoid the Vietnam War draft; animosity from rural communities locked in a miserable, grinding-down cycle of poor education outcomes coupled with increasing pressures to readjust their social and racial thinking?

It should come as no surprise that the children of those communities would, 40 years later, still see themselves as left by the side of the road, orphaned in the only world they had ever known, while the sleek bus of a new, multi-colored, multi-cultural, many-dimensional America pulled away. To those standing in the settling exhaust fumes of that bus, it must have seemed as if abandonment, ridicule, and stereotyping was the only life they would know, and their anger and frustration sought someone, anyone, who would prove them wrong. They could not know that at the precise moment in their lives, a young man growing up at the elbow of a New York real estate king was going to answer their prayers in the 21st century. A new cancer was on the ascendancy. It—or he—would take some time to discolor the skin of a nascent era of American comity.

For a decade or so, legislation pushed to the floors of the House and Senate by strong Civil Rights advocates, compromise-seeking leaders, and a young, motivated, vocal, and active university population, began to press even harder to dig out the deeper cancers of racism, poverty, poor education, and social disunity across the nation. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, along with the Voting Rights Act, represented, on the surface, fundamental changes for the futures of black Americans. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and its partner, the Higher Education Act, opened new doors for students of all colors, ages, and family incomes. Title IX, passed in 1972, was a capstone civil rights legislation for women in athletics. There were no perfect fixes to the ills facing black Americans, other minorities, women, and persons with disabilities, but for a brief shining moment—and fifteen or so years is brief in the life of a nation—there was a spark of hope.

It seemed, for a time, that national leadership was desirous and capable of a deep cleansing of old hatreds, fears, and social discord that polarized the nation: North against South, liberal against conservative, men against women, black against white.

Those who believed firmly that we were on a new and more equitable course—and I was one of them—were as wrong as wrong could be. The bus we thought was taking us toward a better America, was, in fact, making a slow right turn toward the past, and heading us back down the road to Anniston, Birmingham, Montgomery…and, on that sad route, passing through Charleston and Charlottesville.

Shifting Paradigms

Let me pause for a moment here to throw out a purely personal, barely-educated proposition about the effects of the “next big things” in American life on the cusp of the 1980s: the personal computer, the Internet, and their demon offspring, the cellphone. Growing up without the internet, mobile phones, and social media meant that if you wanted to communicate an idea, or share family news, or debate the issues of the day with your friends, you either had to write letters or speak directly to them (even a phone call on a land line meant making an effort to dial a number, and stay in one place during the call).

In the old model, there had to be some degree of personal interaction, requiring reaching out, connecting, communicating, and exchanging information, person to person—either eye-to-eye, or voice-to-voice. The Internet, social media, and the cellphone (a blend of both), removed the direct human connection from the conversation equation, allowing for varying degrees of anonymity which decreases risk of face-to-face encounters, where body language and observed emotions can be crucial to human understanding.

In the new model, such personal connectedness, once firmly-rooted in our DNA, is being callously uprooted by new technologies and new social habits. The new habits eschew handshakes, hugs, and real, physically-present conversations. Instead, the new norm promote sensory-depriving keyboard-connected friending and liking and emojiing (as well as unfriending, hating, and crude imaging). By embracing, encouraging, and normalizing such anti-personal behavior we are opening doors to the depths of loneliness for millions of our fellow citizens.

In his Sunday, October 14 column in the Washington Post, George Will writes about “Our Epidemic of Loneliness,” and quotes Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse’s new book, “Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal,” the subject of which, Will notes, is

“the evaporation of social capital”—the satisfactions of work and community. This reflects a perverse phenomenon: What has come to count as connectedness is displacing the real thing. And Matters might quickly become dramatically worse.”

Will continues, with quotes from Sasse:

“Loneliness in ‘epidemic proportions’ is producing a ‘loneliness literature’ of sociological and medical findings about the effects of loneliness on individuals’ brains and bodies, and on communities. Sasse says, ‘there is a growing consensus’ that loneliness—not obesity, cancer, or heart disease—is the nation’s ‘number one health care crisis.’ ‘Persistent loneliness’ reduces average longevity more than twice as much as does heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity, which often is a consequence of loneliness. Research demonstrates that loneliness is as physically dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and contributes to cognitive decline, including more rapid advance of Alzheimer’s disease. Sasse says, ‘We’re literally dying of despair,’ of the ‘failure to fill the hole millions of Americans feel in their lives’.”

