'I'm Done Being Quiet'

Those words were spoken last week by the ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, finally defiant at her cruel scapegoating by President Trump in his deepening fear of impeachment.

I’m with her.

I used to question whether any columnist outside the media capitals of New York and Washington ought to write about national affairs. I once wondered if I shouldn’t defer to writers closer to the action.

No more. The Trump Effect is unfolding very broadly now, not only in Washington but everywhere. From the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate, the norms of our nation are under attack. Not only from the outside, which you expect, but from the inside too.

Ms. Page’s words have haunted me since the day I read her statement. I have come to understand that to be silent in this dangerous time is to risk making matters worse. Much, much worse.

For three years, Trump’s purposeful erosion has been steady. As this old year ends, the wreckage of his behavior is abundant and clear. It’s become as visible and dispiriting around the G-7 table, most recently in London, as around our dinner tables here at home.

Trump’s aberrant, anti-historical way surfaces mostly without warning. He takes no advice, trusts only his insufficient gut instinct, and therefore he must repeatedly back-track (see Syria). Along the way he encourages the world’s worst dictators and keeps our most important allies guessing, distrustful of our government, and doubting America’s word.

Yet this is how he rolls, embracing turmoil, keeping everyone guessing at what he will or won’t do or say next. The only real mystery about any of this anymore is why the White House press corps (whom he also berates) still insists on making his outbursts into “news” every day.

In the early 1930s, in Germany and then Italy, citizens learned the hard truth the hard way. The behaviors of Hitler and Mussolini – their strutting, their outbursts and insults, their racism – were mildly amusing until they murderously weren’t.

Nobody should remain silent now. None of us. In America today, anyone with a platform should use it, and with a deep sense of urgency.

o

We arrive at our own epiphanies in different ways. My clarity has come from several sources, all of them freely available to you, too:

·     Actually reading the Mueller Report (see especially Volume 2).

·     Actually listening to the warnings of the U.S. intelligence agencies – FBI, CIA, Defense – and not to Trump’s disparagement or dismissal of them. We know now the truth of why he has done that with such vehemence.

·     And hearing the words of those career professionals from the State Department and National Security Council who sat at Congress’ witness table and dispassionately spoke their truth – not to the attacks upon them by this conflicted President and his soulless enablers.

In fact, for me this is no longer about Trump’s capacity to be our President. He has answered that question for us, has shown us the extent to which he is manifestly unfit and always has been. I also no longer even wonder what motivates him. Clearly, it’s been the wrong things, wrong countries, and wrong people.

Trump’s fealty to the Russian president is as complete, as pandering and unwavering, as it is frightening and dangerous for us all. His enabling of white nationalists is likewise reprehensible. Whether he does these things because there’s high treason or low racism in his heart, or because he knows the shock of it will make the rest of us crazy, all that is beside the point now. The point is simply that it’s time for him to go.

Nor am I am distracted any longer by what it might have been in Trump’s damaged childhood that makes him the way he is today – his childish need to insult and ridicule and berate, his inability to admit any mistake, his chronic mockery of the leaders of democracies across Europe. Instead, it is time for him to go.

And no, please, I don’t hate him – that empty, simplistic dodge of his defenders high and low. I don’t hate anybody. I do grieve for my country and wonder what will come next from this man with the White House and his Twitter account as playthings.

o

I finally came to my own clarity on the question of impeachment. Definitely, it should go forward, as professionally and thoroughly as possible. This impeachment is about establishing facts:

·     Did Trump use his office for his own selfish purposes?

·     How exactly did that happen?

These central questions are no longer about the success or failure of one elected official, but of our country’s.

What we need from Congress now is the factual record – make crystal clear the story of what happened, putting aside as much of the partisanship as possible, putting aside whatever might happen afterward in the Trump-enslaved Senate.

Once that record is established, never mind that the Senate may or may not have the guts to remove Trump, at least history will remember it all, informing the 2020 election. The full record, if nothing else, will help our country eventually correct this maddening wayward course, and move forward from the wreckage of this moment.

This is not about the tax-cut, please, nor the stock market nor your 401K. It’s about the damage being done to our republic and our freedom by a selfish regime using intentional disruption, calculated outrage, and its reckless embrace of bad people whose bad behavior is enabled when this wrong leader undermines our social order.

Our history will need a full record of what has happened here. For our children’s sake, at least, there must one day be a means for remembering what occurred in this time of gross distortion and why it all mattered so much.

o

What will the 2020 election say about the soul of our country?

All we can know is ourselves – what’s in our own individual hearts.

We cannot even know what’s in our neighbors’ hearts, or the folks who live in other states - at least not until there’s an election. This is also part of the particular wreckage of Trump’s very intentional and cynical program to undermine our confidence in law enforcement, traditional news media, and essential alliances.

I no longer wonder in my own heart about Trump the man. We know him now and his limitations, because he has daily shown us. We now fully grasp what and who he is, his pathologies, and where his true loyalties lie.

No. What I worry about most, here at the end of 2019, is what the election of next November will confirm about the rest of us.

Are we, the American people, as I hope, truly better than our President’s behavior? Or has his campaign to daily divide and destroy all our norms been successful to the point we doubt ourselves and fear each other and dread the futue?

In politics, one old saw is that nothing clarifies things like a good election. But even our hope of that, in this time of Trump, seems suspect when millions more who can vote are wrongly purged of their registrations because in some states the wrong people are in charge of elections, or too many become irretrievably weary of the whole mess and just stay home. In eleven months, we shall see.

My most favorite Americans now are the activists who help register voters, fight against the unfair purges, and work to make voting places more accessible, not less.

My least favorite people are those paralyzed members of Congress who cannot free themselves from the quagmire, who fear losing their Washington jobs because Trump in his thin-skinned anger takes it all personally. That is a truly dark predicament for our democracy.

o

But we cannot let go of our hope.

My hope is that before next Christmas, it will be the courageous ones who will have triumphed – that a robust voter turnout will put an end to this destructive madness, that one good election fully participated in will re-confirm what it means to be an American.

We shall see. Until then, I am done being quiet.

'Just When We Needed You Most'

The shrinkage of America’s print newspapers – both in number and content – could not have come at a worse time. 

Watching it shrink has been painful for me for at least three reasons, two of them personal but the third extremely public and even dangerous for our republic:

1.    Newspaper journalism is how I grew up and made my own living, from the summer after high school through my twenties.

2.    The Tennessean was where I learned many of my own early life-lessons about human nature, and where I also made some of my best life-long friends.

3.    Without a vigilant well-staffed news media, our governments at all levels are essentially un-watched, un-scrutinized, un-challenged. Historically, that’s why some have called newspapers and television news “the Fourth Estate” for their integral role in how a proper democracy ought to work.

I’ll admit those first two points are personal for me, bordering on heartfelt nostalgia this many years later. But that third reason is the main one and ought to concern us all.

