A Typical Day at Positive High, 1966-2003

                  A Typical Day at Positive High, 1966-2003

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/3/19

            8:20 AM. OK, let’s take our seats. / May I run to my locker? / No, ma’m, it’s time for the announcements. / But I don’t have my book. / Then you best get in the habit of bringing it, especially since there are only three weeks left in the semester. (Goodhearted laughter from the class; moans from the young lady.)

            From the public address system: Please stand for the pledge to the flag. “I pledge allegiance to the flag … with liberty and justice for all.” Thank you. The French Club will meet today after school in Mrs. Boudet’s room. Pictures for rising senior class officers will be made Friday in front of the trophy case.  Officers, please wear a goofy hat. Pictures for next year’s yearbook staff will be made Friday during first period. Decide in advance which picture packet plan you will purchase.

            Still from the PA system: Now a word from the Math Team cheerleaders. “We are the Math Team, rah, rah, rah. / We love calculus, ha, ha, ha.  / Logarithms, logarithms, yo, yo, yo. / We are the Math Team, go Math, go!”

Whispers back in the classroom: “THAT was stupid.” / “Yeah, the next time they do that in assembly, I ain’t going!”

From the PA system: Now Mrs. Horton has an announcement. “Students, the faculty wants to tell you how special you are. Positive High School has collected over 500 cans of food for the needy. We thank the Key Club for spearheading this. They are the greatest.  Now a word from our Key Club officers. First voice: “I can.” Second voice: “You can.” Third voice: “We all can bring cans.” All voices: “Yes, we can!”

Whispers in the classroom: “Now that was REAL stupid.” / “Yeah, I’ve got ‘ole Lady Horton for government. That woman’s CRAZY!” 

From the PA system: Here’s our principal, Mr. Wordsmith. “Students, as we close out the year at Positive High, I want to tell you what a grand bunch you are. I want to congratulate Coach Smiley and the Kittens for their baseball victory last Friday.”

“But on to something negative here at Positive High. Many of you know that 3 young men broke into the library Saturday night and turned over all the book shelves. I hasten to remind you they were all freshmen.  Freshmen need a little time to learn the rules, and I know all of you believe in forgiveness. Teachers who have these young men in your classes, please send their work to the In-School Suspension Teacher. I know you’ll be willing to give them all the time they need to complete their work.”

“Vandalism is serious and sad, and any students who need to talk about it may come to the library conference room during first period to discuss how you feel.  Everyone have a good day.”

8:45 AM. Back in the classroom: “OK, Tennyson’s Ulysses! I believe that last Friday we … / Mr. Hines, I hate to interrupt but are you going to let us go to the library to talk about the vandalism? / Look, Tennyson’s not the easiest author in the book. The test on Tennyson is Thursday. / Yes sir, I know, but Mr. Wordsmith said … / Mr. Wordsmith would understand why I’m asking you to do your therapy session some other time. Did you know any of the freshmen who trashed the library? / No sir, but I’d still like to talk to someone. / Would it help if you asked your questions here? Maybe I or someone in the class could answer them. / I don’t have specific questions, but Mr. Wordsmith indicated that …”

(Rinnnnnnnnnng!) Well, we’ll get to Tennyson tomorrow.  Look back over Ulysses tonight. You’re dismissed.

9:25 AM (Teacher’s Journal): Dear Lord Tennyson, You’ve so much wisdom to give us. Forgive us for displacing learning for therapy when your writings are therapeutic enough. Don’t blame the young man who stole your time. He was only accepting what the school offered him.

Dear Parents, Are you aware of the triumph of the therapeutic or do you favor the enabling culture our schools are becoming?

Dear Students, If I’m going to help you, you must ironically resist many distractions the school throws at you.  Please don’t believe that 14-year-old vandals are necessarily sick. They probably have flawed character and derelict parents.

Dear Reader, Do you see why colleges are now filled with students who clamor for “safe space” and who weep upon hearing things with which they disagree? It didn’t start at college. And not totally at high school. Guess where else.