Just as we are seeing the decline, if not the demise, of real-time-I-am-here-for-you relationships through the rise of hand-held links to small-screen duck faces, we are also in danger of losing our capacity to obtain and understand the facts of the world around us. Absent the electronic ease with which we now access the full spectrum of news—real news, fake news, not-even-fake-news—the average American had, in the mid-20th century, three news media options: newspapers, radio, and network television. Let’s begin with newspapers.

Power of the Print Press
Newspapers—the nation’s oldest form of public communication going back to our British heritage—came in three flavors at the beginning of the 20th century: dailies, weeklies, and tabloids. Most medium to very-large cities had at least two newspapers (morning and evening, with multiple editions of each); many smaller towns and some rural communities had a weekly paper run by a publisher well-known in the community. The big-city dailies, among them the very big national news dailies, offered well-known political points of view which were countered by competing papers. Their hard news staffs were most often seasoned reporters who adhered to the “who-what-why-where-when-how” method of news gathering. The editorial side of the big papers, and even the weeklies, was the space reserved for political opinions and side-taking, along with op-eds and columns expressing similar or countering voices.

For the most part—and there are always big-name exceptions—the major dailies could be relied on for solid reporting with very little editorial bias in hard-news stories. The New York Times was reliable enough to be consider the national newspaper of record. That paradigm shifted dramatically in 1982 with the arrival of USA Today, an upstart, in-your-face, high-graphics-content, nationally-distributed summary newspaper designed for people on the go—a nation of travelers and bi-coastal commuters. Every evening, the editors of USA Today collected the top news stories of the day from all 50 states, along with sports scores and money markets, and stacked them, face out, the next morning in a new kind of newspaper stand—one that looked suspiciously like a television screen or a computer screen. USA Today’s centrist editorial outlook was non-threatening, and its appeal soared. In full disclosure, I must say I was a USA Today columnist from the mid- to late-1980s, and while the paper has moved away from the format I knew when I was writing for it, its appeal—it is the most widely distributed paper in America—cannot be denied.

For well over 100 years, small-town America was a weekly newspaper market—farm news, local police matters, state and county politics, social comings and goings, births, deaths, and, when space allowed, a few cut-and-pasted stories from the national newspapers. In her doctoral dissertation at the University of Alabama, “A History Of Weekly Community Newspapers In The United States: 1900 to 1980,” Beth H. Garfrerick summarized the broad picture of community newspapers.

“For much of the twentieth century, small-town weekly newspapers connected with more small towns and villages on a regular basis than did the country‘s metropolitan newspapers. For example, in large sectors of the country the nearest metropolitan newspaper was located hundreds of miles away. A decade into the twentieth century, only fifty-one percent of Americans lived in metropolitan areas. The weekly newspapers of small communities played an important role in keeping the citizenry informed on local and national news. While a growing number of rural residents subscribed to both metropolitan dailies and their community newspaper, it was the weekly community paper that contained the news relevant to those in the immediate geographic area. The introduction of radio, television, and mega-merged metropolitan dailies with ―community news inserts did not supplant the weekly community newspaper as the main source for local news.”

As Garfrerick notes, over time, the small weekly newspaper, operating on the fringes of, or beyond the market reach of metropolitan dailies, began to morph into a “community” newspaper model as metropolitan areas expanded, and suburbs and exurbs spread into the once-rural newspaper geography and absorbed that reader demographic. Chains of community newspapers encircled big cities, tailored regional versions reflecting events important to a slice of each metro area’s population, while still containing news of broader metropolitan interest.

As of July, 2018, according to statistics compiled by the National Newspaper Association, there were more than 7,000 non-daily newspapers in the country compared to a little over 1,400 daily newspapers. Total non-daily readership is approximately 150 million (includes sharing), with a total circulation of 65.5 million individual subscribers or newsstand buyers. Perhaps of interest, about 30 percent of those readers do not have internet access at home.