A recent report from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the U.S. has lost nearly 2,000 newspapers over the past 15 years. It’s not a new phenomenon, but the trend appears to be accelerating, and the concentration of media ownership bodes for even more shrinkage.

It’s easy to see why this is happening – and is probably irreversible. Nationally, newspaper revenues have been walloped by the internet. Some newspapers closed, others have seen their newsroom staffs cut back – meaning fewer editors, reporters, photographers – to keep the operating books balanced for the sake of investor profitability.

Smaller staffs can mean either shallower coverage or fewer issues questioned and reported, and more likely both.

The only winners in all this upheaval: Crooked politicians who, because they live in shadows, escape attention. Most officials I have met are decent, upstanding, and ethical, but the trouble is never with them. It’s the marginal official, the one with flexible ethics, who thrives in darkness. Sorting out who is in which category is a fundamental function of good journalism from its perch outside government. Fewer newspapers therefore mean more darkness, allowing for more mischief hidden in the civic realm.

But there are glimmers of new hope around, and they deserve our support. One is in Nashville.

My friend Steve Cavendish, a veteran journalist, has a vision for a non-profit model for newspaper ownership. His ‘paper’ would appear online, not on newsprint, and its working capital would come from charitable donors not traditional investors who expect a dollar return. In January, Steve articulated both the current plight and also his vision for how it would work, in an important piece in the Washington Post. Read it here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/local-newspapers-have-already-been-decimated-theres-nothing-left-to-cut/2019/01/25/248fe102-200d-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html

Yesterday I asked Steve how the project is going.

“We’re talking to a lot of folks now, raising money above what has already been pledged,” he told me, “and after we launch we’ll be looking to foundations for some support. We need to make sure we’re on sound financial footing, and that requires philanthropic venture capital. We have a challenge grant we're working against right now that will be a dollar-for-dollar match, so as soon we get to $1.5 million, that will become $3 million, and that will get us to our launch.”

That challenge grant is a huge step forward and obviously encouraging now for Steve and his early funders. The model can work. In fact, similar ventures are already working in a few other U.S. cities, including Memphis. (Check out the impressive new Daily Memphian.)

We all need this type of non-profit initiative to succeed and to be added to the mix, because the old for-profit model has become perilous now for our democracy and freedom. And note that I’m not referring here to the well-heeled Post and The New York Times but to the rest of the print newspapers that struggle to serve the rest of us. Among the majority of the old print newspapers, only the most concentrated ownership groups will survive and likely not with their old robust newsrooms.

Of all times over our nation’s history – just when Americans need them most – this is not the time for us to make do with less aggressive coverage of local, state and national governments. This is the time for even deeper attention and more scrutiny - not less - of what goes on in government.

That’s how the “system” was supposed to work under the First Amendment. And it still is.

Going Up Home

There is a house up in Jackson County, a very old house by our American measure, in a place called Liberty.

This is the house where my father’s mother was born in 1896. She was Mary Terrell Byrne, the youngest of ten children born to Bascom and Darthula Watts Byrne, whose own grandparents were born in Ireland. Then they “crossed over,” as folks say of The Atlantic voyage, and became some of the very earliest Tennesseans.

The Byrne family later came to be in Jackson County because of a land grant. My grandmother’s great-grandfather was on the staff of General Andrew Jackson and received the grant for war service, or so the story goes. Bascom was born in 1856 and became a tobacco farmer here. He was also the builder of this house.

Just so you know: Liberty is found near Granville, between Chestnut Mound and Flynn’s Lick, at the spot where the Shepardsville Road or State Route 290 leaves Highway 53. All of this sits in the peaceful valley down from Chestnut Mound, which rises east of Carthage or, to be precise, east of Elmwood.

A hundred years ago, in this house full of children, my grandmother was called “Mary T” and eventually “Aunt Mary T” there being so many nieces and nephews underfoot in the fullness of time. By the time I was underfoot, her brother, my great-uncle Alvis Byrne, was the owner of this place. He and his son, N.B. Byrne, who lived about 200 yards up the same road, had carried on the proud farming tradition.

Later on, my grandmother was also married in this same house, to Sherman McKeel Hunt Sr., who would become my grandfather, and they soon settled far beyond Carthage, down in Nashville, where my father was eventually born. That was long after the day Mary T had departed the family homeplace and gone away to college over in Cookeville (an extraordinary achievement for a young woman in her day, meaning 1914).

In time Mary T told me her stories, including the ones she had been told as a girl. She loved to tell them, and I loved to listen. She told how her father had felled certain trees to fashion the sturdy foundation timbers for his house. He did his work well; today, when many newer barns and homes of this region are leaning or have long fallen down, Bascom Byrne’s house stands straight and true.

My grandmother returned here often over the long years. She called it "going up home" and whenever you heard her say those words you knew exactly the place she meant. A place of warmth in its many forms - the crackling fireplace in winter, the energy about the kitchen in the mornings, the embrace of family everywhere.

o

In her later years, she shared her memories of how her father would sit on the front porch, on the side opposite the cemetery, facing the planted fields, and there he would read the newspaper and his Bible. When he looked up from his reading, to his left he could rest his eyes upon the rolling hills in the distance. In the foreground he could observe his tobacco crop in progress. To his right, he could see his barn where the harvested tobacco was hung in the upper levels and then cured or “fired” to be made ready for market, and the barnyard where the animals were tended.

That same barn, now in ruin, is where I learned to milk a cow on one of the summer “vacations” with my grandmother. But it was always Alvis’ wife Ola who did the serious milking. I remember her in the kitchen of this house, churning a portion of that milk into butter for the dinner table.

And to this day one of my most vivid memories is a scene of life and death in her back yard, between the kitchen porch and the hen house, watching Aunt Ola select a live bird from the flock and make it part of our Sunday dinner.

o

It seems to me now that I must have traveled from Nashville to Liberty three or four times a year, with my Mom and Dad in the front seat and my brothers Shawn and Kris with me in the rear. One of these regular visits was always for the family reunion, in the fall. They were always held outdoors and very well attended. The branches of the extended family tree included Spurlocks, Drapers, Willoughbys and Jareds, as well as the Byrnes and the Hunts.

In the earliest of these reunions that I can recall, I remember watching the men create the outdoor serving table in the front yard, using ropes and quilts. They would string ropes tight between the same trees every year, and upon these ropes they spread the quilts to make a colorful serving surface off the ground. On this the women would place their dishes, buffet-style. Later reunions were held indoors on proper tables, at the old Granville Elementary School, by then a senior center.

I remember summer vacation trips with my grandmother, and these would extend for a week or two. On still other visits, probably day-trips from Nashville, I remember fine dinners and afterward evenings on the porch. I can still close my eyes now and see the glow of the tips of the adults’ cigarettes and hear the murmur of their grown-up conversation, in darkness, as a ritual for ending the day. The children felt lucky to be up that late. There was no TV, and we didn’t require it.

