By Edwin Cooney
Dated Friday, August 10th 2007
THE PRESENT, Tuesday, August 7th, 2007. As everyone knew it would, when it finally happened it only took an instant. The scoreboard clock read 8:51 p.m. Pacific Time as Washington National’s left-hander Mike Bacsik fired a fastball toward the inside corner of home plate at China Basin’s AT&T Park in San Francisco, California.
In less than three tenths of a second from the time the ball left Bacsik’s hand, Barry Bonds studied the rotation of the baseball hurdling toward the protective armature on his right elbow — and decided to swing at the ninety plus mile per hour pitch.
That decision made, Bonds had to hurl the head of his thirty-three ounce maple bat at the incoming pitch at just the right height and at the exact angle essential for solid contact by a round bat against a round ball.
If Mr. Bonds was right, the ball would change direction ever so slightly away from Barry’s right elbow and cross the plate in front of him where he judged it was going to be. If Bonds was wrong, the ball would either dip sufficiently below and inside of the range of Barry’s bat head or outside and out of the range of Bond’s bat, causing the determined slugger to hit the ball at a bad angle or to miss the pitch entirely.
Because forty-three year old Barry Lamar Bonds judged correctly, there was a sharp crack as maple met cowhide. The nine inch, five-and-a-half ounce baseball was on its four-hundred and thirty-five foot trajectory to Section 144 just to the left field side of the four-hundred and twenty-one foot sign in the right center field bleachers. Reaching its destination, the well-hit baseball became the seven-hundred and fifty-sixth home run of Barry Bonds’ major league career. Finally, at long last, Bonds had passed Hank Aaron’s record of seven-hundred and fifty-five major league career home runs.
Once in the bleachers, the baseball would be the object of much pushing, shoving, poking, diving and falling by desperate and ill-mannered fans. Finally, the ball would be pounced upon by twenty-two-year-old Matt Murphy of Queens, New York—-a New York Mets fan.
As fate would have it, Murphy was on his way to Australia with a friend (whom I’m told wore a Yankees shirt) and just happened to have come to AT&T Park during his San Francisco layover. Matt Murphy just happened to have purchased a ticket for the game about an hour before game time. His reward, after a short and somewhat bloody tussle, was the yet to be valued (but nevertheless priceless) “Bonds’ ball”.
As the crowd cheered, Giants’ officials gathered for a special ceremony. Directing everyone’s attention to the scoreboard video screen in centerfield, Barry, his family, Willie Mays (Barry’s godfather) and everyone else saw the image of Henry Louis Aaron (the just-deposed home run king) congratulating Barry Bonds in a short but very dignified and tasteful statement.
Asserting that home run hitting required skill, longevity and determination, Aaron, now seventy-three, declared:
“…I move over now and offer my best wishes to Barry and his family on this historical achievement. My hope today,” concluded Aaron, “as it was on that April evening in 1974 [referring to his seven-hundred and fifteenth home run which broke Babe Ruth’s seven-hundred and fourteen home run career record], is that the accomplishment of this record will inspire others to chase their own dreams.”
Next came the newly crowned home run king himself. Thanking the fans of San Francisco, his team mates, the visiting Washington Nationals (for their understanding of the need for the ceremony), his godfather Willie Mays, his mother, his wife and children, Barry Bonds concluded with an especially emotional tribute.
Pointing to the sky as he had right after crossing home plate and hugging his bat boy son Nikolai, Barry thanked his late father Bobby Lee Bonds who had taught him everything he knew about baseball. The tears and cheers that followed sent a message to the skeptical world outside of San Francisco that, whatever the outside world thought or felt, Barry Bonds was both a hero and home run king in San Francisco. Long live the king! So powerful was that message that it obscured, in the awareness of most, the fact that the night would end with a loss of the game by the San Francisco Giants to the Washington Nationals by a score of 8 to 6.
THE PAST. One-hundred and thirty-one years have passed since the modern game of baseball was born. It has become America’s “National Pastime”. More than any other sport, baseball relies on tradition as a major part of its appeal.
In watching what took place the other night at San Francisco’s AT&T Park, tradition was very evident. Not only was the new home run king, the son of Bobby Lee Bonds, a fourteen year and eight team Major League veteran, but Michael Joseph Bacsik, the son of Michael James Bacsik, was a five year and two team Major League veteran as well.
In fact, daddy Mike Bacsik had pitched to Hank Aaron on August 23rd of 1976 after Aaron had hit what would be his last career home run, number seven fifty-five. Thus, Mike, Sr. and young Mike both pitched to men who had the same number of career home runs. Had Mike Sr. given up a home run to Hank Aaron, father and son would have both given up career number seven fifty-six to the two men. Bacsik Sr, a right-hander, was pitching for the Texas Rangers in 1976 while Hank Aaron was playing out his final baseball season with the American League’s Milwaukee Brewers. Even that was baseball tradition as the Atlanta Braves, Hank’s team when he broke Babe Ruth’s record in 1974, had once been the Milwaukee Braves. Hank had helped bring a world championship to Milwaukee when his Braves beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series. By the time Mike Bacsik, Sr. pitched to “Hammerin’ Henry”, there were no home runs left in Aaron’s powerful wrists and potent bat. Aaron did get a single off the senior Bacsik, but that was it. No one could know on that August Monday in 1976 that another tradition had been born—but that’s baseball.
Born to Bobby Lee and Patricia Bonds on July 24th, 1964, Barry Bonds was the son of a baseball star. He became the godson of a baseball “super star”. (It also should be noted here that through his mother Patricia Bonds he is a cousin of still another baseball superstar, Reggie Martinez Jackson.) Barry was four years old when the San Francisco Giants brought his powerful and speedy dad to the majors to play alongside of Willie Mays.
Unlike Willie Mays, Bobby Bonds’ gifts of both power and speed (primarily because they weren’t as persistent or long lasting) were not rewarded with team loyalty. After the 1974 season, Bobby Bonds was traded from the Giants to the Yankees. While that was worthy of a star, playing at Yankee Stadium made pressure-packed demands on the senior Bonds. What exactly happened to Bobby Bonds while he was a member of the Yankees, I’ve never learned. However, it must have been significant, because although Bobby Bonds hit 32 home runs for the Yankees, he was traded off to the California Angels after only one year in New York. Even more, during the six years remaining of his career—1977 through 1981—Bobby Bonds would play with six more teams.
The demands and the unfairness of a professional baseball experience obviously made a lasting impression on young Barry. Signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1985, Barry was in the majors by 1986. It was in 1990 that he came into his own, batting .301, hitting thirty-two home runs, stealing fifty-two bases and winning the first of his seven National League MVP awards.
Following his 1992 MVP season with Pittsburgh, Barry Bonds signed with the San Francisco Giants. His father had also signed, that spring, a Giants’ contract as their first base coach. Barry had come home, but his presence cost the Giants $43,000,000 through 1998. It can’t be denied that Barry earned every penny! However, with all of his considerable achievements, there was a downside to Barry Bonds.
Bonds was often moody with teammates, the press and even with the fans. It wasn’t until the 1998 season that there was a discernable change in Barry Bonds.
That year, Mark McGwire, a man whom it is said Bonds considered an inferior player, captured nationwide headlines by hitting seventy home runs for the St. Louis Cardinals. It has also been asserted by some that McGwire’s burst of power wasn’t so much a matter of ability as it was the result of taking growth hormone steroids. So, many people believed that Bonds decided that if McGwire could do it and get away with it, why shouldn’t he? Thus, history began to be made.
Beginning in 1999, Bonds’ weight went from about one-hundred and ninety pounds to about two-hundred and thirty. At the same time, his home run production went from an average of thirty-four per year over his first twelve big league seasons to an average of forty-six per season.
In 2003, federal investigators began investigating Balco Laboratory in Burlingame, California. The names of thirty big league players who had received treatment through the lab’s products, including Barry Lamar Bonds, was uncovered. A grand jury investigation and Bonds testimony followed. Bonds’ boyhood friend, Greg Anderson, a trainer at Balco Lab was arrested for refusing to testify about his recent relationship with Barry Bonds as a lab employee.
Through all of this, we learned from the testimony of Barry Bonds’ former girlfriend Kimberly Bell that Bonds was jealous of Mark McGwire and that he was determined to compete with McGwire’s reputation.
FAME OR INFAMY. Meanwhile, Barry Bonds denies and fans take sides. In San Francisco, many fans don’t want to believe. Still other fans believe but excuse. “How perfect was Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth?” they ask, pointing to Ruth’s drinking and womanizing along with Ty Cobb’s mean and nearly demonic behavior. Some even concede that Bonds may have taken steroids, but they defend it by wondering outloud how many pitchers were probably taking steroids at the same time, thereby equalizing or even countering the power of a batter such as Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa or Barry Bonds.
Home run hitting requires more than strength. It also requires judgment and timing—which is why I began my description of Bonds’ record breaking home run as I did. Past baseball rosters are loaded with the names of brutally strong men who couldn’t and therefore didn’t hit home runs.
Outside of the Bay Area, fans are far less understanding. Commissioner Bud Selig has obviously hedged his bets by offering Barry Bonds offhanded and almost noncommittal congratulations.
What the future holds for Barry bonds, no one can say. The statute of limitations on his possible perjury before the grand jury runs out in 2008, so Barry may well avoid punishment for perjury. However, the weight of public opinion on Barry Bonds’ reputation may matter when the time comes to vote him into the baseball Hall of Fame.
Barry Bonds is talented beyond all question when it comes to production on the baseball diamond. For that reason, he deserves to be famous. However, if the sum total of Barry’s past and present adds up to infamy as much or more than it totals fame, then he may join Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Spiro Agnew and others in the American public’s Historic Hall of Shame.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Sunday, August 5, 2007
CLINTON VS OBAMA — DEBATE OR SHOW?
By Edwin Cooney
Dated Friday, August 3rd, 2007
It had to happen, you know. It was just a matter of time. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were bound to have a difference the media would find compelling and on which you and I could take sides.
The question is whether there is really an issue of experience vs. naïveté here or whether this is a contrived quarrel
It all began during a CNN/YouTube Democratic debate on the night of Monday, July 23rd. Senator Barack Obama responded affirmatively to a question as to whether or not he would agree to meet with rogue leaders of such countries as Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela during the first year of his administration. Senator Clinton wasted little time suggesting that Senator Obama’s response was reckless and naïve and indicative of his lack of experience so essential to any successful presidency. A few days later on the campaign trail, Senator Obama upped the intensity of the “debate” by asserting that what America doesn‘t need is “Bush Lite” in the White House.
From what I’ve gathered, the consensus is that Senator Clinton has come out ahead on this “issue” because everyone knows that any substantive bilateral meeting or “summit” necessarily requires careful preparation. Pre-summit preparedness was one of the rare issues on which John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon concurred during their second debate in 1960.
“Ah, but that’s politics,” you say — but that’s just the point. JFK and RMN had little to gain by disagreeing on the need for pre-summit preparation, but Barack and Hillary both have something to gain by debating this issue.
Senator C. wants to demonstrate that Senator O.’s inexperience is shown by his willingness to consider summitry with “rogue” leaders during the first year of a possible Obama presidency. She wants you to think that she’s experienced and he’s merely naive.
Senator O. wants to demonstrate that Senator C. is simply taking the path of least resistance or “the establishment position” just as she did when she voted to authorize President Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq — which he, with all of his inexperience, opposed. He wants you to see him as bold and creative and to view her as dangerously narrow and cautious.
What neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama is expounding much on is what it takes to conduct a successful summit. Neither are they speculating much about the significance of past summit meetings. So, perhaps a quick look at some questionable summit meetings might be helpful.
Since May 8th, 1945, which we celebrated as VE Day, there have been 18 meetings between American presidents and Soviet leaders. The first one, held at Potsdam just outside of Berlin, Germany, has been considered a failure by many historians and commentators because it solidified and officially sanctified the Soviet Union’s tyranny over Eastern Europe. No one, in-so-far as I’m aware, chalks that failure up to President Truman’s mere three months of presidential experience—and they shouldn’t. After all, post-war spheres of influence by the great powers were regarded as inevitable throughout the war. As for preparedness being a factor at Potsdam, it could hardly have been a factor especially since the British government changed hands in the middle of the conference. Winston Churchill came to the Potsdam conference as Prime Minister and was replaced on July 23rd by Clement Atlee… so much for summit predictability or continuity.
The second post-war meeting between the two “Super Powers” didn’t occur for ten years after World War II. American-Soviet meetings were “conferences” during the war. However, now that the war was over, we and the Soviets were adversaries rather than allies, thus our meetings became “summits” rather than conferences.
By July 1955, President Eisenhower felt that the Soviet Union might well be ready for the easement of international tensions. The Soviets, after all, had agreed to the independence of Austria the previous May (thereby allowing for the restoration of Austria’s constitutional monarchy) and had expressed a willingness to discuss the limitation of nuclear stockpiles.