The two most intriguing stats from the NNA’s report are the community paper market adults who rely on their community newspaper as their primary source of local news (51.8 percent), and the percentage of community newspaper readers who believe the accuracy of the news they read is good or excellent (71 percent). This is an important point to ponder:

Reflecting for a moment on the resurgence of racism in the mid-20th century, it is instructive to note the weekly newspaper’s role in informing the public about the rise of anti-black sentiment, and the South’s sense of isolation and/or victimization. As Beth Garfrerick points out in her dissertation,

“Weekly newspaper coverage during the post-war period also began to turn an eye to domestic concerns related to racism, particularly in the South. Hodding Carter, editor of the weekly Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, brought much attention to the issue when he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his work against racism. Some weekly editors in other parts of the country acknowledged that racism was not unique to the South and joined in the fight as well. For example, a 1946 editorial in the Bedford (Pa.) Gazette applauded members of the First Methodist Church of Monroe, Georgia, for adopting a resolution that condemned the lynching of two local black couples. The editorial referred to the sensitivity of southerners that too much finger pointing was turned their way and emphasized that racial violence occurred in the North as well. The editorial stated, ―They [southerners] will not be helped by silence.… They need assurance that they do not work alone or unnoticed ....”

The power of a community newspaper—whether a daily or a weekly—cannot be overstated when it comes to informing the public about racial issues, pro or con. Although it is easy today—30, 40, 50, 60, or even 70 years after the fact—for newspaper editors, and community leaders, to publicly regret and apologize for positions they or the predecessors took during the peak of racial violence and Jim Crow policies, in order to understand the depth of the damage done to race relations in the U.S., one must look back at the words used by local papers in support of the most heinous acts of inhumanity. This excerpt from a New York Times Opinion Page editor, Brent Staples, on May 5, 2018, reveals the collusion between racists and their local papers in the terrorizing and killing of black Americans:

The Arkansas lynch mob that burned a black tenant farmer at the stake in 1921 observed common practice when it advertised the killing in advance so spectators could mark the grisly event on their calendars. The organizers notified newspapers early in the day that they planned to kill Henry Lowery as painfully as possible, giving editors time to produce special editions that provided the time, place and gruesome particulars of the death to come.

Historians have paid scant attention to the role that the white Southern press played in the racial terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw thousands of African-Americans hanged, burned, drowned or beaten to death by white mobs. This issue surfaced in dramatic fashion recently when the nearly two-centuries-old Montgomery Advertiser printed a front-page editorial apologizing for lynching coverage that dehumanized black victims. The apology coincided with the recent opening in Montgomery, Ala., of a memorial to lynching victims, and it sets the stage for a timely discussion of a deeply dishonorable period in Southern press history.

Staples continues,

Newspapers even bragged about the roles they had played in arranging particularly spectacular lynchings. But the real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as “fiends,” “brutes,” “born criminals” or, that catchall favorite, “troublesome Negroes.” The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality — and to the death penalty — survived the lynching era and lives on to this day.

The Montgomery Advertiser was historically opposed to lynching. Nevertheless, when its current staff scrutinized the paper’s lynching-era coverage, they concluded that it had conveniently opposed lynching in the abstract while responding with indifference to its bloody, real-world consequences. The editors found that the paper too often presumed without proof that lynching victims were guilty and that, in doing so, it advanced the aims of white supremacist rule.

That description applies broadly to the Jim Crow-era South, where even newspapers that were viewed as liberal replicated the apartheid state within their pages — by separating news and birth announcements by race, by rendering law-abiding black people invisible and especially by denying African-Americans the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. This humiliating practice was meant to illustrate the impossibility of racial equality. It also let white readers know when a black person was being quoted so that the person’s statement could be ignored.

The newspaper editor Ira Harkey, who was white, incurred outrage in 1949 when he abandoned the Southern journalistic practice of automatically labeling black people by race in stories and began cautiously extending the courtesy title Mrs. in the pages of The Pascagoula Chronicle-Star “to certain carefully selected Negro women such as teachers and nurses.” Harkey was reviled — and shot at — by racists in Mississippi for championing civil rights. He wrote bitterly of his earlier years at The New Orleans Times-Picayune, where there was “a flat rule that Negroes were not to appear in photographs”; it was required that they be airbrushed out of crowd scenes.