On the overnight stays, at the end of the evening there was the warmth of the feather bed and the knowledge that the chamber-pot was available on the floor underneath. That pot was important; it spared you the long cold walk to the outhouse in the dark. I was truly a city boy, but somehow I don’t remember thinking of these procedures as inconveniences at the time.

o

Memories of this house always come to me at Christmas-time.

How, as a boy, I would watch my Dad step onto the porch and leave with the other men to go hunting. Alvis (whom we called “Uncle Bud”) and N.B. would take the squirrel rifle that hung over a door inside the house and the shotgun that rested above the mantle over the fireplace, both kept up high where no children could reach. (The shotgun was mainly used to fetch mistletoe for the house at Christmas; one of the men would blast a clump of it out of the tall trees, where it grew in abundance.)

I always wanted to go with the men on their hunting trips, of course, but was too little for the danger. But then came one later December morning when my Dad said I could go with them on the hunt. I put on my coat and stepped off the porch as they did. I proudly marched in the rear of the file, and followed along carefully through the chilly woods, as we hiked up the hill behind the house.

No species was even close to being endangered that day; I believe we came back empty-handed, and for the men I’m sure it was just another uneventful morning. For me, it was a grand adventure, and a kind of confirmation. Somehow, in my adolescent mind anyway, this surely had something to do with becoming a man.

The memory of that long-ago morning, and maybe those same sounds and smells and feelings, were in my head some forty years later, when I returned to these same woods with my son Zach. By then he was a young teenager with his own hunting license, and we rediscovered the same trail through the brush and autumn leaves.

We hiked up the same steep hill to its top.

o

In the Byrne family cemetery, the headstones all face homeward.

These markers stand worn by weather and time, and they tell of at least three generations of our ancestors (Bascom and his Darthula included) who came to their final rest here. The ancient stones are silent memorials to those generations and also to the hardness of life, bearing the names of at least two of our early family who passed as infants.

And on some of the stones are carved the words of our faith:

“We will meet again.”

Thankful All Week

I like to think of myself as a generally positive person, and also a grateful person. Not that I show it sufficiently, but I try.

It’s one reason I enjoy Thanksgiving Day so much. Friends and family, especially children and grandchildren, together with great food and fine memories, make for the best of times. All things considered, it’s my favorite time of the year.

I admit I take little enough time through the rest of the year to remind myself to smile often enough and say “Thanks” and to count my own blessings. (Maybe that’s true for you, too? Maybe not.) But I’m certain the wider world could use a little more gratitude now. It’s something we do for each other.

It’s Sunday evening as I write these words, and I’ve made up my mind to not wait until Thanksgiving Day. I am resolving to be thankful all week, not just on Thursday.

So here goes, my list for the whole week. I am hereby thankful for…

• My family - and my grandchildren especially.

• My life – first, that I still have it and, second, how well it’s gone to this point. Generally speaking.

• That you can have your opinion, and I can have mine - and how we don’t have to agree on everything.

• Freedom. Democracy. Justice.

• The four seasons - the time of the year, not the hotel or the quartet.

• Sunshine when it appears (which it did this morning).

• People who are honest (which is almost all of us).

• People who help young people. The helpers are in every Tennessee community, and in abundance.

• Old friends, and also new friends.

• Teachers.

• Librarians.

• All who mentor another person.

• That in my life I got to know these people, who have passed: Pat Summitt, Tommy Burnett, Leonard Bradley, Lewis Donelson, Howard Baker, Anna Belle Clement O’Brien, Bronson Ingram, David Williams, Lewis Lavine, Jerry Adams, Jane Eskind, Dick Fulton, Charlie Cardwell, Clayton McWhorter, Jim Fyke, Douglas Henry, and Francis Guess. Bless them all, every one.

• That before I knew any of those I first got to know John Seigenthaler, and that my own time working at The Tennessean (1967-1977) was in the time of his watch. To this day I am thankful for the years of his towering influence.

• Music. Any and all.

• Dogs, cats, and horses.

• That we don’t read the words ‘It City’ and ‘Secret Sauce’ so much anymore. Mercifully.

• The Smoky Mountains - where I personally ‘lift up mine eyes...’

• Fishing (especially in the Smoky Mountains).

• Dolly Parton

• Vince Gill.

• Tennessee place names - especially Bugscuffle, Chesnut Mound, Flynn’s Lick, Cage’s Bend, Station Camp, Castalian Springs, Defeated, Only, Red Boiling Springs, Liberty, Gruetli-Laager, Bucksnort, Difficult – and of course Nutbush (the birthplace, after all, of Tina Turner).

• That we all (or, from where I sit, most of us anyway) have a sense of humor. Which helps us all get by.

• And did I mention grandchildren?

Upstairs, Downstairs

Things came to something of a head yesterday in the obviously still-evolving relationship between Governor Bill Lee’s administration and the re-constituted leadership of the state House.

It all unfolded over three hours in a pair of legislative committee meetings, one of them quite contentious.

The first was an organizational meeting of the new TANF Working Group, established last Friday by Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and new House Speaker Cameron Sexton. The two speakers acted in response to a still-exploding controversy over those unspent millions in idle surplus in the state’s fund for needy families.

As the Working Group members got themselves organized, both McNally and Sexton sat there with them – observing in silence, and great dignity. This signaled the authority of their offices and also the high-profile seriousness of the task ahead. 

In the second meeting, House Finance Committee members flatly blistered the Lee administration’s commissioner of human services, Danielle Barnes, for sidestepping the legislature on Tuesday when her department announced its own solution to the TANF trouble without any legislative input.

Members of the important House Finance Committee were respectful of Commissioner Barnes but were nonetheless sharply critical of why the administration insisted on a unilateral fix to the TANF surplus. Senior members took turns grilling her (remember, these are mostly all Republicans) and it went on like that for nearly two hours. All Ms. Barnes could do, it seemed, was to apologize and promise to do better. If anyone from the Governor’s staff was in the room, none spoke up and came to her assistance.

From my seat in the gallery, it was not a good afternoon – nor a good look – for the Lee administration. My observations:

1.    Normally, for a new governor anyway, your Transition is wrapped up before your Honeymoon ends with the legislature. But the Lee administration, ten months in, still looks to be in transition insofar as basic legislative protocols. True, the governor filled all the big-shot Cabinet posts early on - that’s the fun part - but the rancor of yesterday suggested other basic procedures are unsettled as yet.

2.    This Transition needs to be over, and soon. Otherwise there may be more hiccups and stumbles in the learning curve of how best to make good policy. (Remember that narrow win on school vouchers last session? That was a honeymoon gift to a new governor. Honeymoons never last into a second session.)

3.    The unfinished work was simply less visible during the first ten months of this year. Through the winter, spring, and most of the summer, the House was going through a highly visible and tortured time of internal regime change. All the headlines coming out of Capitol Hill were about Rep. Glen Casada’s failed speakership and its associated scandals, and then the ins-and-outs of who (mercifully) would succeed him. Once Sexton was anointed by the majority GOP caucus members, that long-running uproar died down.