The American people weren’t so sure of the wisdom of an American - Soviet meeting at “the summit.” Many believed (I think incorrectly) that FDR was either bullied by Stalin or bamboozled due to naiveté and illness into “giving away” Eastern Europe to the Russians during the Yalta conference of February 1945. They thought that this allowed for the drawing down of the “Iron Curtain” and they didn’t want to see any more presidential “surrendering” to the Soviets.
According to Cary Reich, one of Nelson A. Rockefeller’s biographers, Secretary of State Dulles tried to talk Ike out of the conference going so far as to insist that Geneva, Switzerland, where the summit was to be held, would be too packed with summer tourists. Ike wasn’t buying it, however.
It wasn’t until President Eisenhower made his dramatic “Open Skies” inspection proposal that either the President or the Secretary of State was sure who was making the decisions on the Soviet side. Winston Churchill had been calling for a “Big Four” summit for two years. The Soviet government was still in transition following the death of Josef Stalin. No one knew for sure whether the goateed Premier Nikolai Bulganin or the bald and beefy First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev was in charge. As a result, President Eisenhower, Churchill’s successor Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain, Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France, and the Soviet leadership met at the Palace of Nations, the old League of Nations headquarters, on Monday, July 18th, 1955.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, President Eisenhower -- without consulting either the British or the French -- announced that the United States would be willing to allow Soviet aerial inspection of its military installations for purposes of verification if the Soviets would do the same. Amidst everyone’s astonishment at the President’s proposal, a sudden loud thunderclap caused the lights to go out — as if nature itself were applauding Ike. Soviet Premier Bulganin’s comments followed Mr. Eden and Mr. Faure’s favorable responses. The Premier said that the President was obviously sincere and that the Soviet Union would give the proposal serious consideration.
Once the meeting broke up, Nikita Khrushchev cornered Eisenhower and made it plain that, as far as he was concerned, such inspection was a bald espionage ploy. Secretary Khrushchev went on to question why, if the United States was so peace-loving, it didn’t get down to business with the recent Soviet proposal for disarmament talks. Ike responded that he’d be happy to do that if the Russians would accept his proposal. Khrushchev turned and walked away.
The summit was ultimately considered a success because of the propaganda and psychological advantage the United States had gained in the eyes of the world by offering to expose its military to inspection if the Russians would do the same. In addition, our government came out of the summit with a better understanding of who was making the decisions in the Soviet government.
The first American - Soviet summit became known to the world as “The Open Skies Summit”. While “the Spirit of Geneva” wasn’t any more long-lasting than “the Spirit of Camp David” four years later in 1959, I think it’s reasonable to say that summitry was useful because the easing of tensions encouraged the leadership on both sides of the “Iron Curtain” to seek out face-saving methods of survival in the event of potentially lethal crises.
The Camp David summit occurred at the close of Nikita Khrushchev’s September 1959 visit to the United States. It set up the “Big Five” summit scheduled for Paris in May of 1960. That summit was scuttled by Khrushchev after the Russians shot down our U-2 flight and captured both the pilot and the spy plane. That failure was a failure of calculation rather than preparation.
When JFK met Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, the President was under two disadvantages. The first was as the result of our participation in the recent disaster at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The second disadvantage was the occurrence of the “Freedom Riders” antidiscrimination campaign back home which exposed to the world the citizen inequalities existing in the United States. The ’61 summit would be followed by the Berlin crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Luckily, JFK’s knowledge of Khrushchev and Khrushchev’s knowledge of JFK enabled both leaders to find face-saving ways to avoid a disastrous confrontation. It might even be argued that the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was one of the results of the 1961 Kennedy/Khrushchev summit meeting. (However, the immediate aftermath of the 1961 Kennedy Khrushchev summit meeting was the construction of the Berlin wall along with tanks muzzle to muzzle in the streets of Berlin, bomb shelter construction here at home, and missiles and quarantine in the Gulf of Mexico in October of 1962.)
President Nixon and Soviet President Brezhnev were both well prepared for the 1972 Salt I Treaty summit meeting in Moscow and there was much ceremony and even hope, despite the yet unresolved Vietnam War. However, when they were together at Nixon’s home in San Clemente in 1973, there occurred a spontaneous disagreement over the Middle East in the middle of the night. Brezhnev had gone to bed in Tricia Nixon Cox’s room and suddenly, without warning, he called for a late night meeting with the President. The discussion, as reported by President Nixon in his memoirs, was both spontaneous and even “brutal”, but Mr. Nixon said, it paid dividends during the Yom Kippur War the following October.
In summation then, summitry can be a treacherous emotional minefield regardless of the degree of “spadework” or preparation. Neither Obama’s creativity nor Clinton’s calculated caution adequately addresses the subject of summitry for the edification of the American people. Now that Senator Obama has been creative and Senator Clinton has been defensively cautious, it should be noted that neither one of them has been through a summit meeting. Thus, it’s clear to this observer that this “debate” is much less about issues than it is about political positioning and theater.
As I said at the outset, the debate may be both entertaining and even instructive as to the judgment, creativity, and temperament of both candidates. It may even be necessary.
But even though it’s a hell-of-a-good-show, I believe those smirking people out there buying popcorn are Republicans.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Dated Friday, August 3rd, 2007
It had to happen, you know. It was just a matter of time. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were bound to have a difference the media would find compelling and on which you and I could take sides.
The question is whether there is really an issue of experience vs. naïveté here or whether this is a contrived quarrel
It all began during a CNN/YouTube Democratic debate on the night of Monday, July 23rd. Senator Barack Obama responded affirmatively to a question as to whether or not he would agree to meet with rogue leaders of such countries as Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela during the first year of his administration. Senator Clinton wasted little time suggesting that Senator Obama’s response was reckless and naïve and indicative of his lack of experience so essential to any successful presidency. A few days later on the campaign trail, Senator Obama upped the intensity of the “debate” by asserting that what America doesn‘t need is “Bush Lite” in the White House.
From what I’ve gathered, the consensus is that Senator Clinton has come out ahead on this “issue” because everyone knows that any substantive bilateral meeting or “summit” necessarily requires careful preparation. Pre-summit preparedness was one of the rare issues on which John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon concurred during their second debate in 1960.
“Ah, but that’s politics,” you say — but that’s just the point. JFK and RMN had little to gain by disagreeing on the need for pre-summit preparation, but Barack and Hillary both have something to gain by debating this issue.
Senator C. wants to demonstrate that Senator O.’s inexperience is shown by his willingness to consider summitry with “rogue” leaders during the first year of a possible Obama presidency. She wants you to think that she’s experienced and he’s merely naive.
Senator O. wants to demonstrate that Senator C. is simply taking the path of least resistance or “the establishment position” just as she did when she voted to authorize President Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq — which he, with all of his inexperience, opposed. He wants you to see him as bold and creative and to view her as dangerously narrow and cautious.
What neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama is expounding much on is what it takes to conduct a successful summit. Neither are they speculating much about the significance of past summit meetings. So, perhaps a quick look at some questionable summit meetings might be helpful.
Since May 8th, 1945, which we celebrated as VE Day, there have been 18 meetings between American presidents and Soviet leaders. The first one, held at Potsdam just outside of Berlin, Germany, has been considered a failure by many historians and commentators because it solidified and officially sanctified the Soviet Union’s tyranny over Eastern Europe. No one, in-so-far as I’m aware, chalks that failure up to President Truman’s mere three months of presidential experience—and they shouldn’t. After all, post-war spheres of influence by the great powers were regarded as inevitable throughout the war. As for preparedness being a factor at Potsdam, it could hardly have been a factor especially since the British government changed hands in the middle of the conference. Winston Churchill came to the Potsdam conference as Prime Minister and was replaced on July 23rd by Clement Atlee… so much for summit predictability or continuity.
The second post-war meeting between the two “Super Powers” didn’t occur for ten years after World War II. American-Soviet meetings were “conferences” during the war. However, now that the war was over, we and the Soviets were adversaries rather than allies, thus our meetings became “summits” rather than conferences.
By July 1955, President Eisenhower felt that the Soviet Union might well be ready for the easement of international tensions. The Soviets, after all, had agreed to the independence of Austria the previous May (thereby allowing for the restoration of Austria’s constitutional monarchy) and had expressed a willingness to discuss the limitation of nuclear stockpiles.
The American people weren’t so sure of the wisdom of an American - Soviet meeting at “the summit.” Many believed (I think incorrectly) that FDR was either bullied by Stalin or bamboozled due to naiveté and illness into “giving away” Eastern Europe to the Russians during the Yalta conference of February 1945. They thought that this allowed for the drawing down of the “Iron Curtain” and they didn’t want to see any more presidential “surrendering” to the Soviets.
According to Cary Reich, one of Nelson A. Rockefeller’s biographers, Secretary of State Dulles tried to talk Ike out of the conference going so far as to insist that Geneva, Switzerland, where the summit was to be held, would be too packed with summer tourists. Ike wasn’t buying it, however.
It wasn’t until President Eisenhower made his dramatic “Open Skies” inspection proposal that either the President or the Secretary of State was sure who was making the decisions on the Soviet side. Winston Churchill had been calling for a “Big Four” summit for two years. The Soviet government was still in transition following the death of Josef Stalin. No one knew for sure whether the goateed Premier Nikolai Bulganin or the bald and beefy First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev was in charge. As a result, President Eisenhower, Churchill’s successor Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain, Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France, and the Soviet leadership met at the Palace of Nations, the old League of Nations headquarters, on Monday, July 18th, 1955.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, President Eisenhower -- without consulting either the British or the French -- announced that the United States would be willing to allow Soviet aerial inspection of its military installations for purposes of verification if the Soviets would do the same. Amidst everyone’s astonishment at the President’s proposal, a sudden loud thunderclap caused the lights to go out — as if nature itself were applauding Ike. Soviet Premier Bulganin’s comments followed Mr. Eden and Mr. Faure’s favorable responses. The Premier said that the President was obviously sincere and that the Soviet Union would give the proposal serious consideration.
Once the meeting broke up, Nikita Khrushchev cornered Eisenhower and made it plain that, as far as he was concerned, such inspection was a bald espionage ploy. Secretary Khrushchev went on to question why, if the United States was so peace-loving, it didn’t get down to business with the recent Soviet proposal for disarmament talks. Ike responded that he’d be happy to do that if the Russians would accept his proposal. Khrushchev turned and walked away.
The summit was ultimately considered a success because of the propaganda and psychological advantage the United States had gained in the eyes of the world by offering to expose its military to inspection if the Russians would do the same. In addition, our government came out of the summit with a better understanding of who was making the decisions in the Soviet government.
The first American - Soviet summit became known to the world as “The Open Skies Summit”. While “the Spirit of Geneva” wasn’t any more long-lasting than “the Spirit of Camp David” four years later in 1959, I think it’s reasonable to say that summitry was useful because the easing of tensions encouraged the leadership on both sides of the “Iron Curtain” to seek out face-saving methods of survival in the event of potentially lethal crises.
The Camp David summit occurred at the close of Nikita Khrushchev’s September 1959 visit to the United States. It set up the “Big Five” summit scheduled for Paris in May of 1960. That summit was scuttled by Khrushchev after the Russians shot down our U-2 flight and captured both the pilot and the spy plane. That failure was a failure of calculation rather than preparation.
When JFK met Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, the President was under two disadvantages. The first was as the result of our participation in the recent disaster at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The second disadvantage was the occurrence of the “Freedom Riders” antidiscrimination campaign back home which exposed to the world the citizen inequalities existing in the United States. The ’61 summit would be followed by the Berlin crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Luckily, JFK’s knowledge of Khrushchev and Khrushchev’s knowledge of JFK enabled both leaders to find face-saving ways to avoid a disastrous confrontation. It might even be argued that the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was one of the results of the 1961 Kennedy/Khrushchev summit meeting. (However, the immediate aftermath of the 1961 Kennedy Khrushchev summit meeting was the construction of the Berlin wall along with tanks muzzle to muzzle in the streets of Berlin, bomb shelter construction here at home, and missiles and quarantine in the Gulf of Mexico in October of 1962.)
President Nixon and Soviet President Brezhnev were both well prepared for the 1972 Salt I Treaty summit meeting in Moscow and there was much ceremony and even hope, despite the yet unresolved Vietnam War. However, when they were together at Nixon’s home in San Clemente in 1973, there occurred a spontaneous disagreement over the Middle East in the middle of the night. Brezhnev had gone to bed in Tricia Nixon Cox’s room and suddenly, without warning, he called for a late night meeting with the President. The discussion, as reported by President Nixon in his memoirs, was both spontaneous and even “brutal”, but Mr. Nixon said, it paid dividends during the Yom Kippur War the following October.