Roger Hines

10/30/19

Paul, Pete, and the Kurds

                                Paul, Pete, and the Kurds

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/27/19

There’s little doubt that two of my older brothers, Paul and Pete, joined the army to escape the cotton field.  Not that they were lazy or averse to hard work.  They weren’t.  It’s just that they both had been in the cotton fields since they were twelve.  They weren’t the only Southern boys who took refuge in the military.

            Interestingly – and fortunately – both of them enjoyed the military life.  Not the horrors of battle, but seeing the world after World War II ended.  Paul had served in Italy; Pete wound up in Belgium, specifically at the Battle of the Bulge.  Both made a career of the military.

            Like my father, Paul and Pete were avid readers. They never saw a newspaper or magazine they wouldn’t absorb.  By the time I was 15, Paul and Pete were 40 and 38; my father, 65.  At our house a 15-year-old would not inject himself too much into an adult conversation, but he would ask questions, listen, and learn.

            Learn I did.  Because of the intense labor these brothers and their father shared and endured in the fields, they developed what must be called a brotherhood.  By the time I was old enough to work, my father had downsized from fields to “patches,” much smaller areas of crops rather than vast, endless acres.  Many times he reminded me that I didn’t have as rough a life as Paul and Pete.

            After retiring from the military Paul landed in Alabama, Pete in Texas.  The most stimulating times of my youth were when they managed to come home at the same time, thus enabling me to eaves-drop as they and my father discussed their days in` the big fields, the war, Churchill, Truman and McArthur, Eisenhower, and the new young President Kennedy.

            I’m 17.  Paul and Pete are at our house. Paul, the biggest talker, always speaks first. “We proved what the United States has.  There’s not an army anywhere that can whip the United States.”

            “Be careful, now,” my father retorts. “I wouldn’t say that.  You never know.”  Pete, a quiet man who didn’t like to talk about the war experience, adds, “All I know is I must have shot and killed more boys my age than I could count.”

            That comment quelled the topic of superiority and turned the conversation to another topic in which we are engulfed today, that of the role of our military.  A few months earlier in his farewell address in January of 1961 President Eisenhower had warned, “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military/industrial complex.”

            The beloved “Ike,” a WWII hero, went further.  After introducing the expression “military/industrial complex” to America’s political lexicon he added, “Great and sustained spending for defense and war creates power groups that could disastrously harm the nation’s future.”

            Power groups?  Created by war?  Yes. War is profitable for many and always has been.  But why have so many politicians in America encouraged war?  Was novelist Taylor Caldwell right in claiming that wars are always promoted by rich industrialists and their political friends?  With Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syrian “conflicts,” the U.S. has been in a permanent state of undeclared war since the last declared one ended.  But dead is dead and most of the deaths in the undeclared wars have not been the sons of the industrialists or politicians, but the Pauls and Petes of America’s heartland.

            Long before Eisenhower’s warning about the “military/industrial complex,” James Madison stated, “No nation can maintain its freedom in the midst of continuous war.”  Was the esteemed Founder foreshadowing an unofficial alliance between the nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it?  Did he foresee a powerful vested interest, a relationship between the government (politicians) and defense corporations?  I don’t know, but the question is not far-fetched.

            President Trump, as he promised while campaigning, is pulling back from America’s role as policeman of the world.  The brave Kurds, who will be most immediately affected, were not an issue when Paul and Pete were alive, but the role of the U.S. military was.  And believe it or not, when Paul, Pete, and my father’s conversation turned to Eisenhower’s farewell address, Paul the military hawk (Pete was almost a dove), agreed with Eisenhower.

            Perhaps he, like Eisenhower, knew what war was like and believed that you should fight a war to win or come home.  Declared wars typically end.  “Conflicts” don’t.  Have we noticed?  And there are indeed profiteers of war.  Have we noticed that?