4.    Speaker Sexton got his own team established rather quickly – not only naming new committees and chairs but also traveling widely across the long state, personally visiting House members in their own communities. He has given the House a fresh start.

5.    Sexton is also much in the same vein as McNally, the speaker of the Senate. Sexton will tell you McNally was an important mentor in his life, and this mutual respect was visible yesterday. Their relationship may exert a leavening effect on any disruptions to come - or so it seems this morning.

6. The two speakers and the seven members they jointly appointed to the new Working Group are among the most senior – and the most distinguished – members of the legislature. The same could be said of the Finance Committee, too. Sidestepping all these on Tuesday was not a smart choice for the Lee team, especially on the matter of TANF non-spending, which legislators have been hearing plenty about from constituents back home.

7.    Looking ahead, the Capitol Hill press corps might keep a close eye on how Lee, McNally, Sexton and their staffs actually move forward from this fracas. Otherwise, we will observe the old political story of “legislative independence” open a new chapter.

As the TANF funding problem is sorted out in the coming months, this week might turn out to have been a valuable measurement of how much work remains to be done between the first and second floors at the capitol.

TANF non-spending and the citizens who genuinely need help remain the foremost concerns here, not legislative relations and protocols, but how this first scandal is resolved could well affect how a lot of other problem-solving goes in the upcoming 2020 session of the 111th General Assembly.

The best plan for putting the TANF surplus to work should be more than just some fast-spending outlays with of a portion of the idle money. Taxpayers deserve some answers to hard questions about why this surplus – now approaching a billion dollars, and higher than all other states’ – swelled so high in the first place. Even disbursing most of it doesn’t feel like the full explanation.

It would be best to see a cooperative approach to all that, and soon, with the leaders of the state’s executive and legislative branches actually working together.

The Sudden Scandal

Twenty-five years ago Tennessee’s governor and legislature enacted the ‘Families First’ program – bringing the management of the old AFDC welfare program from Washington to the state capitol.

It was a bipartisan policy breakthrough encouraged by Congress and the Clinton administration. To this day, Tennessee’s version is still regarded as a bold policy move that brought administration of a vital assistance program closer to home. Even Governor Don Sundquist’s harshest critics on other policy issues will tell you ‘Families First’ was one of his best achievements.

Connected to this program was a targeted funding mechanism called ‘Temporary Assistance to Needy Families’ (TANF).

It’s the TANF fund that is now gripped in controversy. Commendably, the Beacon Institute and The Tennessean have brought to light how the TANF fund now has a surplus hundreds of millions of unspent dollars. All tolled, the surplus is approaching a billion dollars.

These are funds that might have been disbursed to single-parent families needing child care, which has become a crisis of its own in communities across Tennessee.

It appears the climb to that breathtaking level began in the 2014 budget year.

I know many of us get carried away with the boom time in the capitol city, but in six years did nearly a billion dollars worth of Tennessee families in need just vanish? I don’t think so. We don’t have to look too far, either around the state nor down at street level even in Nashville to see real families struggling with real needs.

So this huge surplus is now an urgent question for both Gov. Bill Lee’s administration and leaders in the General Assembly. Last Friday, the speakers of the General Assembly – Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton – jointly appointed a working group of seven members to get to the bottom of all this. Kudos to them all for take prompt action on this sudden scandal.

Tennessee families in need deserve help, not hoarding, and taxpayers deserve some straight answers to some overdue hard questions.

To my eye, there are seven central questions that need answering now. See my Tennessean column, online this morning at https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/11/19/tanf-working-group-must-find-out-how-sudden-scandal-happened/4238807002/

'The Daily'

When I was a graduate student in Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, one of my work-study tasks at Fisk Hall was to work with undergrads who staffed The Daily Northwestern.

They didn’t require much guidance from me. Then, as now, these were very bright young women and men, aspiring to professional careers someday as correspondents and editors, and it was fun interacting with them in the Daily newsroom.

By that time, I had been on staff at The Tennessean in Nashville through my own college years, and I’d meanwhile been editor of our student newspaper at MTSU. The fall before I arrived on Medill’s Evanston campus, I’d also been The Tennessean’s Washington correspondent.

I am thinking of that cold winter on the Lake Michigan shore now, because I’ve been reading the news of a student journalism fracas this week up at NU. It’s reminding me how important journalism training is for any new generation - and for students to receive the wisdom of elders.

Here’s what happened: The current student editor and undergrad reporters for the Daily stirred an important controversy with their coverage of a campus visit by the controversial former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Read the New York Times report here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/business/media/northwestern-university-newspaper.html

Now, granted I was nowhere close, but from all I’ve read the student journalists did a good job covering the Sessions event and the immediate reaction to it. They not only reported what Mr. Sessions had to say, but went the extra mile and sought out what students in the crowd thought of it all, including their comments on the behavior of activists who protested. 

Then the complaints began. Other students objected to the Daily’s conduct, saying it was improper to seek out and quote the comments of bystanders. And then, oddly, the student editor apologized, publishing his mea culpa.

Criticism of newspapers and reporting is nothing new. The best journalists have always required thick skin and broad shoulders. I’d say this student editor was a little quick on the trigger saying he was sorry.

Then yesterday the Dean of the Medill School, Charles Whitaker, weighed in with this https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/news/2019/statement-from-dean-whitaker.html The dean made a learning moment of a tense situation.

Why is any of this relevant to us down here in Tennessee?

Because it’s reminding me how valuable formal journalism training, combined with street experience, is these days – and how vital it always is, in the process, to have seasoned faculty advisers lending good perspective and instilling good confidence along the way. (In my own grad school time at Medill, we were blessed with an outstanding faculty; they included, among many others, our Dean Sig Mickelson, the former CBS News president who had hired Walter Cronkite, and Professor John Bartlow Martin, the biographer of Adlai Stevenson - and who probably had the most direct influence on me and what I would do later).

In all our communities we need boldness in news coverage today, not timidity. When reporters truly err, there should always be a prompt correction and apology as needed. But that did not happen in this instance on the lakeshore. Nor did it need to.

No one need ever apologize when a good job is properly done.

Quid pro...Go!

Of all the ins and outs of this gnarly impeachment thicket, there’s one thing I’m now 100 percent certain about: People need to stop saying “quid pro quo” for goodness’ sakes.

Honestly, it helps nobody. It makes the people who can’t stop repeating it look like idiots. (Washington types manage to accomplish that well enough on their own.) And it just confuses the rest of us. It must go.

First of all, nobody who isn’t a lawyer or a retired Latin teacher has the faintest clue what “quid pro quo” even means. (I looked it up. It means, in English, “How soon can he be gone?”) 

But DC news reporters seem to love the stilted phrase and can’t look away from it, like they’ve discovered a new hieroglyph on the wall of a pyramid in the Valley of the Kings. On TV and radio especially, they cannot stop saying it, as if they had all the air-time in the world.