In summation then, summitry can be a treacherous emotional minefield regardless of the degree of “spadework” or preparation. Neither Obama’s creativity nor Clinton’s calculated caution adequately addresses the subject of summitry for the edification of the American people. Now that Senator Obama has been creative and Senator Clinton has been defensively cautious, it should be noted that neither one of them has been through a summit meeting. Thus, it’s clear to this observer that this “debate” is much less about issues than it is about political positioning and theater.
As I said at the outset, the debate may be both entertaining and even instructive as to the judgment, creativity, and temperament of both candidates. It may even be necessary.
But even though it’s a hell-of-a-good-show, I believe those smirking people out there buying popcorn are Republicans.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Sunday, July 22, 2007
IF ONLY I DARED TO YAWN!
By Edwin Cooney
Dated July 20th, 2007
I don’t know about you, but I’ll guess: this Iraqi war makes you just as tired as
it does me. Even more, this war seems to have brought out the worst in all of
us -- supporters and opponents, Congress, the media, and the Bush administration.
We who oppose the war want to judge the outcome of the “surge” before General David Petraeus does. To us, a surge is only an escalation in a hopeless struggle.
Supporters of the administration and its Iraqi policy look to any improvement on the proverbial battlefield for encouraging results. They try to ignore what the government is not doing and what the various dissident groups are doing to one another.
In Congress, House Democrats appear to be deliberately out of touch with much of their liberal constituency which very much wants both President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney impeached. As for their Senate colleagues, there seems to be a pre-occupation with a proposed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq which a combination of minority Republicans and conservative Democrats have the votes to prevent.
President Bush continues to stay the coarse — of course. While waiting for a glowing report from General Petraeus on the success of the recent surge, the President, speaking as usual before a handpicked audience, informed us that he was sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East for the purpose of opening up talks which will lead to a two state solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Real success in this area, the President knows, would be a great achievement for his administration. Even better, it would silence a lot of smug, self-righteous, noisy people.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, all of the Democratic Presidential candidates and Libertarian GOP candidate Ron Paul of Texas oppose the Bush administration’s Iraqi policy. Most of their efforts are designed to demonstrate to the public how they — individually as President -- would be more effective than their opponents in bringing about an advantageous result out of the seemingly endless and hopeless Iraqi conflict.
As for GOP candidates, most of them, while generally supportive of the President, want us to understand (without directly saying so of course) that they individually could fight the war on terror, which they see as the legitimate reason for our being in Iraq, better than President George Bush has.
So the question is: where does this leave you and me — that is — “we the people of the United States” to whom all of our leaders and potential leaders say they look to for their wisdom?
Speaking for myself, drawing--as I do--a distinction between our struggle with Radical Islam and the evil Saddam Hussein, I opposed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. I also draw a distinction between our legitimate concerns as to the ambitions of Radical Islam and their strategy of “terrorism.” Terrorism is after all a strategic tactic as was poison gas in World War I and our use of the atomic bomb to end World War II. As I’ve stated before, the British demonstrated that Irish terrorists could be negotiated with when Sinn Féin settled in 1998 following twenty-nine years of domestic terror in England which snuffed out the lives of “commoners,” members of Parliament, and even Royalty in the person of Lord Mountbatten.
Thus, I’ll go on record asserting that, while there is a violent conflict with Radical Islam, there is no such thing as a War on Terror. Terror is a tactic. In every conflict, one side seeks to have an advantage over the other which is designed to demoralize the enemy. I also insist that our invasion of Iraq was actually a step backward. Before March 19th, 2003, there was in Iraq a cruel but effective deterrent to Al-Qaida as well as to Iranian expansion. His name was Saddam Hussein. Throughout the 1980s, our President (I believe his name was Ronald Wilson Reagan) treated Saddam Hussein if not like an ally than certainly like a most useful and valued helpmate despite Hussein’s treatment of his people. Nor was President Reagan the first to misjudge a foreign leader. The practice of such misjudgments goes back to FDR who believed he could manipulate “Uncle Joe Stalin” with his charm. Even further back, Woodrow Wilson treated his European colleagues during the 1919 World War I Peace conference with detached contempt.
It seems to me, therefore, that the solution to the Iraqi conflict is one for a concerted worldwide effort with Americans playing a supporting rather than a lead role. There is merit to President Bush’s decision to pursue a two state solution to the political Gordian knot in the Middle East. There is also merit in the policy of forcefully responding to the violence of militant Islam.
As for you and me, our job is to take it all in. Watch and listen to the political pundits whether they come from Fox News or CNN. We must endure it when Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff predicts a possible terrorist attack on us sometime this summer. At the same time we, the American people whose wisdom is so relied on by the President and Vice President, must listen as Mr. Cheney insists that Al-Qaida is on the run. Never mind if one or all are seriously confused. For the next eighteen months, these men have responsibility for our safety.
.
As for impeachment, skip it. Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders, an independent liberal who votes with the Democrats in the Senate, made the observation that if we can’t get 60 votes in the Senate to establish a timetable for withdrawing our troops from Iraq, how can we expect to get sixty-seven votes to convict President Bush were he impeached by the House?
Hence the liberals will continue to fill the airwaves and cyberspace with complaints that the Democrats have broken faith with the worthy voters of the Fall of 2006 and threaten to permanently abandon the world’s oldest political party forever. Republicans will continue to justify the Iraqi conflict as a necessary evil while asserting that Democrats have always been for appeasement—even though conservative-oriented folks cheered the loudest when Neville Chamberlain made his bargain with Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938. (Back in the thirties, conservatives called themselves “Isolationists”!)
Many years ago, comedian Jim Gordon, who played the character Fiber McGee on radio, used to say of his antagonist Dr. Gamble: “He makes me tired.”
As I said at the outset, this war makes me tired, but its outcome is so important, I really and truly do not dare to yawn.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Dated July 20th, 2007
I don’t know about you, but I’ll guess: this Iraqi war makes you just as tired as
it does me. Even more, this war seems to have brought out the worst in all of
us -- supporters and opponents, Congress, the media, and the Bush administration.
We who oppose the war want to judge the outcome of the “surge” before General David Petraeus does. To us, a surge is only an escalation in a hopeless struggle.
Supporters of the administration and its Iraqi policy look to any improvement on the proverbial battlefield for encouraging results. They try to ignore what the government is not doing and what the various dissident groups are doing to one another.
In Congress, House Democrats appear to be deliberately out of touch with much of their liberal constituency which very much wants both President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney impeached. As for their Senate colleagues, there seems to be a pre-occupation with a proposed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq which a combination of minority Republicans and conservative Democrats have the votes to prevent.
President Bush continues to stay the coarse — of course. While waiting for a glowing report from General Petraeus on the success of the recent surge, the President, speaking as usual before a handpicked audience, informed us that he was sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East for the purpose of opening up talks which will lead to a two state solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Real success in this area, the President knows, would be a great achievement for his administration. Even better, it would silence a lot of smug, self-righteous, noisy people.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, all of the Democratic Presidential candidates and Libertarian GOP candidate Ron Paul of Texas oppose the Bush administration’s Iraqi policy. Most of their efforts are designed to demonstrate to the public how they — individually as President -- would be more effective than their opponents in bringing about an advantageous result out of the seemingly endless and hopeless Iraqi conflict.
As for GOP candidates, most of them, while generally supportive of the President, want us to understand (without directly saying so of course) that they individually could fight the war on terror, which they see as the legitimate reason for our being in Iraq, better than President George Bush has.
So the question is: where does this leave you and me — that is — “we the people of the United States” to whom all of our leaders and potential leaders say they look to for their wisdom?
Speaking for myself, drawing--as I do--a distinction between our struggle with Radical Islam and the evil Saddam Hussein, I opposed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. I also draw a distinction between our legitimate concerns as to the ambitions of Radical Islam and their strategy of “terrorism.” Terrorism is after all a strategic tactic as was poison gas in World War I and our use of the atomic bomb to end World War II. As I’ve stated before, the British demonstrated that Irish terrorists could be negotiated with when Sinn Féin settled in 1998 following twenty-nine years of domestic terror in England which snuffed out the lives of “commoners,” members of Parliament, and even Royalty in the person of Lord Mountbatten.
Thus, I’ll go on record asserting that, while there is a violent conflict with Radical Islam, there is no such thing as a War on Terror. Terror is a tactic. In every conflict, one side seeks to have an advantage over the other which is designed to demoralize the enemy. I also insist that our invasion of Iraq was actually a step backward. Before March 19th, 2003, there was in Iraq a cruel but effective deterrent to Al-Qaida as well as to Iranian expansion. His name was Saddam Hussein. Throughout the 1980s, our President (I believe his name was Ronald Wilson Reagan) treated Saddam Hussein if not like an ally than certainly like a most useful and valued helpmate despite Hussein’s treatment of his people. Nor was President Reagan the first to misjudge a foreign leader. The practice of such misjudgments goes back to FDR who believed he could manipulate “Uncle Joe Stalin” with his charm. Even further back, Woodrow Wilson treated his European colleagues during the 1919 World War I Peace conference with detached contempt.
It seems to me, therefore, that the solution to the Iraqi conflict is one for a concerted worldwide effort with Americans playing a supporting rather than a lead role. There is merit to President Bush’s decision to pursue a two state solution to the political Gordian knot in the Middle East. There is also merit in the policy of forcefully responding to the violence of militant Islam.
As for you and me, our job is to take it all in. Watch and listen to the political pundits whether they come from Fox News or CNN. We must endure it when Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff predicts a possible terrorist attack on us sometime this summer. At the same time we, the American people whose wisdom is so relied on by the President and Vice President, must listen as Mr. Cheney insists that Al-Qaida is on the run. Never mind if one or all are seriously confused. For the next eighteen months, these men have responsibility for our safety.
.
As for impeachment, skip it. Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders, an independent liberal who votes with the Democrats in the Senate, made the observation that if we can’t get 60 votes in the Senate to establish a timetable for withdrawing our troops from Iraq, how can we expect to get sixty-seven votes to convict President Bush were he impeached by the House?
Hence the liberals will continue to fill the airwaves and cyberspace with complaints that the Democrats have broken faith with the worthy voters of the Fall of 2006 and threaten to permanently abandon the world’s oldest political party forever. Republicans will continue to justify the Iraqi conflict as a necessary evil while asserting that Democrats have always been for appeasement—even though conservative-oriented folks cheered the loudest when Neville Chamberlain made his bargain with Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938. (Back in the thirties, conservatives called themselves “Isolationists”!)
Many years ago, comedian Jim Gordon, who played the character Fiber McGee on radio, used to say of his antagonist Dr. Gamble: “He makes me tired.”
As I said at the outset, this war makes me tired, but its outcome is so important, I really and truly do not dare to yawn.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Friday, July 13, 2007
FROM OUT OF THE BLUE -- A Much Needed Reminder
BY EDWIN COONEY
It was on the afternoon of Monday, June 18th, 2007 that I arrived at the Amtrak train station in Washington D.C. aboard Train #125 out of Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey.
I was on my way home to Alameda, California after a full three weeks of happy reunions with old friends and first time meetings with new ones. I felt content for the most part. I was even reasonably satisfied with my own behavior in the way I’d handled one or two touchy situations that are a part of daily relationships and circumstances.
My train was only about 30 minutes or so late, but that was all to the good. It meant that I would only have to wait 20 or 25 minutes for Amtrak Train #29 scheduled out of the station at 4:05 p.m. It would be especially pleasant if Train #29 was nicely air conditioned against the 85 to 90 degree east coast heat and 85 plus percent humidity, but that matter would take care of itself.
Then came the word that Train #29 to Chicago, due to an equipment failure, would not be able to meet its 4:05 p.m. departure schedule and that there was no estimated time when it would depart. A trainload of Amtrak passengers waited patiently in the station hoping that the mechanics would be able to remedy Train #29’s ills quickly enough for all to be on their way in time to make all necessary connections.
As I waited, I found myself seated between two gentlemen. One, from Chicago, told me that he spends a lot of his time on board his houseboat. The other, Archie from Rhode Island, said he also likes to travel but prefers solid terra firma. At one point in our conversation, Archie, in his delightful New England accent, informed me that a blind man without hands was seated a short distance away and was “fumbling” with his suitcase and obviously could use help. Archie was gone for only a very short time before he returned to report that the “blind man without hands” was all right and needed no help.
“Where is he going?” I asked, wondering if he’d be on Train #29 once it got rolling.
“I don’t know,” replied Archie, “but he’s here with the rest of us.
“Wow,” I thought to myself. “Here we are in Washington D.C. and not too far from me is a blind man without hands. It’s got to be Iraq,” I told myself.
Then I began to create a whole set of assumptions about this man’s background:
He has to be a veteran; He’s in Washington for treatment and rehabilitation at Walter Reed hospital; He’s an Iraq War veteran; His injury is recent.