Roger Hines

10/23/19

           

           

Bitter lips, Filthy Mouths, Forked Tongues

                              Bitter lips, Filthy Mouths, Forked Tongues

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/20/19

             Rev. Reginald Thomas Jackson, the bishop over 500 plus African Methodist Episcopal congregations in Georgia, seems to think I and 63 million other Americans are racists.  As quoted in the Marietta Daily Journal on October 14, Jackson recently remarked, “Donald Trump is not the problem.  He’s only a symptom of the problem. The problem is the 35% of this nation’s population he speaks for.  35% of this nation’s population is racist.”

            Where to begin!  First of all Mr. Trump amassed approximately half of all the votes cast for president in 2016.  Jackson’s 35% figure appears to have been snatched out of thin air.  The president certainly speaks for more than 35% of the population. Did the bishop mean that 35% of the 63 million were racists?  Clarity, where art thou?

            But Bishop Jackson wasn’t finished.  Addressing the Georgia state NAACP convention  he added, “For some of ya’ll RNC means Republican National Convention. For me it means “Racist National Convention.”

            How healing is that?  How mean?  How do such words help bridge the divide in our national political discourse?  Right now in a flash I could list hundreds of friends who voted for Trump and who also are strong defenders of racial justice.  Racists don’t reach out to people of a different color. They don’t volunteer to teach in schools of a different color or purposely support businesses run by those of a different color. They don’t go to integrated churches.

            And true healers and lovers of all people don’t use incendiary language, especially if they are spiritual leaders.  They don’t stereotype or trumpet un-forgiveness and getting even, a la Al Sharpton.

            Let’s revisit the history of the “Racist National Convention” and compare it to the Bishop’s vicious characterization.  Birthed in 1854, its first successful presidential candidate in 1860 ran an anti-slavery campaign.  He won and ended slavery with the stroke of his pen.  From then on that president’s party advanced equality while the other national party became the refuge and seat of power for self-avowed, arch-segregationists.  One member of that other major party whom the party never chose to censure was a West Virginia U.S. Senator and former prominent KKK leader, Robert Byrd, who died as recently as 2010.

            The “Racist National Convention” also fought for and helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 over the strong opposition of the other major party’s members who dominated committee chairmanships in the U.S. Senate.  In time, by 1980, the “Racist Convention” would turn southern politics upside down, all for the better.  Meanwhile, Senator Byrd was still using the N-word with nary a peep from his own party colleagues.

            Bishop Jackson lamented that there are over 42 million blacks in America and only 500,000 NAACP members.  That’s understandable since younger blacks are hearing from black “Racist National Convention” sympathizers like brain surgeon Dr. Ben Carson, activist Candice Owens, intellectual Thomas Sowell, Wall Street Journal writer Jason Riley, radio host Larry Elder, Professor Walter Williams, and many others.

            Let’s give the Bishop the Bitter Lips award.  In all fairness let’s give the Filthy Mouth award to President Trump, but let’s not hold faultless those who have been just dandy with our culture’s R-rated movie and comedy filth, but who act appalled at the president’s language.  To whom are our youth more attuned, who influences them more, the president or our filthy-mouthed cultural icons?  Mr. Trump didn’t start that landslide.  Movies and television did.

            One thing we must give the President credit for is his calling a spade a spade.  If his mouth is filthy, his tongue is not forked.  “Yea, yea” and “nay, nay” are refreshing after decades of “well, on the other hand” from so many politicians.

            Filthy language is to be rebuked, but vivid understandable language is to be commended.  “Drain the swamp” is language we deplorables understand and have been yearning for.  Many in Congress have gotten rich from “public service” because of connections abroad or lobbying jobs taken after leaving Congress, thus “the swamp.”  Knowledge obtained from years of “public service” has enriched more ex-U.S. Senators of both parties than we can count.

             It’s appears that both parties are going to be outed as far as profiting from “public service” is concerned.  Surely the President’s 63 million are thinking, “It’s about time.”  His phone conversation with the Ukraine president stirred up a beehive.  Democrats never dreamed the loose bees would be stinging them as well.

            Loose lips sink ships.  The much talk, the persistent accusations thrown at the president are turning toward his accusers.  Ask the Bidens.