Lawyers naturally adore any chance to pepper their speeches and documents with obscure Latinate words and phrases. For lawyers this is understandable behavior; they can bill extra hours for translating (back into English) what they’ve just written or said in the other language. Do law schools advocate this?

Saying “quid pro quo” doesn’t make you sound smart. It makes you sound lost. This is not good thinking on the part of either reporters or struggling politicians. Some of both have enough trouble coming off as smart on their best days.

Finally, the thing is hard to pronounce. Go ahead, stand in front of a mirror and try saying “quid pro quo” three times really fast, without laughing. Latin became a dead language for a reason.

This whole impeachment thing is hard enough to follow without confusing us with needless weird words. And, please, why use three words when one will do.

I say, Give us less Latin, and more plain English. Just call that Ukraine thing by what it was: Extortion.

Readers Sound Off, on Reading

No recent column I have written has drawn as much positive feed-back as last Sunday’s piece with my “Reading List for a troubled Time.” Turns out a lot of us feel rather strongly about the civic anchoring that important books, plays, speeches and films can provide.

If you didn’t catch it in the Sunday newspaper (or maybe you didn’t work your way through all the ads, pop-up videos and other interruptions that keep Tennessean.com on the air), no problem. You can read it now. Just scroll down this page and click on the most recent Field Note (“Words that Matter…”).

Many readers responded by direct email with a simple “Thank you” (always much appreciated). Others suggested their own favorite titles to add to my list. I value this kind of engagement with readers - and for that I “Thank you” back. A few examples:

Andy Brennan, the affable store manager at Parnassus Books in Nashville, told me he planned to “make a display with some of these titles.”

Joel Wallace tweeted about another notable speech with a Tennessee connection: President Kennedy’s 1963 address at Vanderbilt University. (Joel also said that speech was first recommended to him by Bill Purcell, the former mayor of Nashville.) The president brought a powerful message to Dudley Field that day, about the responsibilities of educated citizens. Two other readers told me they had been there that day. Hear JFK now, at this link: https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkvanderbiltconvocation.htm

The lawyer Nathan Ridley wrote to me quoting words from George Washington’s Farewell Address, in which our first president warned against the rise of political parties.

Dr. Ming Wang, the Nashville eye surgeon, made this comment in an email: “Even though we do have a democratic society, the important prerequisite is that we must have an informed public. Our knowledge and independent thinking today are short-circuited by brief soundbites and sensational images on the media. We need to read much more, to learn about where we have come from as a human race, what we have learnt, and what we should do!”

Amen to that.

In a troubled and sometimes angry time like ours, we most need to meet on some common ground. We can find it through familiarity with the great written works of history, of fiction and nonfiction, and of theatre and film - and by engaging with each other about what we have read and appreciate. This is what book clubs do, and it is what the best teachers lead our children and grandchildren to do, too. To find these source documents and their lessons for this turbulent age, ask a librarian. Librarians are some of my favorite people. (More to come on that, another day.)

Today is a prime time for reading the wisdom of the world, in its many forms: essays from antiquity, novels of the Enlightenment, the great speeches on freedom and democracy and what democracy requires of citizens and our leaders. By extension, they can also help us keep clear about our fundamental bearings as a nation.

Here are Seven Reasons to Read Broadly:

• To recall where we’ve come from.

• To reset our nation’s compass back to level.

• To know the most important lessons of our world with the help of historians and novelists, playwrights and poets.

• To be reminded how civilizations rose – and how some saw (too late) their societies seized by tyrants.

• To remember our shared meanings of words not their opposites – that up is not down, and down is not up.

• To keep clear about the plumb line that tells the difference between good and bad, and divides the proper from the corrupt.

• To see how we all count, how even our newest neighbors have great worth, too. All make us strong not weak.

Thanks for your help with this. I wish us all Good Reading, and good progress on our path to Common Ground.

Words that Matter: Reading List for a Troubled Time

Books are for reading and sharing – not for burning. Let’s start with that.

The news of that ridiculous book-burning last week on a Georgia campus (where a group of students couldn’t find a better way to protest the views of its author) got me to thinking:

In a society that values free expression – e.g. ours – isn’t it much better to consume a book with eyeballs and conversation than with gasoline and matches? Of course it is.

And that got me thinking: What are the best things to read, from any age? With so much stoked-up anger in our U.S. society today, what might be the most helpful works for any of us to read (or re-read) to assess what’s happening now?

In the canon of great books, films and plays there are many that might have prepared us all better to understand and navigate through this current time of weak, fearful or distorted leadership. Great works of literature that were built on solid thought have given us good anchors over long history. They take many forms: Novels, memoirs, plays, letters, speeches. They can be guideposts when our path grows dim. Like now.

President Trump daily injects chaos, discord and disarray. His impulsive nature and one-man decisions are eroding our norms, as he assaults our institutions and upends the world order. His fanning of flames, his way with large crowds – these are, well, scary.

But such men have occasionally appeared over human history. Other impetuous leaders – unread and unwise – have held power before. Reading broadly, if we will, helps the rest of us get a grip.

We need wise leaders, women and men with good hearts and correct bearings, and we also need informed voters. Social media aren’t getting the job done for us now, and for economic reasons too many of our traditional media have fallen away. In this current maelstrom, the wisdom of the world is still found in the great published works, in our sacred texts and in secular fiction and nonfiction. The good news is: We can read again the classics of antiquity, the great novels of history, and our treasury of drama for stage and screen.

The great tales of freedom and democracy; the literature of social movements; stories of struggle, persecution, loss and triumph, of how civilizations have risen and flourished, and how they declined – these can remind us of old lessons for our world to remember now and to heed.

What texts are valuable to you? Here’s a few dozen from my list:

Books & Other Texts

• Psalm 23

• Federalist 51

• Advise & Consent by Allen Drury

• Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• George Orwell’s 1984

• It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

• Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

• Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz

• In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

• Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl

• Night by Elie Wiesel

• Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

• Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

• Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America

• Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance

• Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki

• JFK’s Profiles in Courage

• RFK’s The Enemy Within

• Robert Reich’s The Common Good

• Guerrillas and Generals: The Dirty War in Argentina by Paul H. Lewis

• Obama’s Dreams from My Father

• The Book of Job

Speeches

• Washington’s Farewell

• Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

• Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech

• Kennedy’s Inaugural

• Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

• Reagan’s Speech at Omaha Beach

Films & Plays

• "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"

• "Seven Days in May"

• Shakespeare’s "Macbeth," "Henry V," "Julius Caesar"

• "All the President’s Men"

• "A Face in the Crowd"

• "Elmer Gantry"

• "Network"

• "The Post"

• "Good Night, and Good Luck"

If you know these already, share them with another citizen. This is a time to help each other find steerage for this frightful journey we’re on, with perspective and nourishment for our civic soul.

Frankly, I feel some urgency about this. Things are moving fast now, and our times grow more turbulent.