Next came my assumptions regarding his state of mind:
He’s gotta be angry and bitter about his recent war injury; He’s gotta be apprehensive and even frightened as he struggles to adjust to his deficiencies; He’ll be lost or easily disoriented; He’ll need lots of help; He’ll be sad and perhaps even clingy.
Next, I went to the root of my assumptions -- my own fears, needs, comforts and ideas of convenience:
What would I do without hands? I’d be totally lost without a sense of touch. How could I function as I do today using a cane? What’ll I do if he’s in my car? I’ll have to help him, because, after all, he’s one of “us”.
Then came my final hope:
“Maybe he’ll be in another car if not on another train.”
Alas, such was -- most fortunately -- not to be.
Shortly after six-thirty p.m., I was assisted onto Train #29 and into the lower portion of a car which is where passengers who are senior and/or with disabilities may ride.
The car was reasonably cool and my seat was next to an electrical outlet so that I could conveniently listen to taped books and recharge my cell phone. The train had started to move, but the conductor hadn’t come to collect our tickets. I mumbled to myself out loud wondering whether the act of eating my lunch would automatically bring the conductor around to take my ticket.
Suddenly, from one seat behind me and across the aisle to my left, I heard the chime of a talking watch. Then a very cheery voice said:
“Who’s this blind guy who talks to himself?”
Next came introductions. His name was Dan and I, of course, introduced myself as Ed. My introduction to him confirmed his assumption as to who I was, thus I didn’t have to say anything to him about my disability. What’s strange is that although he rather quickly explained his condition to me, I don’t recall precisely how he confirmed to me that he was “the blind man without hands”.
Almost instantly, even before Dan told me much about himself, my fear-laden presumptions and perceptions melted away. Dan, after all, was Dan. Dan was not a set of my presumptive fears.
Within minutes of the outset of our conversation, the conductor had come around taking tickets and Dan was making plans to go to the dining car for supper. Since I’d had my lunch, I didn’t need the dining car. I’d join him in the lounge car for Happy Hour. Thus it was clear that Dan got around as well as I did.
During Happy Hour, Dan and I easily conversed on a number of topics. He was easy-going, he flirted with the ladies much more easily and with seemingly much greater confidence and resourcefulness than I. Even more, Dan was funny.
Once we were back in our car, Dan told me that at the age of 15, which was back in 1955, he’d injured himself while constructing a hand grenade. He went on to explain that as a youngster he’d learned to make such incendiaries in order to protect himself from possible harassment or harm from Chicago’s youth gangs. One day, he explained, he’d accidentally installed the wrong type of trigger on his latest grenade and his life had been changed forever.
He went on to talk of his daughters, one of whom served in the Balkan conflict in the late 1990s. He spoke of his life’s work as a rehabilitation counselor for the Department of Mental Health in Decatur, Illinois.
Dan is now retired and doesn’t have to work for monetary reasons. He just likes to keep busy. The reason he was on the train was because he was returning home from a job interview in Alexandria, Virginia.
The only assistance I provided him was to let him use my cell phone to call his daughter who was meeting him in Chicago, so that he could let her know that the train was running late.
When Dan and I parted in Chicago, I knew that I’d met a very extraordinary person. Certainly, my vacation—and, if I allow it, perhaps my life -- had been enriched by that man named Dan. However, I was also aware that I’d been guilty of one of humankind’s most subtle but devastating injustices.
I was guilty of the act of “preconceived negative personal perception”. What is even more incredible to me is that I am acutely sensitive to the fact that I am a lifelong victim of such preconceived negative personal perceptions.
How many times have I been denied opportunities for work, friendship, even love because of a person’s negative perceptions and ultimate inability to imagine interacting comfortably with me in a working or loving relationship? How many times have I answered the inquiry people often make as to what is hardest about living with disability by saying, with some intensity, that the most difficult aspect of living with disability (which in my case is total blindness) is dealing with the public’s perception of it.
The answer to both the above questions is — too many times.
Preconceived negative personal perception often is devastating to persons who live with disability. Unfortunately, its practice -- which I’ll define here as preconceived negative conclusions about others based on poor knowledge of the conditions under which another person lives -- is widely practiced and affects far more than the disabled.
Thus, persons with disabilities, persons of different races, of different religions, of different classes and economic stature are all too often ready-made victims of our preconceived ideas as to how they live, what they believe, what they can do and what they will be like. What is more, one shouldn’t assume that the poor and disadvantaged are the sole victims of negative personal perception. The rich and powerful can also be victimized – and often are. Their ability to more easily protect themselves from negative personal perception doesn’t in the least justify the practice.
Hence, the victim of racism can also be a racist, the offended can indeed offend, the sinned against can -- and do -- sin…as I learned once again on Monday, June 18th, 2007:
Just because I’m aware of others’ capacity for preconceived negative personal perception does not immunize me from practicing it myself.
Furthermore, negative personal perception may not be the only path to our individual and societal failings, but it’s surely one of the most well-taken paths. Next to the path of least resistance, the path of negative personal perception is the easiest to take…and it’s taken too often by far too many -- including this observer.
Thanks, Dan. Because you’re you, I couldn’t get away with it -- this time anyway!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
It was on the afternoon of Monday, June 18th, 2007 that I arrived at the Amtrak train station in Washington D.C. aboard Train #125 out of Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey.
I was on my way home to Alameda, California after a full three weeks of happy reunions with old friends and first time meetings with new ones. I felt content for the most part. I was even reasonably satisfied with my own behavior in the way I’d handled one or two touchy situations that are a part of daily relationships and circumstances.
My train was only about 30 minutes or so late, but that was all to the good. It meant that I would only have to wait 20 or 25 minutes for Amtrak Train #29 scheduled out of the station at 4:05 p.m. It would be especially pleasant if Train #29 was nicely air conditioned against the 85 to 90 degree east coast heat and 85 plus percent humidity, but that matter would take care of itself.
Then came the word that Train #29 to Chicago, due to an equipment failure, would not be able to meet its 4:05 p.m. departure schedule and that there was no estimated time when it would depart. A trainload of Amtrak passengers waited patiently in the station hoping that the mechanics would be able to remedy Train #29’s ills quickly enough for all to be on their way in time to make all necessary connections.
As I waited, I found myself seated between two gentlemen. One, from Chicago, told me that he spends a lot of his time on board his houseboat. The other, Archie from Rhode Island, said he also likes to travel but prefers solid terra firma. At one point in our conversation, Archie, in his delightful New England accent, informed me that a blind man without hands was seated a short distance away and was “fumbling” with his suitcase and obviously could use help. Archie was gone for only a very short time before he returned to report that the “blind man without hands” was all right and needed no help.
“Where is he going?” I asked, wondering if he’d be on Train #29 once it got rolling.
“I don’t know,” replied Archie, “but he’s here with the rest of us.
“Wow,” I thought to myself. “Here we are in Washington D.C. and not too far from me is a blind man without hands. It’s got to be Iraq,” I told myself.
Then I began to create a whole set of assumptions about this man’s background:
He has to be a veteran; He’s in Washington for treatment and rehabilitation at Walter Reed hospital; He’s an Iraq War veteran; His injury is recent.
Next came my assumptions regarding his state of mind:
He’s gotta be angry and bitter about his recent war injury; He’s gotta be apprehensive and even frightened as he struggles to adjust to his deficiencies; He’ll be lost or easily disoriented; He’ll need lots of help; He’ll be sad and perhaps even clingy.
Next, I went to the root of my assumptions -- my own fears, needs, comforts and ideas of convenience:
What would I do without hands? I’d be totally lost without a sense of touch. How could I function as I do today using a cane? What’ll I do if he’s in my car? I’ll have to help him, because, after all, he’s one of “us”.
Then came my final hope:
“Maybe he’ll be in another car if not on another train.”
Alas, such was -- most fortunately -- not to be.
Shortly after six-thirty p.m., I was assisted onto Train #29 and into the lower portion of a car which is where passengers who are senior and/or with disabilities may ride.
The car was reasonably cool and my seat was next to an electrical outlet so that I could conveniently listen to taped books and recharge my cell phone. The train had started to move, but the conductor hadn’t come to collect our tickets. I mumbled to myself out loud wondering whether the act of eating my lunch would automatically bring the conductor around to take my ticket.
Suddenly, from one seat behind me and across the aisle to my left, I heard the chime of a talking watch. Then a very cheery voice said:
“Who’s this blind guy who talks to himself?”
Next came introductions. His name was Dan and I, of course, introduced myself as Ed. My introduction to him confirmed his assumption as to who I was, thus I didn’t have to say anything to him about my disability. What’s strange is that although he rather quickly explained his condition to me, I don’t recall precisely how he confirmed to me that he was “the blind man without hands”.
Almost instantly, even before Dan told me much about himself, my fear-laden presumptions and perceptions melted away. Dan, after all, was Dan. Dan was not a set of my presumptive fears.
Within minutes of the outset of our conversation, the conductor had come around taking tickets and Dan was making plans to go to the dining car for supper. Since I’d had my lunch, I didn’t need the dining car. I’d join him in the lounge car for Happy Hour. Thus it was clear that Dan got around as well as I did.
During Happy Hour, Dan and I easily conversed on a number of topics. He was easy-going, he flirted with the ladies much more easily and with seemingly much greater confidence and resourcefulness than I. Even more, Dan was funny.
Once we were back in our car, Dan told me that at the age of 15, which was back in 1955, he’d injured himself while constructing a hand grenade. He went on to explain that as a youngster he’d learned to make such incendiaries in order to protect himself from possible harassment or harm from Chicago’s youth gangs. One day, he explained, he’d accidentally installed the wrong type of trigger on his latest grenade and his life had been changed forever.
He went on to talk of his daughters, one of whom served in the Balkan conflict in the late 1990s. He spoke of his life’s work as a rehabilitation counselor for the Department of Mental Health in Decatur, Illinois.
Dan is now retired and doesn’t have to work for monetary reasons. He just likes to keep busy. The reason he was on the train was because he was returning home from a job interview in Alexandria, Virginia.
The only assistance I provided him was to let him use my cell phone to call his daughter who was meeting him in Chicago, so that he could let her know that the train was running late.
When Dan and I parted in Chicago, I knew that I’d met a very extraordinary person. Certainly, my vacation—and, if I allow it, perhaps my life -- had been enriched by that man named Dan. However, I was also aware that I’d been guilty of one of humankind’s most subtle but devastating injustices.
I was guilty of the act of “preconceived negative personal perception”. What is even more incredible to me is that I am acutely sensitive to the fact that I am a lifelong victim of such preconceived negative personal perceptions.
How many times have I been denied opportunities for work, friendship, even love because of a person’s negative perceptions and ultimate inability to imagine interacting comfortably with me in a working or loving relationship? How many times have I answered the inquiry people often make as to what is hardest about living with disability by saying, with some intensity, that the most difficult aspect of living with disability (which in my case is total blindness) is dealing with the public’s perception of it.
The answer to both the above questions is — too many times.
Preconceived negative personal perception often is devastating to persons who live with disability. Unfortunately, its practice -- which I’ll define here as preconceived negative conclusions about others based on poor knowledge of the conditions under which another person lives -- is widely practiced and affects far more than the disabled.
Thus, persons with disabilities, persons of different races, of different religions, of different classes and economic stature are all too often ready-made victims of our preconceived ideas as to how they live, what they believe, what they can do and what they will be like. What is more, one shouldn’t assume that the poor and disadvantaged are the sole victims of negative personal perception. The rich and powerful can also be victimized – and often are. Their ability to more easily protect themselves from negative personal perception doesn’t in the least justify the practice.
Hence, the victim of racism can also be a racist, the offended can indeed offend, the sinned against can -- and do -- sin…as I learned once again on Monday, June 18th, 2007:
Just because I’m aware of others’ capacity for preconceived negative personal perception does not immunize me from practicing it myself.
Furthermore, negative personal perception may not be the only path to our individual and societal failings, but it’s surely one of the most well-taken paths. Next to the path of least resistance, the path of negative personal perception is the easiest to take…and it’s taken too often by far too many -- including this observer.
Thanks, Dan. Because you’re you, I couldn’t get away with it -- this time anyway!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Friday, July 6, 2007
VACATION—AS MUCH A REMINDER AS A REST
BY EDWIN COONEY
My recent vacation began smoothly and pleasantly on the morning of Monday, May 28th largely due to the considerate and most helpful efforts of four men named Chris, Don, Peter and Dennis.
Wearing new clothes, carrying a new cane, toting a new cell phone along with a full suitcase, I arrived shortly after eight thirty a.m. at the Emeryville, California train station on Monday, May 28th to begin a three-and-a-half day venture across America. The following Thursday, the Lakeshore Limited out of Chicago would deposit me in Depew, New York, a suburb of Buffalo.