Radio

I mentioned radio as one of the three key communications influencers of my generation…along with newspapers and television. I don’t need to get into an elaborate history of radio and race, or radio’s influence on society—those are topics for serious scholars and historians—but I do want to reflect for a few moments on radio’s reach into the mindset of Americans who, in my time (and a bit before), were predisposed to stereotype—and isolate—blacks, the poor, the middle class, and the elite. Unlike newspapers or television, which can display images to either clarify or distort an event, radio does its work without any substance other than sound to act as an ingredient in the fuel of the engines of information, disinformation, distraction, deception, and disarray.

Franklin Roosevelt was, I think, unarguably, the master of the medium, and he used it to connect with every corner of the nation—from the least fortunate among us to the mightiest—and he was able to promote and sell his visions of national reform from the comfort of his fireside—a fireside he invited Americans to share. He was also able to inspire the nation with powerful images of the Four Freedoms, and to charge the nation with the greatest mission of all—to avenge, globally, the deaths of Pearl Harbor, and defeat the purveyors of tyranny.

In his State of the Union Address, January 6, 1941, eleven months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, spoke of those Four Freedoms. This is part of what most of America heard via radio.

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms:

· The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

· The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

· The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

· The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

Three-and-a-half-years later, on October 4, 1944, shortly before the presidential election, Roosevelt, again by radio, addressed the nation, and it is instructive to read through the remarks to get to his views on voter suppression and the rights of all citizens to vote:

My fellow Americans: 

I am speaking to you tonight from the White House. I am speaking particularly on behalf of those Americans who, regardless of party- I hope you will remember that- very much hope that there will be recorded a large registration and a large vote this fall. I know, and many of you do, from personal experience how effective precinct workers of all parties throughout the Nation can be in assuring a large vote.

We are holding a national election despite all the prophecies of some politicians and a few newspapers who have stated, time and again in the past, that it was my horrid and sinister purpose to abolish all elections and to deprive the American people of the right to vote.

These same people, caring more for material riches than human rights, try to build up bogies of dictatorship in this Republic, although they know that free elections will always protect our Nation against any such possibility.

Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves—and the only way they could do that is by not voting at all.

The continuing health and vigor of our democratic system depends on the public spirit and devotion of its citizens which find expression in the ballot box.

Every man and every woman in this Nation—regardless of party—who have the right to register and to vote, and the opportunity to register and to vote, have also the sacred obligation to register and to vote. For the free and secret ballot is the real keystone of our American Constitutional system.

The American Government has survived and prospered for more than a century and a half, and it is now at the highest peak of its vitality. This is primarily because when the American people want a change of Government—even when they merely want "new faces"—they can raise the old electioneering battle cry of "throw the rascals out."

It is true that there are many undemocratic defects in voting laws in the various States, almost forty-eight different kinds of defects, and some of these produce injustices which prevent a full and free expression of public opinion.

The right to vote must be open to our citizens irrespective of race, color, or creed—without tax or artificial restriction of any kind. The sooner we get to that basis of political equality, the better it will be for the country as a whole.” (my bolding)

Here was the change-agent power of radio being used again by a great leader to unite and give a charge to action that was without rancor, dissembling, ridicule, meanness-of-purpose. It was the use of radio to remind America of the founding principle behind the vote; it is our America, it is not the America of tyrants. It was radio that gave FDR the power to reach out and encourage racial equality and mutually-achievable national purpose.

From the Lofty to the Laughter

Ironically, at the same time, radio was also the popular medium for poking fun at, but also diminishing the stature of, many minorities. Blacks, Jews, Italians, Polish, Asians…all stereotypes found their way to radio comedy scripts that gave white Americans targets for cocktail party derision.

So many radio heroes (all white), had goofy, stereotyped sidekicks or servants of various ethnicities: (Matt Dillon had Festus, The Lone Ranger had Tonto, Paladin had Hey Boy, Jack Benny had Rochester, Hopalong Cassidy had California, Wild Bill Hickock had Jingles, The Green Hornet had Cato, and the list goes on). It was as if no hero could gain the trust of the audience if he didn’t have some foolish or subservient character to play off—even though many of those characters came to the hero’s aid in the last minute of the show. Even when the hero was paired with a woman (Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, The Thin Man with Nick and Nora Charles, The Shadow with Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane), with few exceptions the woman had at least one moment in every show where she was on the verge of some savage victimization, saved from the evil doer in the nick of time by the male hero.