I fear a hard winter is coming, and I’m not talking about the weather. We must all make ready.

o

(My sincere thanks to so many subscribers for contributing your favorite titles to this list. I am grateful.)

Reading for a Troubled Time

The news last week about a book-burning down in Georgia (a group of college students were disturbed by the views of its author) got me to thinking this:

Which books might have best prepared us to understand this current angry age we’re living through?

For an upcoming column, I’m compiling such a list (of books, plays, films) and I’d like to know what you might suggest from your own reading? Here are five on my list…

·      It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

·      Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

·      Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

·      Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki

·      In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

What titles would you add? Which works of fiction or nonfiction, old or new, would you nominate? Please email me at Keel@KeelHunt.com

Thank you.

Census, Reapportionment, Democracy

My thanks for all the responses to my US Census questions of yesterday. Most so far have come to me via direct email, which is the most helpful when mentioning specific other individuals whom I might be able to interview personally.

If you have not replied as yet, please do. That email address to reach me is: Keel@KeelHunt.com (See the previous post below for the three questions.)

The Census will commence in just three months, and it will lay the foundation for how reapportionment (the re-drawing of congressional and state legislative district maps) will be done in the following year. All of this is relevant to how democracy is intended to work in our nation.

The longer piece I’m working on is about this formulation: Full-count Census + Fair Reapportionment = Representative Democracy.

It’s all connected.

Count Us All

Just a short post this morning, to ask your help with a timely research project…

I’m working on a new piece about an upcoming sequence of important events. These may seem distant now but will, in fact, have much to do with our democracy in America over the coming decade. It will happen like this:

Step 1: The 2020 US Census

Step 2: Reapportionment by the Legislature in 2021

Step 3: New Congressional Districts for 2022

Especially Step 1 is of immediate significance now. There has been much controversy about the government’s approach to this next Census. In many states, officials are concerned that there be full participation in the 2020 count that will commence just 12 weeks from now. (In Georgia, for instance, there is a movement underway to ensure that African-Americans are not undercounted.)

The Census – which occurs only once a decade – affects everything from your representation in Congress to the allocation of federal funding for schools and law enforcement to planning by the private sector that drives the placement of new plants and jobs.

My questions for now are these:

A.   What do you remember from the last Census, in 2010?

B.   Did you personally participate in the Census in 2010?

C.   Do you know anyone who was NOT counted in 2010?

You can respond in the ‘Comments’ here on this page, or via direct email to me at Keel@KeelHunt.com. If you can connect me with specific individuals relative to Question C (for interview purposes) please email me privately.

Thanks for your consideration.

Words Matter

Whichever side you take on this hot topic of President Trump, Ukraine and impeachment, I have a modest proposal that maybe we can all agree on.

As fellow Americans in a stressful time, the least we can do for each other is agree on some essential vocabulary. By this I mean some of the key words being tossed around publicly now, and what they factually mean.

Over the past week, Mr. Trump has used language that most of us would have deemed incendiary at an earlier time. I read them as incendiary now. So I think it’s worth clarifying the meaning of these five words as the whole national discussion moves forward:

Treason: The US Constitution (see Article III, Section 3) defines treason as waging war against one’s country, adhering to the nation’s enemies, or giving them aid and comfort. Wherever this might have happened, we deserve to know the facts.

Traitor: One who commits treason. Nothing less.

Whistle-blower: A whistle-blower is one who has information of wrongdoing within an organization. Such a person may fear reprisal from a superior by sharing anything outside normal channels, so federal law gives whistle-blowers protection against such reprisals. Congressional intent was to make them part of law enforcement, to ferret out wrongdoing from the inside, not put them in physical danger. A whistle-blower is not a traitor.

Impeachment: This word does not mean removal of an official from his elected office. It means a finding of misconduct via an inquiry into what exactly has happened. When the focus is on the President, the inquiry itself will be a divisive process. It’s also regrettable that the country has to be put through this now, but voters deserve the truth.

Coup: Let’s be careful here. The word means the sudden overthrow of a government. This obviously hasn’t happened, yet Mr. Trump this week used this term in a reckless way. In America’s current heated environment, it sounds like a dangerous incitement.

This week there have been other inflammatory words (beware the references to “spies” and “civil war” by a defensive White House and its partisan defenders) but these five will do for now.

Words matter. Words can be weaponized. Certain words, wrongly applied, can incite weaker minds to disastrous action. Much of this behavior also looks consistent with Mr. Trump’s pattern (learned from his mentor, the late Roy Cohn) of deny/dodge/distract to get yourself out of real trouble when the facts close in.

For now, we all just need to be careful out there.

Ten Governors, One Jerry Adams

Our friend Bill Bradley has sent word this weekend that Jerry Adams has died.

This is a profound loss, not only to Jerry’s family and his many friends and colleagues, but to uncountable thousands who served in Tennessee state government over ten administrations that relied on his vast institutional memory.

For more than 50 years, Jerry worked on state government budgets and served for most of that time as the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Finance & Administration. Governors and Cabinets change, as do members and leaders of the General Assembly, but Jerry did not change. He was a rock.

Year in and year out, Jerry knew the state budgets inside and out, knew the agencies and their managers, and understood the big picture, too. That is always complicated work – some years moreso than others depending on the shifting winds of politics at the Capitol – but Jerry was always the unflappable, calm, professional near the center of any storm. From 1962 until his retirement, in 2008, Jerry had 46 years of active service. Then he worked part-time in the Budget Office for another eleven years, applying his knowledge and memory to revenue estimates, budget overviews, bond finance and debt issues, and the drafting of new legislation. All tolled, he was a central figure in state administration for 57 years.

As Deputy Commissioner, he was the foremost example to me of stability in state government. This was true in many departments, where the Deputy Commissioner is like a chief operating officer. They are the non-political professionals who are almost never in the news but provide the essential element of continuity as administrations change. New governors will often appoint political friends they know to the top jobs as Commissioners. The Commissioner then is typically the public face of the department, with the Deputy less visible but always helping smooth the periodic transitions from one administration to the next. These largely unseen leaders provide the necessary institutional knowledge to keep the agency rolling forward.

Over parts of six decades of Jerry Adam’s long career, there were many storms, and behind the scenes Jerry helped to navigate most of them. He worked in the central budget office during the terms of ten different governors: Frank Clement, Buford Ellington, Winfield Dunn, Ray Blanton, Lamar Alexander, Ned McWherter, Don Sundquist, Phil Bredesen, Bill Haslam, and Bill Lee. In 1974, during the last few months of Dunn’s term, Jerry also served as Commissioner (the top official) over the F&A department. 

It was my good fortune to know Jerry Adams and to work with him as a colleague from 1979 to the middle of 1986, and as a friend for long after that. If you’re a Tennessean, it was your good fortune too that he was on the job whether you knew Jerry or not.

From time to time, maybe only once a decade, you read of some low official who seems intent on giving state government a bad name. (It was the legislature’s turn in the footlights this year.) But that rare bad actor is only a tiny fraction of all the conscientious men and women who have served.