Roger Hines

10/16/19

           

What’s Next in the Sexual Revolution?

                   What’s Next in the Sexual Revolution?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Journal, 10/13/19

            It’s doubtful that I would have had a keen awareness of the Sexual Revolution had I not been around 16 to 20-year olds for the past 52 years.  I capitalize the two words because just as surely as the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement were all social/political game changers in the western world, so have been the ever changing views of human sexuality.

             With a fearful and sad heart I watched at least five times the video of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam defending post-birth abortion.  Of course “post-birth abortion” is an illogical expression.  If a baby is alive and delivered it can hardly be aborted, but its life can certainly still be ended, and that’s exactly what the governor was suggesting.

            And what connection does abortion have to the Sexual Revolution?  According to the Guttmacher Institute, over 80% of abortions are for convenience.  Fewer than 1% are done to save the life of the mother.  Most of the 80% are by young, unwed mothers.

            The Sexual Revolution began in the late sixties.  Had the Great Depression not halted the Roaring Twenties, it might have begun sooner.  This ongoing revolution has denied the importance of home, re-defined marriage and family, reduced all sexual morality to “consent,” and exchanged common sense and science for ideology.

            Believe it or not there is a political candidate who is challenging the revolution.  He too is a doctor, a former veterinarian and now a general practice physician.  A third-term Congressman from northeastern Louisiana’s 5th district, Dr. Ralph Abraham is a happy cultural warrior.  The good doctor dares to speak exactly what he believes, addressing what he calls “the absence of common sense in all of the gender and transgender talk.”

            “I’ve delivered babies for years and I can tell you that in every case I’ve turned to their parents and told them they have a boy or a girl,” the doctor- politician recently stated.

             Dr. Abraham’s strong stand has not hindered his present race for governor of Louisiana.  It has, however, made me wonder why more politicians and doctors as well don’t speak out for sanity in all things sexual.  The Sexual Revolution has delivered disease and sexual chaos.  It has normalized the abnormal.  Even so there is silence everywhere.

            Ok, let’s forget about those silly, outdated ideas about traditional marriage, monogamy, and marital fidelity.  Let’s go libertine and do just anything we wish.  What’s wrong with trouples, or polyamory, or incest?  That’s right, incest.  Does anyone think incest is not in the agenda of the sexual libertines?  Some of us need to do a little more reading.

            And parents need to do a lot more inquiring, in the schools of California, Washington state, Massachusetts, and Virginia for sure, but coming soon to the schools in your area as well.  For that we can thank the LGBQT lobby, the criers for “transgender studies,” the ACLU, the American Psychological Association which long ago left its academic purpose, and quite a few religious denominations that have traded orthodox faith for “diversification,” diversification meaning not different cultures but a departure from Judeo-Christian values that western culture has championed for two millennia.

            Suffice it to say that modern society cannot countenance any restraint on sex.  No limitations, no boundaries either.  Surely there are more than two genders.  Tell your son he can be a girl.  Get free from nature and nature’s God.  Cut loose from marital fidelity and from matrimony itself.  Give Oscars to those who depict blood, gore, and the raunchiest sex, but who would never show a video of an abortion.  Appoint judges who, un-tethered from the written law, sally off to invent new “rights.”

            Traditionalists have spoken much of family but perhaps too little of “household,” a word that sends leftists into cardiac arrest.  The culture needs families, but families need a place, that is, a community.  Even gangs have a place where work is shared and belonging is experienced.  Ponder how a sense of place, where meals are shared and talk is plentiful, might alleviate the loneliness that leads so many teens down the wrong sexual path.  Ponder the great need for community and political leaders to speak out on sexual chaos as the Louisiana doctor-politician is doing.

            The beast of perversion is at America’s door.  Guardrails are needed.  It will take parents, grandparents, pastors, teachers, and straight talking politicians to restore them.  I doubt that I could have hope for restoration if I had not gazed into the eyes of so many lonely and aimless young people who yearned for something more than what the culture was giving them. 

Restore the guardrails we must.