My point to all of this all-too-well-known but cast-aside radio entertainment history is that with so few exceptions, white America elevated a certain category of male characters to heroic, nearly mythic status, while relegating minorities, women, and poorly-educated, often rural characters to comedic anti-totems. This kind of casting, overseen by New York and Hollywood studios, either purposefully, or by tone-deaf-inadvertence, drove wedges of social, ethnic, and racial differentiation deep into the foundation of American unity.

In February 2001, National Public Radio, through American Public Media, launched a series entitled, “Radio Fights Jim Crow,” with host Deborah Amos. In her introduction, Amos said,

“If you were a black American in the 1930s, two kinds of intolerance threatened you: Ferocious bigotry in the United States, and the lethal tide of fascism rising in Europe. As America prepared for war, your own government looked on you as a challenge to democracy, because the discrimination you endured revealed how shallow that democracy could be. Worried that racial unrest would erode home-front unity, the Roosevelt administration launched an unprecedented assault on prejudice over the radio. In the next hour, American RadioWorks correspondent Stephen Smith recalls the decade when radio fought Jim Crow.”

What followed over the course of that hour (Americans All, Immigrants All), and over the next three programs in the series—Freedom’s People, New World A’Coming, and Destination Freedom—covered the period 1941-1950, a time when programs like Amos ‘N’ Andy (created and voiced almost entirely by two white men, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll), and the Jack Benny Show (featuring the black servant, Rochester), among others, created caricatures of blacks/negroes that were wildly off-center and often little more than willful depictions of minorities as minstrel show buffoons.

To be fair, radio comedy stuck barbs in white lower-to-middle-class Americans as well, including The Goldbergs (New Yorkers), Lum and Abner (the fictional town of Pine Ridge, Arkansas), and, perhaps most famously, Fibber McGee and Molly—the forever goofy couple living at 79 Wistful Vista, in Depression-era-money-is-tight Wistful Vista (somewhere in the Midwest), and whose front hall closet was in a constant state of landslide.

But it is one thing to prick your own finger and laugh at your misfortune (Molly Goldberg, the Jewish mother of The Goldberg family, always found something positive to make of a bad situation); it is another to slide a sarcastic knife deep into the social fabric of an entire race of fellow citizens—voiced, ironically, by two white men—and laugh at the bloody result. You must keep in mind that we’re talking about white corporate America, through the radio networks and stations they owned, making fun of…and isolating through crude and slapstick humor…a generation of men and women whose children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are alive today.

Radio historians credit Amos ‘N’ Andy with being a breakthrough format, allowing white and black Americans to laugh at the travails of the “everyman” caught up in the daily routines and schemes of shared lives of struggle and unfairness, and, given the show’s wide popularity among listeners of both races for more than 30 years, it is hard to fault the show’s success on the face of it. But caricatures and stereotypes are isolating devices—and the long-term effect of broadcasting a show whose faux-negro characters fit neatly into a “black” box, painted white simply reinforced what many white Americans thought about blacks.

In an American Public Media discussion of the Amos ‘N’ Andy show (following an audio clip of the show), historian Jim Horton said,

“And so Amos 'N' Andy, in some ways, became a kind of confirmation in the minds of many whites that the segregation system was basically OK. That the racist thoughts you had were OK because they were based in reality.”

Television as a Teacher, Divider, and Isolator

No medium, prior to the advent of social media platforms, had as much impact on Americans’ perceptions of the state of society, the economy, politics, and long-term goals as did television from the 1950s through the 1980s. Until the expansion of television broadcast companies in the ‘80s, and the rise of cable broadcast a decade later, most Americans got their TV news and entertainment from a handful of national—and a few more metropolitan—networks. ABC, CBS, NBC, and, briefly, Dumont, dominated the limited number of broadcast frequencies available to American households.