Jerry Adams was an exemplar, a professional, and a role model for all the rest. He gave government and its bureaucracy their good name.

Just Do Your Job

Saturday morning, wondering if all that we’ve seen and read over the past 36 hours is how the Trump story begins to end. A few thoughts on the unfolding Ukrainegate, for your weekend consideration…

1. The One-Man Show at the White House: No advisors he trusts or heeds other than those on-screen folks at ‘Fox & Friends.’ The word ‘hubris’ comes to mind this morning – how extreme pride and arrogance can lead to downfall of the main character. All very Greek classical. Very American, too, in our current day.

2. Impeachment: It’s important now that everybody have the same correct understanding of what “impeachment” means and what it doesn’t. It does not mean removal of an official from his elected office; it may lead to that but first it is an inquiry into what the facts are. It will be divisive, yes, even disruptive, but these past few days have surfaced some shocking details. The questions now, as Senator Howard H. Baker of Tennessee famously asked in the Senate Watergate Committee, are ‘What did the President know, and when did he know it?’

3. What This President Knew: Don’t have to look too far. Mr. Trump himself seems to have cleared up much of that answer before the weekend in the information he sent to Congress. (This time, the smoking gun came to the Hill by White House courier.) But not the whole story, obviously. An impeachment inquiry will need to dig much deeper: Who said what to whom? What was the context?

4. Everybody Needs To Do His Own Job Now: This is not a chess game. Don’t assume what the next guy will do with what you must do. That’s been one maddening aspect to all this so far: From Speaker to county chairman, the constant comments about how impeachment is a fool’s errand, because the Republican Senate will never convict the Republican president. That doesn’t matter now; Republican senators will be called on to do their duty, in due course, but House members have their duty to discharge now. (All will be judged by voters in due course.) What matters now is a factual understanding about what happened with Trump and the Ukraine president. The House needn’t do the Senate’s job. Do your own job. Do it fully and well. Please.

5. The Bottom Line: If our president has tried to extort (look it up) a foreign leader for his own low re-election purposes, then an historically grave breach of duty has occurred. The very idea of it feels like treason to me.

This is no longer about partisan politics. No longer about Republicans one-upping the Democrats. Nor is this about who gets re-elected in Congress. This is about the national interest and faithfulness to basic duty. This is about honesty and character - or the lack of it. This is about boundaries, guard-rails, and the foundational fabric of our country.

Do you want to know what happened in this sordid mess, or do you not?

I do.

New Footnote to 1984

Yesterday afternoon in Murfreesboro, Al Gore got some tongues wagging with a tantalizing new footnote to Tennessee’s history of bipartisan cooperation in the 1980s.

The scene at MTSU was a well-attended book launch for the new biography of Al’s dad, the late Senator Albert Gore Sr. Its distinguished author, the historian Anthony Badger, and former Vice President Gore were featured on a 90-minute panel discussion about the elder Gore’s life and politics.

One of the panelists, History Professor Mary Evins, asked Al to talk about the influence of his mother, the late Pauline Gore, on the political careers of father and son. The son spoke effusively about his accomplished mom, who had been the first woman graduate of Vanderbilt’s School of Law and was a shrewd political thinker in her own right.

Gore also told the audience how Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., the eminent Republican, had had a long friendship with the Gore family, all Democrats. That much we knew.

What we didn’t know was what Al shared next. He spoke of a pair of sensitive, secretive phone calls that Baker placed to Mrs. Gore in the tumultuous political year of 1984 – a year that was freighted with a mixture of high-profile speculations that churned the state’s politics. Among that year’s big questions were these:

-      Was it possible President Ronald Reagan might not seek a second term in the White House? If yes, might Baker now run for President?

-      Would that mean the young Congressman Al Gore of Carthage, then representing the 4th District, might make a statewide run for Baker’s Senate seat?

-      Might Lamar Alexander, the young Republican governor just then beginning his second term at the state capitol, also run for Baker’s seat – thus setting up a spectacular Gore-Alexander contest? (I was then on Alexander’s governor’s staff and remember thinking that I hoped this would never happen; Alexander was my boss and friend, while Gore was a friend from our newspaper days, both with keen intellects and gifts for public service, and I worried that a head-to-head race would mean Tennessee would certainly lose one of them.)

This was, after all, a time in Tennessee politics when strong candidates of both parties were in play. But Baker, meanwhile, was keeping his own cards close about seeking another term.

Yesterday, Gore intrigued some among the older politicos inside MTSU’s Tucker Theatre when he described two telephone calls that Baker himself had placed to Pauline Gore that season, asking that she keep secret what he was about to share, but to share it with her son. She agreed.

Call 1: Baker confided to her a decision he had made but would not announce for another two weeks: He had decided he would not be running for another term. He knew this information would have great implications for the Gore family, whom he respected.

Call 2: Two weeks later, Baker called again. This time he told Mrs. Gore that Gov. Alexander would also announce shortly that he would not run for Senate in that year either. (Alexander eventually ran for Senate in 2002, when he won his current seat.)

This revelation was just a couple of minutes out of a much longer program. But as the campus event adjourned yesterday, many of us there found ourselves asking each other, “Did you know that story, about those phone calls?” “Had you known Baker disclosed all that to Mrs. Gore when he did?” All the answers I heard to these questions were “No.” At a post-event reception on campus, I asked Gore to confirm that I had heard him correctly. I had.

This morning I caught up with Senator Alexander also. I asked him what he knew of Baker’s “across the aisle” phone calls to Mrs. Gore in 1984. Surely Baker, his long-time mentor, would have coordinated very carefully with him on such sensitive political communications with the Other Side.

“I didn’t know about the calls,” Lamar told me. “I knew Howard was close to Pauline Gore. And he was always reaching out to Democrats. He specialized in having good relationships with people on both sides of the aisle. It doesn’t surprise me a bit that he would call Pauline.”

“Baker had recruited me over time to be his successor,” Alexander added. “Reagan had even talked to me about it. But I decided pretty promptly that I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t a hard decision for me, when I had a chance to be governor for another four years. I wanted to finish the job. I thought it was wrong to ask the people for the job and then not finish the job.”

In the end, of course, President Reagan ran for a second term and was re-elected. Baker did not seek a fourth Senate term. Gore ran, won, and took Baker’s seat in the upper chamber. And the race between Alexander and Gore never happened.

Why is such an old footnote so interesting to me now, half my lifetime later?

Because today our politics – so hyper-partisan and hardened in its spirit now, so nationalized and fierce in its tone – just isn’t like that anymore.

Across the Big Water

Been away for a few days, across the wide Atlantic, and as always I am struck by the perspective that the separation of an ocean gives a traveler.

It’s not only the great distance that figures into this – a vast remove of miles and time zones from the routines of home – but also the fresh wisdom that we draw from new friends we meet on the far side of a great divide.