Roger Hines

10/9/19

           

           

When Objectivity Dies

                                When Objectivity Dies

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/6/19

Glance at the front page of this newspaper.  Compare it to the page you are now on.  On the front page you will find hard news.  The headlines indicate that factual material will follow. I believe that factual material is what you will always find there.

On the page you are now reading, a heading appears.  It reads “Editorials & Opinions.”  I have read the Marietta Daily Journal since August of 1971.  I doubt that I have missed reading a single issue over these 48 years.  I also believe this newspaper has remained true to the distinction between news and opinion.

This doesn’t mean that the MDJ’s editorials or its columnists’ opinions haven’t made anyone angry or that they haven’t been unfair.  Fair or not is a matter of perspective.  In opinion writing, “fairness” doesn’t apply as long as one doesn’t tell lies or misrepresent someone.  It’s not the opinion writer’s purpose to show both sides but to argue, support, and shed light on one side.    

Factual or not is a matter of integrity.  Even so, it’s possible to get facts wrong, in which case apologies and corrections are due.  At any rate, a principled journalist will always keep news and opinion separate.  This newspaper does.

Not so with its print counterparts around the country nor with television news.  Objectivity informs; subjectivity argues a viewpoint.  Only a cursory glance will reveal whether or not the Washington Post or the New York Times presents hard news objectively. They don’t.  The Wall Street Journal is better, though at times it could justifiably be charged with fashioning headlines that tilt a certain way.

It hasn’t always been so with the New York Times.  Its long time editor, Mississippi-born Turner Catledge, was heralded as an ethical man who sought to “do newspapering right” and to “report the facts straight and the opinions clear.”  Editor of one of the world’s most widely known newspapers from 1951 to 1968, Catledge was never a big shot nor too busy to visit his home state and little East Central Jr. College in Decatur, Mississippi to talk journalism with the college newspaper staff.  Catledge was a graduate of Mississippi State University, then known as Mississippi A&M.

Smaller newspapers excepted, modern journalism has not followed the path of Turner Catledge.  Neither has the electronic media.  That’s why President Trump’s rage during his press conference this past week was justified.  There has never been a better example of New Journalism’s excesses and subjectivity than the way the national media has covered President Trump.  Finding him entertaining during his presidential campaign, the networks and the national newspapers gave him time and space, never dreaming he would win the presidency.  The biggest Uh-oh! in political history is election night of 2016.  The media’s useful idiot turned out not to be an idiot after all, but a candidate who was saying what voters wanted to hear.  Since that eventful night, the sole mission of CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times has been to erase their embarrassment by destroying Donald Trump.  So far none of their efforts have worked.  It’s highly unlikely that a kerfuffle over the president’s conversation with a foreign leader will work either.

Nationally, objective journalism is dying.  ABC’s Sam Donaldson started it all by yelling out at and being disrespectful to a president, but who could ever enrage the smiling, joke-cracking Ronald Reagan?  Trump, though, ain’t taking it.  Good for him.

Georgia Congressman John Lewis deserves deep respect for his courageous stand as a civil rights hero.  How many different photographs of his bloodied head have we seen?  But that heroism cannot justify Lewis’ ludicrous claim that President Trump is a threat to our democracy.  Currently the biggest threat to our democracy is “news” organizations leading the way in refusing to accept the results of an election.  That’s what undeveloped nations do.

Churchill once commented, “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”  His words are an apt description of the journalists and commentators whose arrogance and disdain are aimed as much at Trump’s 63 million voters as at Trump himself.

Having thrown respectable and objective journalism to the winds, the New Journalists are mean and vengeful, but they aren’t dumb. They know that Biden is too yesterday and that the other Democratic candidates are too far left.  Their aim is to coronate Hillary Clinton who, no doubt, is waiting in the wings.

Even Napoleon remarked, “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”  But Donald Trump doesn’t fear newspapers or cable television either.  That’s why they hate him.  He has bill-boarded their total lack of objectivity.