Between Sacramento, California and Denver, Colorado, I had the pleasant company of a lady named Nancy. Nancy has a son living in Seattle, Washington, a daughter and
granddaughter living north of Denver, Colorado and family residing all over the West. Her experience riding the roads and rails is extensive and her adventures are varied in the moods their memories invoke. Thus, as train Number Six, the California Zephyr, worked its way - ponderously at times - across the western mountains, deserts and the great salt flats, Nancy shared some of her stories with me.
She told of the time recently when a passenger aboard the Greyhound bus she was riding reported to the driver that another passenger was carrying a gun. The bus was held up for two hours while authorities thoroughly searched the bus. She shivered in the cold and waited with her fellow travelers only to discover that the gun was merely a beebe gun intended as no threat to anyone. Yes, indeed, travel does have its travails--especially on Amtrak.
While waiting in Chicago for the Lakeshore Limited to Buffalo, I encountered one of the most resourceful and purposeful ladies I’ve met in some time. Her name is Charlene and she and her daughter Eva were traveling back to their home near New York from a family reunion in Minnesota. The Amtrak station in Chicago is underground and thus makes it hard for passengers waiting between trains to use radios to listen to local baseball games or other broadcasts. Even worse, the television in the station wasn’t showing the Cubs game then in progress. Charlene, a lady possessed of both charm and persistence, sought assistance from the technical staff and made the request to let us hear the Cubs rather than the boring movie being broadcast. Although we didn’t get to hear the Cubs, I like to think that the reason for that was simply because we ran out of time between trains. The daughter of a Canadian father and an Icelandic mother, Charlene was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and has traveled widely. For many years, Charlene has been involved in caring for and supporting people with disabilities as well as people who suffer from the depravities of a low income existence. Charlene and her remarkable daughter Eva, who has sufficiently mastered disability to become the Program Director at the Westchester, New York Independent Living Center, were the kind of traveling companions who made me want to know them even when I wasn’t traveling.
Then, too, there was Jerry, a Learning Consultant at the Center for Advanced Learning in Concord, Ohio. Jerry is the kind of person who makes his companion feel like he or she is the center of his attention — even in the most crowded room.
The train was a mere twenty-five minutes late getting into Buffalo and I was met there by my friend Bob. For the last thirty-two years, Bob has been most considerate and kind to me as both a friend and even a landlord. Bob, who constantly reminds me that he “tumbled out of the hills of Pennsylvania,” and therefore is “just a country boy,” insists on being not only helpful, but even generous. He makes it easy for me to minimize our political differences.
Attica, New York has been known to the world primarily as a prison town since the Attica Prison Riot in September 1971. Tiny in size, its other-worldliness is emphasized for me by three distinct sounds. The first sounds are the hymns which are heard throughout the village twice daily -- at noon and at 6 p.m. -- from the chimes of St. Vincent’s Roman Catholic Church. The second is the sound of the crunch of automobile tires on a gravel driveway instead of the usual concrete driveway found in most other places. That sound takes me back as far as I can remember. The third sound is more subtle but ultimately more significant: in the village of Attica, the sound of traffic is present, but it doesn’t dominate one’s senses. The most constant sound in Attica is that of barking dogs, the chirping of birds, and the wind in the trees. That sound, powerful and even primitive, leaves one with the impression that Attica could very easily be swallowed up by Mother Nature—-prison and all.
Attica always will mean the most to me as the home of a woman who has nurtured me since she was a “house mother” and I was a student at the New York State School for the Blind in nearby Batavia, New York. Edith has meant more to my values (spiritual and otherwise) than any other single person. She was born in Buffalo back in 1910 when children were mostly born at home and were expected to be “seen and not heard”. Now, at age ninety-seven, Edith, with considerable dignity, lives in a very different world from the one into which she was born. She doesn’t quarrel with today’s world, different as it is from the world she once knew, for she has always championed young people. Now she spends her time in her home from which she offers love and gentle wisdom in support of those she cherishes—including this observer.
Her daughter Sharon, who came to Attica from her Watertown home approximately 150 miles to the northeast of Attica to be with us, although somewhat different from Edith in style and manner, nevertheless possesses a sweet and generous nature. Marvelously feminine, Sharon’s personality is such that sunny laughter inevitably bubbles just below the surface of her daily existence and thus seems to fuel her ongoing thoughtfulness of other people.
While staying in Attica, I had lunch at the Attica Hotel with Dr. Wayne Mahood, a retired professor but still an actively prolific author of history texts. Between 1969 and 1994, Wayne was an instructor of education at the State University College at Geneseo. A professor and friend of mine since 1971, Wayne has grown gracefully senior encouraging and advising me as well as far more successful students. My shortcomings in these pages are not of his doing: Wayne really does encourage me to do better.
Batavia, which sits well established atop the flatland of Western New York, thirty-five miles northeast of Buffalo and thirty miles almost due west of Rochester, is a pretty thriving place for such a small city of approximately 18,000 citizens. It is the home of the New York State School for the Blind which opened in 1868 and which I attended from the fall of 1950 until June of 1966. These days the school serves a different and more severely disabled group of those who live with blindness. Its future as an institution is uncertain, but its past was celebrated by its Alumni Association early in June at its annual alumni reunion which was held at the Batavia Holiday Inn.
For nearly three days, I shared a cascade of school memories with approximately fifty others ranging in age from their early forties to the upper eighties. Many at the reunion attended that little school as early as 1924 and as recently as the late 1970s. Their common bond is their love for the school. Their common discomfort is coping with what their alma mater has become. I knew most of those who attended the reunion although I was not really a contemporary of many of them.
For hours and hours we exchanged stories. One man named Michael remembered my having protected him from a dog when he was about ten years old. To him I still am a hero although he realizes that all the dog was doing was barking, but he was deathly afraid of dogs. Then there is Nick who still blames me for an accident he had once while we were both in the school infirmary. “It wasn’t my fault,” Nick insists, “you had me laughing so hard that I couldn’t help it.” I thought the nurse understood the situation pretty well, but Nick isn’t so sure she did.
Between Sunday, June 10th and Friday, June 15th, I went home. I was born in Binghamton, New York and lived in what they still call “The Triple Cities” -- Binghamton, Johnson City and Endicott -- during school vacations throughout most of my childhood. My friends Barb and Dick were not only wonderfully generous and kind to me this year, but have been so since I was a teenager. They have lived in the same house since 1961 and are the proud parents of two children and two grandchildren. Steve is a new and somewhat struggling businessman who lives by his principles no matter how difficult for him they may be. He believes in hard work and conscientious behavior. His sister Kathy works contentedly as a secretary and computer whiz and raises their granddaughter Jenny. Sweet and petite, Barbara is intensely passionate about people and the principles that matter to her. Dick is quiet and easy-going but very passionate about Bobbie—as he usually refers to his wife. Their grandson Nick, Steve’s son, is very precious to them.
Barb and her sister Joanie treated me to a night of baseball at Nyseg Stadium where the Binghamton B-Mets lost to the Redding Phillies 7 to 1. When I was growing up, the team was called the Binghamton Triplets and they were a Yankee farm team. Yes, Binghamton really does possess a most glorious past.
Okay, it’s true. I won’t deny it. My best friend is a woman. Her name is Rhoda but I always call her Roe. We were in graduate school together and have been friends ever since. While I was majoring in history, Roe was a Library Science major. Second only to Edith, Roe has watched over me since August 29th, 1973 when we first talked at SUNY Geneseo.
Small, round-faced, and curly-haired, Roe believes in living by rules and standards, but she has a considerable amount of understanding and respect for the “underdog”. Intensely proud of her Jewish heritage, she is also intensely interested in helping other people learn about their own heritage. Her strongest characteristics are loyalty and thoughtfulness especially for those she cares about most, which of course include her husband and two daughters.
Mark, her husband of twenty-five years, is an imposing looking but very generous man. Primarily because he has a strong sense of his own worth, Mark extends himself to be kind and helpful to others. I was permitted to share his Father’s Day weekend. How much more generous than that can one possibly be?
Yes, this vacation was indeed a reminder of the past and the present, the happy, the sad and the uncertain. It was a reminder of the vastness of America, of the variety of its people’s experiences and perceptions. Even more, near its close, I got a reminder I didn’t realize I needed. I’ll share it with you next week.
Meanwhile, please accept this as…
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
My recent vacation began smoothly and pleasantly on the morning of Monday, May 28th largely due to the considerate and most helpful efforts of four men named Chris, Don, Peter and Dennis.
Wearing new clothes, carrying a new cane, toting a new cell phone along with a full suitcase, I arrived shortly after eight thirty a.m. at the Emeryville, California train station on Monday, May 28th to begin a three-and-a-half day venture across America. The following Thursday, the Lakeshore Limited out of Chicago would deposit me in Depew, New York, a suburb of Buffalo.
Between Sacramento, California and Denver, Colorado, I had the pleasant company of a lady named Nancy. Nancy has a son living in Seattle, Washington, a daughter and
granddaughter living north of Denver, Colorado and family residing all over the West. Her experience riding the roads and rails is extensive and her adventures are varied in the moods their memories invoke. Thus, as train Number Six, the California Zephyr, worked its way - ponderously at times - across the western mountains, deserts and the great salt flats, Nancy shared some of her stories with me.
She told of the time recently when a passenger aboard the Greyhound bus she was riding reported to the driver that another passenger was carrying a gun. The bus was held up for two hours while authorities thoroughly searched the bus. She shivered in the cold and waited with her fellow travelers only to discover that the gun was merely a beebe gun intended as no threat to anyone. Yes, indeed, travel does have its travails--especially on Amtrak.
While waiting in Chicago for the Lakeshore Limited to Buffalo, I encountered one of the most resourceful and purposeful ladies I’ve met in some time. Her name is Charlene and she and her daughter Eva were traveling back to their home near New York from a family reunion in Minnesota. The Amtrak station in Chicago is underground and thus makes it hard for passengers waiting between trains to use radios to listen to local baseball games or other broadcasts. Even worse, the television in the station wasn’t showing the Cubs game then in progress. Charlene, a lady possessed of both charm and persistence, sought assistance from the technical staff and made the request to let us hear the Cubs rather than the boring movie being broadcast. Although we didn’t get to hear the Cubs, I like to think that the reason for that was simply because we ran out of time between trains. The daughter of a Canadian father and an Icelandic mother, Charlene was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and has traveled widely. For many years, Charlene has been involved in caring for and supporting people with disabilities as well as people who suffer from the depravities of a low income existence. Charlene and her remarkable daughter Eva, who has sufficiently mastered disability to become the Program Director at the Westchester, New York Independent Living Center, were the kind of traveling companions who made me want to know them even when I wasn’t traveling.
Then, too, there was Jerry, a Learning Consultant at the Center for Advanced Learning in Concord, Ohio. Jerry is the kind of person who makes his companion feel like he or she is the center of his attention — even in the most crowded room.
The train was a mere twenty-five minutes late getting into Buffalo and I was met there by my friend Bob. For the last thirty-two years, Bob has been most considerate and kind to me as both a friend and even a landlord. Bob, who constantly reminds me that he “tumbled out of the hills of Pennsylvania,” and therefore is “just a country boy,” insists on being not only helpful, but even generous. He makes it easy for me to minimize our political differences.
Attica, New York has been known to the world primarily as a prison town since the Attica Prison Riot in September 1971. Tiny in size, its other-worldliness is emphasized for me by three distinct sounds. The first sounds are the hymns which are heard throughout the village twice daily -- at noon and at 6 p.m. -- from the chimes of St. Vincent’s Roman Catholic Church. The second is the sound of the crunch of automobile tires on a gravel driveway instead of the usual concrete driveway found in most other places. That sound takes me back as far as I can remember. The third sound is more subtle but ultimately more significant: in the village of Attica, the sound of traffic is present, but it doesn’t dominate one’s senses. The most constant sound in Attica is that of barking dogs, the chirping of birds, and the wind in the trees. That sound, powerful and even primitive, leaves one with the impression that Attica could very easily be swallowed up by Mother Nature—-prison and all.
Attica always will mean the most to me as the home of a woman who has nurtured me since she was a “house mother” and I was a student at the New York State School for the Blind in nearby Batavia, New York. Edith has meant more to my values (spiritual and otherwise) than any other single person. She was born in Buffalo back in 1910 when children were mostly born at home and were expected to be “seen and not heard”. Now, at age ninety-seven, Edith, with considerable dignity, lives in a very different world from the one into which she was born. She doesn’t quarrel with today’s world, different as it is from the world she once knew, for she has always championed young people. Now she spends her time in her home from which she offers love and gentle wisdom in support of those she cherishes—including this observer.
Her daughter Sharon, who came to Attica from her Watertown home approximately 150 miles to the northeast of Attica to be with us, although somewhat different from Edith in style and manner, nevertheless possesses a sweet and generous nature. Marvelously feminine, Sharon’s personality is such that sunny laughter inevitably bubbles just below the surface of her daily existence and thus seems to fuel her ongoing thoughtfulness of other people.