It would be impossible in this article to categorize and list the incredible spectrum of programming available from early morning until the classic late-night signoffs (sometimes a devotional, often the National Anthem), but suffice it to say that television brought virtually every social situation into the nation’s living rooms, whether through drama presentations, comedy shows, music and variety shows, educational programming, children’s Saturday morning and early morning weekday shows, sports, and, of course straight news programs in which journalists like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Peter Jennings, and, eventually, women anchors like Barbara Walters, presented the day’s news with very little political tilt. There were political elements, of course, as seen in the (Chet) Huntley- (David) Brinkley Report, where the news of the day was shared between the two anchors, but always without rancor, and never with any sense of voter manipulation.

The immediacy of network news, and the advances in television broadcast technology—notably mobile television crews—allowed Americans for the first time to watch news play out in real time on the steps of a segregating university, or during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (56-years-ago this week), or in Dallas on November 22, 1963, or in the killing fields of Vietnam, or as Neil Armstrong took that first step on the Moon in 1969. Television—through entertainment and news programming—also let us explore social issues in ways that allowed for political commentary to shape our perceptions of what we were seeing.

In the South, particularly in the 1960s, national news programs—and many television reporters—were often viewed as skewed toward liberal agendas, highlighting racial crimes, reporting on racial and political chicanery, casting many Southern states and cities as centers of Confederate-thought, run by rough police forces and overseen by bought-and-paid-for judges. It did not help the Southern-white case when television crews captured on-the-street struggles between whites and blacks, or when the television cameras and microphones broadcast the hateful epithets of whites shouting at black children trying to go to school.

Seeing these scenes play out on millions of television sets across the country, Southerners had to know that their way of life, illuminated by the harsh glare of television lights and recorded for posterity, was being savaged by the national media, and used against them for liberal and moderate conservative political gains. But, for every liberal politician who decried Southern society’s inability to rise above the Civil War, there were staunch supporters of the Old South and of Southern gentility and Southern voters, who railed against the media and their liberal colleagues and liberal presidents. What television was beginning to show as two different Americas, politicians were confirming with their growing reluctance to seek compromises. The cracks creeping across the political landscape were beginning to break wide open despite FDR’s wish twenty years earlier that “The sooner we get to that basis of political equality, the better it will be for the country as a whole.”

Entertainment television was of little help in filling the widening cracks.

Writing in the Oxford University Press, in a paper titled, Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Media Content and Effects, Dana Mastro detailed the effects of television on Black and White audiences from the 1950s forward. In this excerpt, Mastro describes the portrayal of Blacks in 1950s television, and looks at the longer-term perceptions of those roles (I’ve dropped the citations, but they are available in the linked article):

Taking a historical look at depictions of Blacks reveals that many notable changes have emerged over the decades. In the 1950s portrayals of Blacks were dominated by unfavorable archetypes such as loyal but subservient mammies and ridiculed buffoons. Generally, Black characters function to serve and amuse their white counterparts on television. However, changes began to emerge by the end of the 1960s. Although these new images of Blacks offered idyllic representations of Blacks and U.S. culture (particularly when considering the realities of the era), programming during the latter years of this decade marked a positive change from the stereotypical messages offered on TV up to that point. Changes in the characterization of Blacks again were revealed in the 1970s, during which time a number of sitcoms emerged that centered on the experiences of Black families across varying backgrounds (e.g., Good Times). These shows were meaningful in that their predominately black casts helped bring more representations of Black Americans to the small screen. However, even in these shows, depictions of Blacks were still often stereotypical (e.g., lazy, unemployed. Further, characters harkening back to the mammy and buffoon persisted. For example, on shows such as The Jeffersons (1975–1985) more contemporary mammy characters appeared who deviated in appearance and lifestyle from these previous figures but reflected much the same overarching theme. In particular, these characters in the 1970s represented a range of skin tones and served affluent white and Black families. However, in these updated sitcoms, Blacks were often seen exclusively as care free figures, leaving these characters underdeveloped. Overall, quantitative content analyses of the programming airing in the 1970s reveals that that the prevailing portrayals of Blacks were as lazy, poor, and/or jobless."

These examples of how segments of America's communications industries have splintered the once solid beams of our foundation are not meant to be taken as a race/money/culture-is-the-only-problem diatribe. I’m not writing just about the disassociation of blacks from whites, of the poor from the rich, of the immigrants from the nationalists. I’m writing about example of a trend of separation and isolation. And in this last section, I want to address what I believe gets us closer to answering the initial question.