Take the delightful Brit couple we met at dinner, sitting at the next table. She noted our accents and inquired about our hometown. In a moment she asked where exactly Tennessee is. To our questions, she spoke movingly about the treat of an opera festival she and her husband had experienced in Lucca the week before. Not an opera buff, she admitted, but she also told how Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” aria had brought her to tears.

Or the gracious Italian couple who invited us to lunch in their home in Panzano, in the hilly terrain of the Chianti region, not so unlike the highlands of East Tennessee though at a higher latitude. This was a day trip, by bouncing bus, and once there we shared a midday meal and family stories.

She spoke of her mother, born in Austria in the time of gathering darkness, who became the only survivor of the Holocaust in her own immediate family. (The very thought that there are Holocaust deniers at large in the world seems immediately cruel and stupid. To this day, the generations of extended families still suffer as no one else can ever know.)

In so many European capitals the scale of time and history are of a different order than in youthful America. From many trips ago, we have a friend in Paris who once remarked: “In Europe, when we say ‘old’ we mean really old. When you Americans say ‘far’ you mean really far.”

Politics still intrudes in conversations even across the Atlantic. Not the minutiae of city elections but the constant puzzlements of Washington and London, too. The most common comparisons one hears now, in fact, are those between the American President Donald Trump and the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, each one so anti-historical in his own nation. One hears of their low success rates on policy, their strings of rejections by courts and their respective houses of representatives, the rash decisions, and how the more complex economic questions – Boris on Brexit, Donald on trade – have seemed to baffle them both.

One difference, at the moment, is how Parliament is standing up to the PM (six times in six days, I believe) but how the U.S. Senate so caves, with no courage or stomach for telling Trump no. Defiance on the one side of the pond, cowardice on the other.

Lament for a Former World

The word came overnight, from our friend Beverly Burnett, letting us know that Frank Empson has died.

The note she forwarded, from the Tennessean chief photographer Larry McCormack, was respectful but not long. Frank, who had been a long-time staff photographer at our newspaper, was in his 80s by now. As must be the case with many who have not worked at 1100 Broadway in multiple decades, I gather not much was known about Frank anymore by the young current staff.

When I met him, in 1967, Frank was already a fixture on the Tennessean’s award-winning photography team. He and his colleagues, who operated out of the old photo department and lab in the basement, were also an assortment of genuine characters. All of them were excellent shooters but differed wildly in style and personality. I remember Frank as probably the most ‘normal’ one. He was chiefly a pro, not chiefly a prankster, as many were. He was always a nice man, eager to help a cub still wet behind the ears.

During this pre-digital period the chief photographers were Bill Preston, later Jack Corn, then Jimmy Ellis (when Corn joined the journalism department faculty up at Western Kentucky U). Frank became the chief himself a few years later. The full cast through my time there (1967-77) ranged from the photo-stylists Terry Tomlin, Gerald Holly, Joe Rudis, Nancy Rhoda, Tipper Gore, and Bill Welch, to the authentic police-beat shooters Dale Ernsberger, Billy Easley, Robert Johnson, S.A. (Tark) Tarkington, J.T. Phillips, and Jimmy Holt. Any one of these I could easily imagine as a character out of ‘The Front Page’ wearing a fedora with a press card in the hatband.

They all shot sports too, of course, from high school hoops and Friday night gridiron action to Vanderbilt and Tennessee SEC football and basketball. Phillips and Holt also doubled as sportswriters, reporting on bowling and hunting/fishing respectively. I’ll admit the Nashville Banner had great shooters too (go see their work at the Nashville Public Library, in the Civil Rights Room) but The Tennessean was where I lived.

When the action came, usually in the dark of night at a morning newspaper, the veterans on the photo staff could be the best escorts around town that a young cub reporter could have. Assignments came suddenly, and getting quickly to the right location was critical. Typically I would hop in the front passenger seat, and hold on for dear life.

It was the photographer who always knew the best shortcuts from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ in the city – whether to a press conference at city hall or to any sort of police situation: murder, four-alarm fire, armed robbery, gambling raid, assorted other mayhem. Their cameras aside, photographers also had the coolest communications equipment in their cars. In that era way before cell phones, the photog’s car, with a whip antenna or two on top, was typically loaded with police frequency receivers and also the ham radio unit that connected with the editor on night-desk duty back at 1100 Broad.

Thinking now of Frank Empson and all his contemporaries – that cast of assorted visual artists and comedians who live in my memory – there really ought to be a TV show about them. In my mind’s eye, it would be a sit-com about life and a sense of humor. It would look and feel like that 1980s police squad-room comedy ‘Barney Miller’ where every character was real, and every scene a scream. But in the 1100 Broad adaptation, it would all be true.

I miss Frank Empson this morning. I miss them all.

First Day of September

A slight break in the weather, a reminder to stop and reflect on how it is not all about heat, misery and perdition but also neighbors and life and dogs.

September is not my favorite month (October is, for a bunch of reasons, most involving nicer weather) but Labor Day is a turning point.

In our middle South, summer is the sluggish time. Not so harsh a heat as in the Carolina Lowcountry nor the drawling steam of New Orleans nor the breathlessness of Houston. But here there’s an impulse to hide somewhere indoors through the depths of July and August. Then a hint of a cool breeze will bring us back out, as before, especially when the zebra-shirted ref blows his whistle for the helmeted kicker to get on with it.

Speaking of, that last day of August was not a proud day in Knoxville. Least not for anybody I know, and especially for those two couples and dog on the doomed pleasure boat that burned. It had been their first run upriver with the Vol Navy, and for naught. All the five aboard survived, the News-Sentinel reports. In hindsight, the dramatic sinking might have foretold the afternoon for the Vol Boys, who would struggle for breath inside the cathedral of SEC football. They lost - sadly and badly - to Georgia State. (I’m sorry, to whom?)

September mainly puts me in mind of many positives…

Neighbors: The way so many folks get outdoors again and renew each other’s acquaintance. (Of course, this happens year-round with dog-walkers, or rather with dogs who walk their people, but as autumn deepens many others also appear when the temp comes down a tad. In September, the dogged are more likely to encounter the non-dogged.

Colors: September is the month the leaves begin to fall and blow about, and at the higher elevations all in nature turns orange and red and copper and rust.

Blessings: I think of certain amenities that that mayors and councils and donors have blessed our city with: Greenways and sidewalks, and parks, bike lanes and branch libraries. All these are fine places where people meet people, and the city gets to know itself a little better.

Fun: In September we may remember there’s a testing to come, but before winter there will be chances for picnics and handshakes and more baseball. Nothing quite like a breezy night with a hot dog and a cool one at First Tennessee Park, with friends and a view of an astonishing skyline.

Thinking of that skyline view, which takes in the State Capitol, I’m reminded that the Legislature does not meet in September, and I smile for my city.

September is the month we look back and look ahead. Back to the awful 9/11 when the world changed, yes, but also ahead in anticipation of new births, new hopes, and before we know it new elections.