While staying in Attica, I had lunch at the Attica Hotel with Dr. Wayne Mahood, a retired professor but still an actively prolific author of history texts. Between 1969 and 1994, Wayne was an instructor of education at the State University College at Geneseo. A professor and friend of mine since 1971, Wayne has grown gracefully senior encouraging and advising me as well as far more successful students. My shortcomings in these pages are not of his doing: Wayne really does encourage me to do better.
Batavia, which sits well established atop the flatland of Western New York, thirty-five miles northeast of Buffalo and thirty miles almost due west of Rochester, is a pretty thriving place for such a small city of approximately 18,000 citizens. It is the home of the New York State School for the Blind which opened in 1868 and which I attended from the fall of 1950 until June of 1966. These days the school serves a different and more severely disabled group of those who live with blindness. Its future as an institution is uncertain, but its past was celebrated by its Alumni Association early in June at its annual alumni reunion which was held at the Batavia Holiday Inn.
For nearly three days, I shared a cascade of school memories with approximately fifty others ranging in age from their early forties to the upper eighties. Many at the reunion attended that little school as early as 1924 and as recently as the late 1970s. Their common bond is their love for the school. Their common discomfort is coping with what their alma mater has become. I knew most of those who attended the reunion although I was not really a contemporary of many of them.
For hours and hours we exchanged stories. One man named Michael remembered my having protected him from a dog when he was about ten years old. To him I still am a hero although he realizes that all the dog was doing was barking, but he was deathly afraid of dogs. Then there is Nick who still blames me for an accident he had once while we were both in the school infirmary. “It wasn’t my fault,” Nick insists, “you had me laughing so hard that I couldn’t help it.” I thought the nurse understood the situation pretty well, but Nick isn’t so sure she did.
Between Sunday, June 10th and Friday, June 15th, I went home. I was born in Binghamton, New York and lived in what they still call “The Triple Cities” -- Binghamton, Johnson City and Endicott -- during school vacations throughout most of my childhood. My friends Barb and Dick were not only wonderfully generous and kind to me this year, but have been so since I was a teenager. They have lived in the same house since 1961 and are the proud parents of two children and two grandchildren. Steve is a new and somewhat struggling businessman who lives by his principles no matter how difficult for him they may be. He believes in hard work and conscientious behavior. His sister Kathy works contentedly as a secretary and computer whiz and raises their granddaughter Jenny. Sweet and petite, Barbara is intensely passionate about people and the principles that matter to her. Dick is quiet and easy-going but very passionate about Bobbie—as he usually refers to his wife. Their grandson Nick, Steve’s son, is very precious to them.
Barb and her sister Joanie treated me to a night of baseball at Nyseg Stadium where the Binghamton B-Mets lost to the Redding Phillies 7 to 1. When I was growing up, the team was called the Binghamton Triplets and they were a Yankee farm team. Yes, Binghamton really does possess a most glorious past.
Okay, it’s true. I won’t deny it. My best friend is a woman. Her name is Rhoda but I always call her Roe. We were in graduate school together and have been friends ever since. While I was majoring in history, Roe was a Library Science major. Second only to Edith, Roe has watched over me since August 29th, 1973 when we first talked at SUNY Geneseo.
Small, round-faced, and curly-haired, Roe believes in living by rules and standards, but she has a considerable amount of understanding and respect for the “underdog”. Intensely proud of her Jewish heritage, she is also intensely interested in helping other people learn about their own heritage. Her strongest characteristics are loyalty and thoughtfulness especially for those she cares about most, which of course include her husband and two daughters.
Mark, her husband of twenty-five years, is an imposing looking but very generous man. Primarily because he has a strong sense of his own worth, Mark extends himself to be kind and helpful to others. I was permitted to share his Father’s Day weekend. How much more generous than that can one possibly be?
Yes, this vacation was indeed a reminder of the past and the present, the happy, the sad and the uncertain. It was a reminder of the vastness of America, of the variety of its people’s experiences and perceptions. Even more, near its close, I got a reminder I didn’t realize I needed. I’ll share it with you next week.
Meanwhile, please accept this as…
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Monday, May 28, 2007
HARSH PRESIDENTIAL JUDGMENT OF PRESIDENTS -- Almost an American Institution
BY EDWIN COONEY
Written Friday, May 25th, 2007
As I’ve stated on numerous occasions—privately as well as in my columns—I’m a Jimmy Carter Democrat and have remained so, through thick and thin, since 1976.
Last weekend, my political hero startled some pretty impressionable people by asserting that the Bush administration was the worst in history in-so-far as our effect on the world was concerned.
The former president’s assertions in the Democratic Gazette of Little Rock, Arkansas as well as over the BBC were considered by many to have been exceedingly harsh and even unprecedented. Douglas Brinkley, one of Mr. Carter’s biographers, called his remarks “fighting words,” suggesting that Jimmy Carter’s words were unusually abusive to President George W. Bush.
It’s hard to understand how Mr. Brinkley could reach that conclusion had he bothered to do just a little research. Former presidents have often been every bit as harsh on their successors.
One of the richest sources for what former presidents have said about each other is William A. DeGregorio’s Complete Book of U.S. Presidents. The following presidential observations are from the fourth edition of Mr. DeGregorio’s work.
President Washington had no predecessor to criticize him. However, criticism by Thomas Paine -- whom many consider to be the Father of the American Revolution through publication of his famous pamphlet “Common Sense”, which swore enmity to all tyrannies -- was pretty powerful stuff by the end of President Washington’s second term of office. Paine, who gained the admiration and friendship of George Washington during and after the American Revolution, felt abandoned by Washington when Paine became a prisoner during the French revolution. In an angry open letter to President Washington from France in 1796, Thomas Paine excoriated George Washington thusly:
“AND AS TO YOU, SIR, TREACHEROUS TO PRIVATE FRIENDSHIP (FOR SO YOU HAVE BEEN TO ME, AND THAT IN THE DAY OF DANGER) AND A HYPOCRITE IN PUBLIC LIFE, THE WORLD WILL BE PUZZLED TO DECIDE, WHETHER YOU ARE AN APOSTATE OR IMPOSTER, WHETHER YOU ABANDONED GOOD PRINCIPLES OR WHETHER YOU EVER HAD ANY.”
President Washington more than survived Thomas Paine’s attack, but many, especially Jeffersonian Republicans, deeply believed that Washington’s tendency to lean toward Britain was elitist and potentially damaging to Thomas Paine’s perpetual goal—freedom.
Thomas Jefferson didn’t live to see Andrew Jackson become President, but he witnessed Jackson’s frequent rages on the floor of the United States Senate. Jackson was a young Senator from Tennessee and Jefferson, Vice President under John Adams, was Senate President when he asserted that Jackson was “…A DANGEROUS MAN.”
John Quincy Adams as Secretary of State under James Monroe had supported Andrew Jackson when Secretary of War John C. Calhoun wanted Jackson arrested following his 1820 invasion of Spanish Florida. He was defeated for re-election as President by Old Hickory in 1828. Of Jackson John Quincy Adams later wrote:
“A BARBARIAN WHO COULD NOT WRITE A SENTENCE OF GRAMMAR AND WHO COULD HARDLY SPELL HIS OWN NAME.”
Whether it was pure anger over his defeat by Jackson or jealousy of Jackson’s popularity that led John Quincy Adams to attack Jackson isn’t clear. What is clear however is that Adams saw Andrew Jackson, with all of his popularity, to be an inferior individual and leader.
President James Knox Polk was conducting a war with Mexico in 1848 which many -- including Illinois Representative Abraham Lincoln -- considered to be an immoral war despite America’s triumph. Said Lincoln of President Polk:
“I MORE THAN SUSPECT THAT HE IS DEEPLY CONSCIOUS OF BEING IN THE WRONG—THAT HE FEELS THE BLOOD OF THIS WAR, LIKE THE BLOOD OF ABEL, CRYING IN HEAVEN AGAINST HIM…HE IS A DEEPLY BEWILDERED, CONFOUNDED, AND A MISERABLY PERPLEXED MAN.”
Whatever President Polk might or might not have felt about his presidency in general or the war in particular, his weakened physique enabled him to live only three months and eleven days after his term. He died on June 15th, 1849.
Former president Franklin Pierce, whose own personal tragedies and failings led up to the Civil War, said of President Lincoln:
“LINCOLN IS, FOR ALL HIS LIMITED ABILITY AND NARROW INTELLIGENCE, THE ABOLITIONISTS’ WILLING INSTURMENT FOR ALL THE WOE WHICH, THUS FAR, HAS BEEN BROUGHT UPON THE COUNTRY FOR ALL THE DEGRADATION, ALL THE ATROCITY, AND ALL THE DESOLATION AND RUIN.”
Like President Washington, Abraham Lincoln easily survived the attacks on him made by “handsome Frank” Pierce, primarily because Pierce by the mid 1860s was seen even by his New Hampshire neighbors as having been a political and personal failure due to personal tragedy and perhaps even heavy drinking.
Then, of course, there was Teddy Roosevelt’s assessment of Woodrow Wilson. TR was never happy; it seems, with any president who served after he did:
“FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, NEVER ALLUDE TO WILSON AS AN IDEALIST, MILITAIRE, OR AN ALTRUIST. HE IS A DOCTRINAIRE WHEN HE CAN BE SO WITH SAFETY TO HIS PERSONAL AMBITION….HE HASN’T A TOUCH OF IDEALISM IN HIM. HIS ADVOCACY OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS NO MORE REPRESENTS IDEALISM ON HIS PART THAN DID HIS ADVOCACY OF PEACE WITHOUT VICTORY….HE IS A SILLY DOCTRINAIRE AT TIMES, AND A COLD-BLOODED POLITICIAN ALWAYS.”
TR’s criticism of Wilson came in 1919 just days before his January 6th death while President Wilson traveled triumphantly through Europe following the November 11th, 1918 armistice that ended “The Great War” and “saved the world for democracy,”--a sentiment expressed by Wilson and millions of others.
Former President Truman’s assessments of Republicans were seldom if ever gentle. In the volume the late Stephen Ambrose wrote about Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, he quoted Truman as saying of Ike:
“HE DOESN’T KNOW ANY MORE ABOUT BEING PRESIDENT THAN A PIG KNOWS ABOUT SUNDAY.”
Truman’s assessment of General Eisenhower in Mr. DeGregorio’s book doesn’t represent an improvement of President Truman’s evaluation of President Eisenhower in Professor Ambrose’s book:
“IKE DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING AND ALL THE TIME HE WAS IN OFFICE, HE DIDN’T LEARN A THING. IN 1959, WHEN CASTRO CAME TO POWER DOWN IN CUBA, IKE JUST SAT ON HIS ASS AND ACTED AS IF HE DIDN’T NOTICE WHAT WAS GOING ON DOWN THERE. WHY, MAYBE CASTRO WOULD JUST GO AWAY OR SOMETHING.”
One of Mr. Truman’s least favorite politicians in any party was future President Richard M. Nixon. What President Truman said about Richard Nixon may have been said long before RMN was elected. It goes as follows:
“RICHARD NIXON IS A NO-GOOD LYING BASTARD. HE CAN LIE OUT OF BOTH SIDES OF HIS MOUTH AT THE SAME TIME AND IF HE EVER CAUGHT HIMSELF TELLING THE TRUTH, HE’D LIE, JUST TO KEEP HIS HAND IN.”
As harsh as it sounded last weekend, by comparison with the above, Jimmy Carter’s assessment of George W. Bush as “AS THE WORST PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY IN-SO-FAR AS OUR PLACE IN THE WORLD IS CONCERNED,” is reasonably mild. However, it brought down on Mr. Carter the force of all of the Conservative dogma attacks which those of us sympathetic to Jimmy Carter have heard since he was President. Accordingly, President Carter is far more affective when he addresses himself to issues than he is when he addresses himself to personalities or persons.
Every former president has an official right that President Carter knows about and actually spoke of some years ago in an interview. That right is to address the United States Senate at any time.
Suppose President Carter, feeling as he did about President Bush’s pending invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, had availed himself of this prerogative and had appeared before the U.S. Senate to say something like this:
“I STAND BEFORE YOU TODAY, NOT IN OPPOSITION TO OUR PRESIDENT, FOR I KNOW WHAT IT IS TO SERVE AS PRESIDENT AND THUS TO SUFFER ALL OF THE FRUSTRATIONS WHICH THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THAT OFFICE OFTEN BRING TO ITS OCCUPANT. NOR, DO I COME AS AN OPPONENT OF ALL WAR BECAUSE, TERRIBLE AS IT IS, WAR CAN BE ESSENTIAL TO HUMAN FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUAL SECURITY.