Roger Hines

10/2/19

The Lure of Old Suitcases

                                The Lure of Old Suitcases

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal,9/1/19

“Of the making of books there is no end,” wrote the Jewish King Solomon.  For a certain Jewish child’s curiosity about the contents of his father’s long forbidden suitcase, there was seemingly no cure.  Or so says my new friend Peter Bein, author of Maxwell’s Suitcase.  No cure, that is, except to open the suitcase after his father had died. 

            Author Peter Bein teaches English at Chattahoochee Technical College.  His professional career has been winding, though purposeful and interesting.  How many college English teachers first “had a math brain” as Bein puts it, studied mathematics in college, spent 25 years in the computer field, taught math, returned to college to get a Master’s degree in Professional Writing and then taught English?

            Maxwell’s Suitcase is what the publishing world is now calling a memoir, not a full scale researched biography but a remembrance or a focusing upon a period of time, a person, or as in Bein’s book, an object.

            Bein’s object is a suitcase of his father’s, hidden for forty years in a hall closet in the family’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York.  Bein’s father made his escape from Nazi Germany in 1938 on Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”), or the Night of Broken Glass, November 9, when Nazi forces ransacked Jewish-owned homes, stores, hospitals, schools, and synagogues, leaving streets littered with shards of broken glass.

            Suitcase in hand, Max Bein fled Germany for the United States, leaving behind his mother and fiancée, Lola.  In the suitcase, son Peter Bein would learn, were pictures and stacks of letters bound in old shoelaces, which became the inspiration for his book.  The letters were to his father from Bein’s lost grandmother who had been killed in a Polish death camp at Belzec during World War II.

            It is one thing to read a history book about the Holocaust.  It is quite another to talk to a friend who is not yet even 70 and who has such close connection to one of the greatest evils of human history.  Bein’s connection to his past, particularly his grandmother’s death, is exquisitely described in his riveting book as is his childhood puzzlement over how his father could have fled Germany leaving his mother, Malka, behind. 

            When Bein was ten, his father said to him, “Come, I’ll show you my pictures from home.”  It was one of those rare occasions when Max would open up the suitcase and “invite me to the past,” Bein writes.  But not for long.  When Bein was shown a picture of his grandmother, he asked “Where is she?” only to elicit a quiet “She disappeared” from his father.

            The letters in the suitcase were written during WWII from Bein’s grandmother in Poland to his father in New York City.   In 1996, living in Columbus, Georgia Bein opened the suitcase after his father’s death.  “That suitcase was the keyhole to my past,” he writes.  Later, living in Atlanta, Bein secured the help of a friend who met him once a week at the Aurora Café in Atlanta’s Little Five Points and translated the letters aloud in English while Bein wrote feverishly.

            This enterprise compelled Bein to “make an appointment with his past” as he travelled to Poland and Germany in 2008, 2009, and 2010 to “find his way back home” and learn about the fate of his grandmother as well as the reason why his father was so protective of the suitcase.  The visit to Poland included finding and making a picture of the apartment where his grandmother had written the letters in the suitcase seventy years earlier.

            Any moviemaker seeking an interesting twist on Thomas Wolfe’s title, “You can’t go home again,” need look no further than Bein’s memoir.  Its conciseness makes it as script-ready as a book could be. Malka’s letters to her son Max are heart-rending, her last one ending with “From your mother who loves you and wishes you the best.”

            Today the Holocaust, like history in general, is being weaponized and trivialized.  Using history as a bludgeon, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said the detention centers on our southern border ought to be called “concentration camps.”  Little must she know about what people such as Bein’s grandmother Malka endured. 

            Cicero wrote, “Who only knows his generation remains always a child.”  Author Peter Bein was not content to know only of his own era.  Hence a suitcase was his teacher and his motivation to discover who he was.  The suitcase, he writes, was his “museum in a box.”

            Readers can find Maxwell’s Suitcase on Amazon and at PeterBein.com.  From it they can learn to respect – and heed – history as Bein himself has done.