This is the End?
And so I come to the creation of cable news, the Internet, social media, and cellphones. During all that had gone on before, in traditional newspapers, radio, and television, Americans still had more control over their lives through personal, face-to-face or voice-to-voice communications. No matter what you heard on the radio, read in morning or evening paper, or saw that night on the news shows, there was time for personal dialogue, time to sit around the dinner table, time at the poker game, time to meet over the office water cooler to get the temperature of your friends’ and colleagues’ points of view. The arguments might get heated, but they got heated face-to-face; we could see the effects of our tempers in body language and gauge their intensity in direct conversation. Our circle of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and local associations (stores, banks, gas stations), were comparatively small, and the consequences of outrageous behavior were almost immediately felt within that circle.

If we unintentionally hurt someone, we had time, and proximity, to apologize and make amends. If we intentionally, and unapologetically, hurt someone, the community around us felt the effects of our actions. So, too, was the larger sense of community of the nation as the issues of racism, cultural ignorance, educational crises, economic swings, and political brinksmanship more attuned to the possibility of fixing things and finding common ground for public action on a national scale.

The works of the activists and presidential and congressional compromisers brought us so close to the tipping point of finally advancing noble causes on behalf of the poor, the poorly educated, blacks, other minorities, women, etc. Until the advent of anonymity by electrons—the use of our faceless, fleshless names as nothing more than markers in emails and messages and screeds—we were, I believe, within striking distance of an era of national renaissance. Before the ascendancy of cable news and 24/7/365 news cycles and talking heads, and screaming radio commentaries, we were able to consume news in reasonable bites, chew on and digest what we heard, read, or saw, and come to our own conclusions without all the shouting and distraction. I believe we were very close to closing the gap between misunderstanding and hatred; that lashing out that occurs when uninformed opinions clash with facts.

But once we were engulfed in a tsunami of “Breaking News” and able to share our yet-to-be-fully-informed impressions with legions of virtual friends, complete with Photoshopped images, cherry-picked quotes, irrelevant sidebars, religious sniping, and downright slug-fests playing out on our tiny screens, the tipping point no longer favored comity and concert; it tipped inexorably toward increased animosity, distrust, lies, anxiety, depression, and, as Senator Ben Sasse and George Will put it, loneliness on a once-unimaginable scale—ranging from the sadness of the individual isolated by cyberbullies and bitter politics, to the loneliness of an entire nation broken into islands of self-interests, self-protection, self-delusion, self-denial.

Those islands of loneliness, like the cancers of my burns, have, at last, risen and float now on the skin of America, each one in need of diagnosis, excision, stitches, and recovery. Can we do it? Do we have the will to address the root cause of our national cancer? Can we turn away from the incessant hum of the news cycles, to break our OCD-like need to check our phones every 4.3 minutes, the impulsive need to seek affirmation—affirmation by strangers who opine on who we really are as individuals and as a nation? Do we have the will to reject those in power who grow stronger as we grow weaker under the assault of lies and schemes?

Let me repeat the initial question:

“For us folks who are feeling trampled and flattened by a group that has no morals, what are we supposed to do? What is the most effective way to respond other than vote? Because right now I don’t trust that system either. I know I’m being a paranoid downer, but I’ll let the process prove me wrong after Election Day, but we may be in for a huge disappointment come November. Or this all may be just fever-addled despair on my part and I’ll be fine in a few days.”

I’m a believer in the power of the press and a free, vigorous, and expansive news media as the one sure check on governmental power and the abuses thereof. I am also an optimist when it comes to the power of individuals to ferret out truth from a burrow of lies. But the one sure power I know works, is the power of the ballot box, and the untrammeled right of every eligible voter to express himself or herself—their outrage, their messages, their discontent, their choices for something better—every election day. If there is any answer blowing in the wind, it is coming from the direction of the community polling places all across America.

It is only through the power of the vote that we will begin to heal the cancers that divide us, that isolate us, that bring such loneliness and anxiety to a nation otherwise filled with a populace that, once it sets its mind toward the stars, will bend everything toward that end.

I am informed of the difficulty—but also the possible salubrious destination—of our path begun in the 1960s, by William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in 1950:

“Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”