“I STAND BEFORE YOU TODAY RATHER IN SAD OPPOSITION TO PRESIDENT BUSH’S PROPOSED INVASION OF IRAQ BECAUSE I SEE WITHIN THE VERY CIRCUMSTANCE OF THAT INVASION THE GATEWAY, NOT TO VICTORY OVER TERRORISM, BUT RATHER TO AN UNINTENDED INVITATION TO THE INCREASE OF DEADLIER AND MORE WIDESPREAD TERRORISM…”
I think it might have been a hell of a speech and might well have increased Jimmy Carter’s status as a statesman even if it had brought him temporary criticism.
I’d have been delighted to help him write the speech. Late as it is—I just did.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Written Friday, May 25th, 2007
As I’ve stated on numerous occasions—privately as well as in my columns—I’m a Jimmy Carter Democrat and have remained so, through thick and thin, since 1976.
Last weekend, my political hero startled some pretty impressionable people by asserting that the Bush administration was the worst in history in-so-far as our effect on the world was concerned.
The former president’s assertions in the Democratic Gazette of Little Rock, Arkansas as well as over the BBC were considered by many to have been exceedingly harsh and even unprecedented. Douglas Brinkley, one of Mr. Carter’s biographers, called his remarks “fighting words,” suggesting that Jimmy Carter’s words were unusually abusive to President George W. Bush.
It’s hard to understand how Mr. Brinkley could reach that conclusion had he bothered to do just a little research. Former presidents have often been every bit as harsh on their successors.
One of the richest sources for what former presidents have said about each other is William A. DeGregorio’s Complete Book of U.S. Presidents. The following presidential observations are from the fourth edition of Mr. DeGregorio’s work.
President Washington had no predecessor to criticize him. However, criticism by Thomas Paine -- whom many consider to be the Father of the American Revolution through publication of his famous pamphlet “Common Sense”, which swore enmity to all tyrannies -- was pretty powerful stuff by the end of President Washington’s second term of office. Paine, who gained the admiration and friendship of George Washington during and after the American Revolution, felt abandoned by Washington when Paine became a prisoner during the French revolution. In an angry open letter to President Washington from France in 1796, Thomas Paine excoriated George Washington thusly:
“AND AS TO YOU, SIR, TREACHEROUS TO PRIVATE FRIENDSHIP (FOR SO YOU HAVE BEEN TO ME, AND THAT IN THE DAY OF DANGER) AND A HYPOCRITE IN PUBLIC LIFE, THE WORLD WILL BE PUZZLED TO DECIDE, WHETHER YOU ARE AN APOSTATE OR IMPOSTER, WHETHER YOU ABANDONED GOOD PRINCIPLES OR WHETHER YOU EVER HAD ANY.”
President Washington more than survived Thomas Paine’s attack, but many, especially Jeffersonian Republicans, deeply believed that Washington’s tendency to lean toward Britain was elitist and potentially damaging to Thomas Paine’s perpetual goal—freedom.
Thomas Jefferson didn’t live to see Andrew Jackson become President, but he witnessed Jackson’s frequent rages on the floor of the United States Senate. Jackson was a young Senator from Tennessee and Jefferson, Vice President under John Adams, was Senate President when he asserted that Jackson was “…A DANGEROUS MAN.”
John Quincy Adams as Secretary of State under James Monroe had supported Andrew Jackson when Secretary of War John C. Calhoun wanted Jackson arrested following his 1820 invasion of Spanish Florida. He was defeated for re-election as President by Old Hickory in 1828. Of Jackson John Quincy Adams later wrote:
“A BARBARIAN WHO COULD NOT WRITE A SENTENCE OF GRAMMAR AND WHO COULD HARDLY SPELL HIS OWN NAME.”
Whether it was pure anger over his defeat by Jackson or jealousy of Jackson’s popularity that led John Quincy Adams to attack Jackson isn’t clear. What is clear however is that Adams saw Andrew Jackson, with all of his popularity, to be an inferior individual and leader.
President James Knox Polk was conducting a war with Mexico in 1848 which many -- including Illinois Representative Abraham Lincoln -- considered to be an immoral war despite America’s triumph. Said Lincoln of President Polk:
“I MORE THAN SUSPECT THAT HE IS DEEPLY CONSCIOUS OF BEING IN THE WRONG—THAT HE FEELS THE BLOOD OF THIS WAR, LIKE THE BLOOD OF ABEL, CRYING IN HEAVEN AGAINST HIM…HE IS A DEEPLY BEWILDERED, CONFOUNDED, AND A MISERABLY PERPLEXED MAN.”
Whatever President Polk might or might not have felt about his presidency in general or the war in particular, his weakened physique enabled him to live only three months and eleven days after his term. He died on June 15th, 1849.
Former president Franklin Pierce, whose own personal tragedies and failings led up to the Civil War, said of President Lincoln:
“LINCOLN IS, FOR ALL HIS LIMITED ABILITY AND NARROW INTELLIGENCE, THE ABOLITIONISTS’ WILLING INSTURMENT FOR ALL THE WOE WHICH, THUS FAR, HAS BEEN BROUGHT UPON THE COUNTRY FOR ALL THE DEGRADATION, ALL THE ATROCITY, AND ALL THE DESOLATION AND RUIN.”
Like President Washington, Abraham Lincoln easily survived the attacks on him made by “handsome Frank” Pierce, primarily because Pierce by the mid 1860s was seen even by his New Hampshire neighbors as having been a political and personal failure due to personal tragedy and perhaps even heavy drinking.
Then, of course, there was Teddy Roosevelt’s assessment of Woodrow Wilson. TR was never happy; it seems, with any president who served after he did:
“FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, NEVER ALLUDE TO WILSON AS AN IDEALIST, MILITAIRE, OR AN ALTRUIST. HE IS A DOCTRINAIRE WHEN HE CAN BE SO WITH SAFETY TO HIS PERSONAL AMBITION….HE HASN’T A TOUCH OF IDEALISM IN HIM. HIS ADVOCACY OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS NO MORE REPRESENTS IDEALISM ON HIS PART THAN DID HIS ADVOCACY OF PEACE WITHOUT VICTORY….HE IS A SILLY DOCTRINAIRE AT TIMES, AND A COLD-BLOODED POLITICIAN ALWAYS.”
TR’s criticism of Wilson came in 1919 just days before his January 6th death while President Wilson traveled triumphantly through Europe following the November 11th, 1918 armistice that ended “The Great War” and “saved the world for democracy,”--a sentiment expressed by Wilson and millions of others.
Former President Truman’s assessments of Republicans were seldom if ever gentle. In the volume the late Stephen Ambrose wrote about Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, he quoted Truman as saying of Ike:
“HE DOESN’T KNOW ANY MORE ABOUT BEING PRESIDENT THAN A PIG KNOWS ABOUT SUNDAY.”
Truman’s assessment of General Eisenhower in Mr. DeGregorio’s book doesn’t represent an improvement of President Truman’s evaluation of President Eisenhower in Professor Ambrose’s book:
“IKE DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING AND ALL THE TIME HE WAS IN OFFICE, HE DIDN’T LEARN A THING. IN 1959, WHEN CASTRO CAME TO POWER DOWN IN CUBA, IKE JUST SAT ON HIS ASS AND ACTED AS IF HE DIDN’T NOTICE WHAT WAS GOING ON DOWN THERE. WHY, MAYBE CASTRO WOULD JUST GO AWAY OR SOMETHING.”
One of Mr. Truman’s least favorite politicians in any party was future President Richard M. Nixon. What President Truman said about Richard Nixon may have been said long before RMN was elected. It goes as follows:
“RICHARD NIXON IS A NO-GOOD LYING BASTARD. HE CAN LIE OUT OF BOTH SIDES OF HIS MOUTH AT THE SAME TIME AND IF HE EVER CAUGHT HIMSELF TELLING THE TRUTH, HE’D LIE, JUST TO KEEP HIS HAND IN.”
As harsh as it sounded last weekend, by comparison with the above, Jimmy Carter’s assessment of George W. Bush as “AS THE WORST PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY IN-SO-FAR AS OUR PLACE IN THE WORLD IS CONCERNED,” is reasonably mild. However, it brought down on Mr. Carter the force of all of the Conservative dogma attacks which those of us sympathetic to Jimmy Carter have heard since he was President. Accordingly, President Carter is far more affective when he addresses himself to issues than he is when he addresses himself to personalities or persons.
Every former president has an official right that President Carter knows about and actually spoke of some years ago in an interview. That right is to address the United States Senate at any time.
Suppose President Carter, feeling as he did about President Bush’s pending invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, had availed himself of this prerogative and had appeared before the U.S. Senate to say something like this:
“I STAND BEFORE YOU TODAY, NOT IN OPPOSITION TO OUR PRESIDENT, FOR I KNOW WHAT IT IS TO SERVE AS PRESIDENT AND THUS TO SUFFER ALL OF THE FRUSTRATIONS WHICH THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THAT OFFICE OFTEN BRING TO ITS OCCUPANT. NOR, DO I COME AS AN OPPONENT OF ALL WAR BECAUSE, TERRIBLE AS IT IS, WAR CAN BE ESSENTIAL TO HUMAN FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUAL SECURITY.
“I STAND BEFORE YOU TODAY RATHER IN SAD OPPOSITION TO PRESIDENT BUSH’S PROPOSED INVASION OF IRAQ BECAUSE I SEE WITHIN THE VERY CIRCUMSTANCE OF THAT INVASION THE GATEWAY, NOT TO VICTORY OVER TERRORISM, BUT RATHER TO AN UNINTENDED INVITATION TO THE INCREASE OF DEADLIER AND MORE WIDESPREAD TERRORISM…”
I think it might have been a hell of a speech and might well have increased Jimmy Carter’s status as a statesman even if it had brought him temporary criticism.
I’d have been delighted to help him write the speech. Late as it is—I just did.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Saturday, May 19, 2007
EVERY DAY MATTERS -- This One Perhaps Most of All
BY EDWIN COONEY
Written Friday, May 18th, 2007
Yah, I know, my ex-wife -- a lady of uncommon judgment and uncanny foresight -- IS right—I must have way too much time on my hands when I do what I did today.
The problem is that I have an ingrained obsession about the significance of historic events and the dates on which they occurred. Thus, I hit the internet to learn what important or significant events had taken place on May the 18ths of the past. As usual, I was fascinated. Not only that, I almost decided for myself what I believe to be the most significant event that occurred in history on this date. However, since I couldn’t quite make up my mind, I did what I always do in such instances.
I went to my local watering hole to find my buddies Lunkhead and Dunderhead—and there they were. Lunkhead was looking a little grim leaning on his left elbow, the fingers of his left hand spread through what little hair he has, a dead cigar poking out of the left side of his mouth, and his scotch glass about a third empty. Dunderhead was leaning on his right elbow looking to his left along the bar at Lunkhead with a self-satisfied smirk on his thin face as though he’d just said something very clever to Lunkhead. There was a nearly full glass of beer in front of him.
“What’s up?” I asked, as I took the stool between them and ordered a beer.
“Oh,” said Dunderhead, “Lunkhead is in mourning for both the San Jose Sharks and the Golden State Warriors.”
“I’d be lucky if that’s all it was,” muttered Lunkhead. “My wife didn’t care about the hockey playoffs but, as you’ll recall, she’s from Salt Lake City and I was dumb enough to bet her that the Golden State Warriors would beat the Utah Jazz in the recent basketball playoff series. Unfortunately for me, they didn’t. Now, I have to do anything she tells me to do for a week beginning tomorrow. She generously gave me a few days to get ready and tomorrow -- on a Saturday, of all days -- it starts,” Lunkhead moaned.
“Well, perhaps this’ll take your mind off your troubles for at least awhile, Lunkhead,” I said, handing both fellows printed copies of the historic events I had printed from the website. The lists are broken into three major categories: significant May 18th births, deaths, and historic events both here and abroad.
“So,” I suggested, “what do you say if we first decide on the most significant May 18th birth?” and they both nodded.
Suddenly, Lunkhead sat up straight and laid his cigar on the bar and Dunderhead lowered his exotic beer. They both began running their forefingers along the first column of names.
“Good God!” said Lunkhead, “Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, was born on May 18th, 1868, and Bertrand Russell, the British mathematician, Nobel Prize winner, and pacifist philosopher was born on the same day in 1872—hmmmm.”
“Neither one of those guys,” said Dunderhead (having obviously started from the opposite end of the list) can hold a candle to Jennifer Streblow, Miss Wisconsin of 1997. And Lunkhead, look -- here’s a Golden State Warrior for you -- Donyell Marshall was born May 18th, 1973. How about that?”
“He’s long gone to the Cleveland Cavaliers, and what’s worse, his team is still in the playoffs,” said Lunkhead hanging his head again.