Roger Hines

7/28/19

           

           

Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/28/19

                          A Brief History of a House Divided

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 8/28/19

Russia, Russia / collusion, collusion / impeachment, impeachment / racism, racism, and now recession, recession.  

            Media assault didn’t start with our current president, though it did of course start with a Republican president.  Ronald Reagan was a cowboy from California whose ignorance of geo-politics and diplomacy would surely cause him to blow up the world.  And we dare not have a president saying, “Government is not the solution; government is the problem,” or – while still California’s governor –  “The college Vietnam protestors are screaming ‘Make love not war,’ but considering their appearance I doubt they could do either.”

            Just whom does such rhetoric sound like?  While its tenor may not be as acidic as Trump’s, its aim was just as sure.  And the head cheerleaders of the Reagan opposition were, yes, the three major pre-cable television networks.  If not as malicious as today’s cable networks, they were still definitely anti-Reagan.

            In spite of his supposed instability, Reagan was re-elected.  Sam Donaldson of ABC was to Reagan as Jim Acosta of CNN is to President Trump.  Both so-called reporters made themselves the story.

            In Reagan’s day cable television was in its infancy, CNN being launched in 1980, the year Reagan was elected.  The three major television networks were foot soldiers for the Democrat Party just as they and at least two cable networks are today.  Conservatives, having never enjoyed media support, edged bravely into the winds of bias and subjective journalism wherever and however they could.  Their primary conduit was radio.  Radio “spots” funded by Texas oil man H.L. Hunt kept the conservative faithful from despair.  The journalism and compelling voice of Paul Harvey, intertwined with American lore and values, kept them from sheer depression.

            Conservatives slightly cracked the media in 1966 in the person of William F. Buckley and his television program, “Firing Line.”  It was only a crack.  Rush Limbaugh would push the door further in 1988.  Only when cable television expanded was the door pushed open by Fox News in 1996.  Even so, there were two GOP presidents, Bush I and Bush II, who bore the brunt of the old networks’ bias.  Bush I was portrayed as “a wimp,” he who flew WWII combat missions and was shot down, only to fly again.  His son, like Reagan, was presented as something of a strutting, strident cowboy.  The Bushes weren’t Texans.  They were privileged whites from Connecticut merely using Republican Texas as their new base of power.  Or so the northeast media asserted.

            Clinton and Obama, on the other hand, were media darlings.  Clinton was the bright boy.  Obama was the future for sure.  He would put conservatives in their place.

            But it came to pass that, partly because of the IRS’s treatment of the Tea Party and globalism gone wild, the peasants came with their pitchforks.  From every crook and cranny they came, mostly from heartland America and small towns, though from large industrial cities as well.  We’re all familiar with “… and a little child shall lead them,” but nowhere in the annals of history do we find “…and a billionaire shall lead them.”  But a billionaire did lead ordinary folks to victory, vindicating Buckley who had said he’d rather be governed by the first 100 people in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty.

            Yes, the billionaire talks ugly.  He hits back.  His rhetoric falls far short of Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” and “the better angels of our nature.”  But the billionaire is listening to his peasants and they are influencing him for good, not on his hitting back which he needs to continue, but on his increasingly apparent love for ordinary folks and their values.  Who knew (the educated media elites should have) that globalism was understood by the non-elites at both the intellectual and pocketbook levels?  Who ever dreamed that the non-elites, so many of them people of faith, would support a thrice married playboy?

            It’s fortunate that ancient Jews didn’t reject the help of King Cyrus even though he was a pagan Persian.  Not a perfect vessel, that Cyrus.

            It would be nice if those who fault people of faith for supporting the president cared more about the abhorrent practice of abortion, the loss of manufacturing to other nations, and the illegal immigration crisis. It would be wise if free-marketers stopped taking social conservatives for granted.

            Those peasants are smart.  Guided by common sense, they know a smart, authentic dude when they see one.  Given that the face of the Democrat Party is now the anti-Semitic members of The Squad, it’s possible that the Jewish community will join the peasants in giving the playboy a rousing victory in 2020.

Roger Hines

8/21/19