Both men continued to run their fingers along the May 18th births:
Baseball slugger Reggie Jackson, 1947; Albert Hammond of “It Never Rains In Southern California” fame, 1942; Frank Capra,1894, producer of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Arsenic and Old Lace”; the late Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York, 1904; and Brooks Robinson, 1937, the Baltimore Orioles “vacuum cleaner” at third base for almost twenty-two years now in the Baseball Hall of Fame (along with Jackson); former Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, co-author of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget act of the 1980’s GOP-controlled U.S. Senate.
Suddenly, the silence was interrupted and, for the next ten or twelve minutes, I had to listen to both Lunkhead and Dunderhead singing songs like:
“Catch a Falling Star”, “Tom Boy”, and “Hot-Diggity, Dog-Diggity, Boom What You Do To Me!”
Long before they got to “The Bluest Skies You’ve Ever Seen Are in Seattle”, I knew that Perry (Pierino) Como (May 18th, 1912) -- the singing barber -- was their choice for the most significant birth I was just grateful that they stayed away from “Ave Maria,” not because I dislike it, mind you, but rather because it’s a beautiful hymn.
It took less time than I possibly could have imagined for them to decide on the most significant May 18th death. At least they didn’t settle for Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit Missionary. (Dunderhead made the derisive comment that he’d been turned down at Marquette when he’d applied for admission to the university back in the 1960s.) Indeed, Mary McLeod Bethune of education and civil rights fame who died May 18th 1955, and Jeannette Rankin, the maverick GOP Congresswoman from Montana who had been elected to two terms in the House of Representatives in 1916 and 1940 so she could vote to keep us out of both World War I and II before being denied re-election both times, got no reaction at all. Not even Wilbur J. Cohen, the first employee of the Social Security Administration who died on May 18th, 1977 got the slightest sniffle.
Then, suddenly, it came.
“Oh, no,” Lunkhead and Dunderhead cried together, as if it had happened on May 18th, 2007 rather than on May 18th, 1988. They were talking about the death of Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi Bear and Huckelberry Hound.
“But,” I cried, “Why not Lawrence Welk who died of pneumonia on May 18th, 1992 at the age of 89?”
“Naah,” said Lunkhead, “I couldn’t vote for anyone who had lemons for sisters. The Oak Ridge Boys are more my type of music anyway.
“Lunkhead,” said Dunderhead, “They were the Lennon Sisters, not the Lemon sisters! Open your ears and your mind might follow!”
“Yah, but they were lemons just the same as far as I’m concerned,” Lunkhead growled, retrieving his dead cigar from the bar and putting it back into his face.
The pick for the most historic event was, of course, going to be the toughest and probably the most significant choice. The possibilities included:
The 1631 election of John Winthrop as the first governor of Massachusetts; the 1652 decision by Rhode Island to make slavery illegal; the May 18th 1804 crowning of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor of France; the infamous decision of the people of Massachusetts on May 18th 1852 requiring all children of age within the state to attend school; the beginning of the siege of Vicksburg by General Grant during the Civil War in 1863; the panic by many in 1910 when the earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet; the 1934 reference to the Academy Award Statue as “Oscar” for the first time in print by Sidney Skolsky — none of which got any reaction from either man.
The 1953 breaking of the sound barrier by Jacqueline Cochrane, the first woman pilot to do so, did get a reaction from Lunkhead who said that his wife had broken the sound barrier many times without thinking anything of it. Both men thought it was remarkable that Catholic Italy had approved the legalization of abortion as early as 1977—and both thought it was quite “manly” that Chung Kwung Ying had performed 2,750 “atomic” hand-stand push-ups on Sunday, May 18th, 1986. The amazing thing is that they missed it -- both of them.
There was dead silence. They couldn’t make up their minds. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar name that had caused their attention to skip over it. I pronounced it—Edwin Budding. Then I pronounced the year—eighteen thirty.
I thought Lunkhead was going to pass out. Suddenly he saw it: in 1830, an English engineer named Edwin Budding from Stroud, Gloucestershire had invented the lawn mower -- the bane of every husband nearly every Saturday of his life between May and October. Yes, indeed, that was it. I hadn’t known about Lunkhead’s pickle before presenting my lists, but what can one say or even do when history proves so real and relevant?
Suddenly, there we were, me on one side and Dunderhead on the other, leading Lunkhead home to face the first chore Bertha Lunkhead would surely demand of her groggy husband tomorrow morning.
“I can just hear her now,” Lunkhead cried. “Before you do anything else, mow the lawn dear!!!”
“Lunkhead,” I asked sweetly, “what price would Bertha have had to pay had the Warriors and not the Jazz won the recent series?”
Oh, that’s easy,” shot back Lunkhead, “she’d have had to do anything I wanted her to do for a week beginning tomorrow, of course. After all, I’d have given her prep time, I’m not a brutish man you know,” he insisted.
“Okay,” I said “then what would you have asked her to do first that she never does?” I inquired as I snickered at Dunderhead over Lunkhead’s bent head.”
“Oh, hell, that’s easy, too. Mow the lawn, dear,” he said with just the slightest tremor in his voice.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
Written Friday, May 18th, 2007
Yah, I know, my ex-wife -- a lady of uncommon judgment and uncanny foresight -- IS right—I must have way too much time on my hands when I do what I did today.
The problem is that I have an ingrained obsession about the significance of historic events and the dates on which they occurred. Thus, I hit the internet to learn what important or significant events had taken place on May the 18ths of the past. As usual, I was fascinated. Not only that, I almost decided for myself what I believe to be the most significant event that occurred in history on this date. However, since I couldn’t quite make up my mind, I did what I always do in such instances.
I went to my local watering hole to find my buddies Lunkhead and Dunderhead—and there they were. Lunkhead was looking a little grim leaning on his left elbow, the fingers of his left hand spread through what little hair he has, a dead cigar poking out of the left side of his mouth, and his scotch glass about a third empty. Dunderhead was leaning on his right elbow looking to his left along the bar at Lunkhead with a self-satisfied smirk on his thin face as though he’d just said something very clever to Lunkhead. There was a nearly full glass of beer in front of him.
“What’s up?” I asked, as I took the stool between them and ordered a beer.
“Oh,” said Dunderhead, “Lunkhead is in mourning for both the San Jose Sharks and the Golden State Warriors.”
“I’d be lucky if that’s all it was,” muttered Lunkhead. “My wife didn’t care about the hockey playoffs but, as you’ll recall, she’s from Salt Lake City and I was dumb enough to bet her that the Golden State Warriors would beat the Utah Jazz in the recent basketball playoff series. Unfortunately for me, they didn’t. Now, I have to do anything she tells me to do for a week beginning tomorrow. She generously gave me a few days to get ready and tomorrow -- on a Saturday, of all days -- it starts,” Lunkhead moaned.
“Well, perhaps this’ll take your mind off your troubles for at least awhile, Lunkhead,” I said, handing both fellows printed copies of the historic events I had printed from the website. The lists are broken into three major categories: significant May 18th births, deaths, and historic events both here and abroad.
“So,” I suggested, “what do you say if we first decide on the most significant May 18th birth?” and they both nodded.
Suddenly, Lunkhead sat up straight and laid his cigar on the bar and Dunderhead lowered his exotic beer. They both began running their forefingers along the first column of names.
“Good God!” said Lunkhead, “Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, was born on May 18th, 1868, and Bertrand Russell, the British mathematician, Nobel Prize winner, and pacifist philosopher was born on the same day in 1872—hmmmm.”
“Neither one of those guys,” said Dunderhead (having obviously started from the opposite end of the list) can hold a candle to Jennifer Streblow, Miss Wisconsin of 1997. And Lunkhead, look -- here’s a Golden State Warrior for you -- Donyell Marshall was born May 18th, 1973. How about that?”
“He’s long gone to the Cleveland Cavaliers, and what’s worse, his team is still in the playoffs,” said Lunkhead hanging his head again.
Both men continued to run their fingers along the May 18th births:
Baseball slugger Reggie Jackson, 1947; Albert Hammond of “It Never Rains In Southern California” fame, 1942; Frank Capra,1894, producer of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Arsenic and Old Lace”; the late Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York, 1904; and Brooks Robinson, 1937, the Baltimore Orioles “vacuum cleaner” at third base for almost twenty-two years now in the Baseball Hall of Fame (along with Jackson); former Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, co-author of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget act of the 1980’s GOP-controlled U.S. Senate.
Suddenly, the silence was interrupted and, for the next ten or twelve minutes, I had to listen to both Lunkhead and Dunderhead singing songs like:
“Catch a Falling Star”, “Tom Boy”, and “Hot-Diggity, Dog-Diggity, Boom What You Do To Me!”
Long before they got to “The Bluest Skies You’ve Ever Seen Are in Seattle”, I knew that Perry (Pierino) Como (May 18th, 1912) -- the singing barber -- was their choice for the most significant birth I was just grateful that they stayed away from “Ave Maria,” not because I dislike it, mind you, but rather because it’s a beautiful hymn.
It took less time than I possibly could have imagined for them to decide on the most significant May 18th death. At least they didn’t settle for Jacques Marquette, the Jesuit Missionary. (Dunderhead made the derisive comment that he’d been turned down at Marquette when he’d applied for admission to the university back in the 1960s.) Indeed, Mary McLeod Bethune of education and civil rights fame who died May 18th 1955, and Jeannette Rankin, the maverick GOP Congresswoman from Montana who had been elected to two terms in the House of Representatives in 1916 and 1940 so she could vote to keep us out of both World War I and II before being denied re-election both times, got no reaction at all. Not even Wilbur J. Cohen, the first employee of the Social Security Administration who died on May 18th, 1977 got the slightest sniffle.
Then, suddenly, it came.
“Oh, no,” Lunkhead and Dunderhead cried together, as if it had happened on May 18th, 2007 rather than on May 18th, 1988. They were talking about the death of Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi Bear and Huckelberry Hound.
“But,” I cried, “Why not Lawrence Welk who died of pneumonia on May 18th, 1992 at the age of 89?”
“Naah,” said Lunkhead, “I couldn’t vote for anyone who had lemons for sisters. The Oak Ridge Boys are more my type of music anyway.
“Lunkhead,” said Dunderhead, “They were the Lennon Sisters, not the Lemon sisters! Open your ears and your mind might follow!”
“Yah, but they were lemons just the same as far as I’m concerned,” Lunkhead growled, retrieving his dead cigar from the bar and putting it back into his face.
The pick for the most historic event was, of course, going to be the toughest and probably the most significant choice. The possibilities included:
The 1631 election of John Winthrop as the first governor of Massachusetts; the 1652 decision by Rhode Island to make slavery illegal; the May 18th 1804 crowning of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor of France; the infamous decision of the people of Massachusetts on May 18th 1852 requiring all children of age within the state to attend school; the beginning of the siege of Vicksburg by General Grant during the Civil War in 1863; the panic by many in 1910 when the earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet; the 1934 reference to the Academy Award Statue as “Oscar” for the first time in print by Sidney Skolsky — none of which got any reaction from either man.
The 1953 breaking of the sound barrier by Jacqueline Cochrane, the first woman pilot to do so, did get a reaction from Lunkhead who said that his wife had broken the sound barrier many times without thinking anything of it. Both men thought it was remarkable that Catholic Italy had approved the legalization of abortion as early as 1977—and both thought it was quite “manly” that Chung Kwung Ying had performed 2,750 “atomic” hand-stand push-ups on Sunday, May 18th, 1986. The amazing thing is that they missed it -- both of them.
There was dead silence. They couldn’t make up their minds. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar name that had caused their attention to skip over it. I pronounced it—Edwin Budding. Then I pronounced the year—eighteen thirty.
I thought Lunkhead was going to pass out. Suddenly he saw it: in 1830, an English engineer named Edwin Budding from Stroud, Gloucestershire had invented the lawn mower -- the bane of every husband nearly every Saturday of his life between May and October. Yes, indeed, that was it. I hadn’t known about Lunkhead’s pickle before presenting my lists, but what can one say or even do when history proves so real and relevant?
Suddenly, there we were, me on one side and Dunderhead on the other, leading Lunkhead home to face the first chore Bertha Lunkhead would surely demand of her groggy husband tomorrow morning.
“I can just hear her now,” Lunkhead cried. “Before you do anything else, mow the lawn dear!!!”
“Lunkhead,” I asked sweetly, “what price would Bertha have had to pay had the Warriors and not the Jazz won the recent series?”
Oh, that’s easy,” shot back Lunkhead, “she’d have had to do anything I wanted her to do for a week beginning tomorrow, of course. After all, I’d have given her prep time, I’m not a brutish man you know,” he insisted.
“Okay,” I said “then what would you have asked her to do first that she never does?” I inquired as I snickered at Dunderhead over Lunkhead’s bent head.”
“Oh, hell, that’s easy, too. Mow the lawn, dear,” he said with just the slightest tremor in his voice.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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