IS IT AMERICA THE GREAT, BEAUTIFUL, OR WHAT?

By Edwin Cooney

It isn’t that I haven’t seen my buddies Lunkhead and Dunderhead recently. I have, and I always tremendously enjoy our discussions.  It’s just that D. J. Trump as candidate and as president is sufficiently contentious to dominate everyone’s attention.

My favorite watering hole the other night was only sparsely populated when they walked in.  Lunkhead, both tall and massively built, had the usual unlit cigar clenched in his teeth.  Dunderhead, small and lean with his perpetual worried look, had the latest edition of the New York Times under his right arm. He darted ahead of the lumbering Lunkhead and grabbed the nearest seat as though Lunkhead would otherwise claim it.  Thus, with Dunderhead to my left and Lunkhead on my right, I barked out my taunting question for the evening.

“Gentlemen,” I began, “is America great, beautiful, both, or none of the above?”

‘’That’s a stupid question,” growled Lunkhead, “It’s both!”

“Wow!” shot back Dunderhead, “I love it when you contradict your hero Trump! It’s Trump that’s going to ‘make America great again’! Not even Trump can make America great if it’s already great, can he?’

“Of course, he can! He can make it even greater,” said Lunkhead, unnecessarily stirring his whiskey and water with a swizzle stick.

“Wait a minute, guys,” I cried. “Let’s not debate great vs greater! First let’s define ‘great’.”

“First of all,” insisted Lunkhead, “Every great nation is first and foremost militarily superior to every other nation in the world!”

“Nuts!” exclaimed Dunderhead, squeezing a lime into his beer. “Are you saying that Adolf Hitler’s Germany was a ‘great’ nation when it went to war in 1939? Greatness has little to do with military strength and much more to do with character.”

“Okay, hotshot,” Lunkhead challenged Dunderhead. “Name me a ‘great nation” that wasn’t, or isn’t, superior militarily!”

“Let’s see,” said Dunderhead. “There’s Great Britain and Switzerland, both of which are significant in international monitory affairs. There’s Japan, and how about Canada or even Germany? I don’t know of any country that’s trembling in fear of them, but all of those countries are respected by most nations of the world.  Then, there’s the case of China. China is increasingly significant economically and militarily, but I don’t know many people who would call China a ‘great’ nation.”

“Aside from military strength,”I asked, “when has America historically been great?”

“Get it straight,” Lunkhead insisted. “America has been great ever since the Revolutionary War and it has never stopped being the greatest nation!”

“Look,” Lunkhead said, as Dunderhead took a handful of peanuts from a bowl set conveniently between us, “since no one is perfect, no nation is perfect or ‘great’ all the time. Were we great when we wrote into our Constitution that blacks and Indians should only be counted as 3/5ths of a person when calculating a state’s population for representation in Congress? Were we great throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in our policy toward Native Americans? Did we demonstrate greatness when, just before the Civil War, our Supreme Court ruled that blacks were property? Were we great when we imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II, a decision which was far worse than FDR’s 1937 effort to pack the Supreme Court?”

“We’ve been eternally great since our adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776,” Lunkhead declared, ‘because by so doing we issued a promissory note to perfect all of our economic, social, and political institutions!”

“So, Dunderhead,” I inquired, “since you’ve just listed a set of instances in which you think America has demonstrated a lack of greatness, does that mean you think America isn’t a ‘great’ nation?”

“Not at all,’ said Dunderhead.  “Lunkhead is right about the Declaration of Independence. Certainly the adoption of our Constitution, even with its imperfections, was a great act. Passage of the Twentieth Amendment which granted female suffrage, as well as the establishment of the United Nations, and the Marshall plan to restore Western Europe after World War II were all great accomplishments. Establishment of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts were overwhelmingly great achievements. Thus, America, like other nations, has demonstrated greatness from time to time. However, the fact is that America has no monopoly on greatness,” asserted Dunderhead taking his first sip from another beer.

“Yes, indeed,’ said Lunkhead, “and our splendid new president Donald John Trump is going to make America even greater!

“How’s he going to do that?” demanded Dunderhead.

“By strengthening us militarily, economically, and then defeating Radical Islam among other things,” said Lunkhead.

Finally, although I love both of them, I’d had enough of their political baloney!

‘Look fellows!” I remarked, “you’re both living a fantasy! First, no nation is permanently or by nature ‘great.’ Second, certainly no nation is made great by a goal or proclamation of its leader be his name Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Reagan or Trump. National significance is energized by the character of all its people and the institutions that have been established to assure the freedom and security of its people! Even more to the point, no single leader can force greatness on people. Neither Hitler nor Stalin, with all their political and military authority and power, were capable of making Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia great. Finally, you don’t need a better example of what President Trump complained about during his inaugural address when he insisted that his predecessors were basically selfish men and women looking out for themselves rather than for the country.

“Although you can cite instances when presidents have played a role in American greatness, you can’t name one president who singlehandedly has made America great. To even suggest that a president can attain ‘greatness’ for America is exceedingly deceptive. It could conceivably be an impeachable offense!”

What was ironic as Lunkhead and Dunderhead left the watering hole that night, leaving me to pay the check, was that none of us even tried to debate the idea that America is beautiful!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

AFFECTION FOR AND CONNECTION WITH THE PRESIDENCY - ARE THEY RELICS OF THE PAST?

By Edwin Cooney

Over the years it seems that these pages are loaded with my personal confessions, so I guess one more confession won’t hurt!  I’m as much a romantic as I am an academician.  I have a tendency to fall in love with an odd mixture of people and institutions.

Among my favorite people are such personages as: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Jimmy Carter, Billy Martin, Elvis Presley, and even Aaron Burr.  Among my favorite institutions are professional baseball, politicians of varying types and ideologies, and of course the presidency of the United States.  I even once confessed to a clergyman friend of mine that perhaps the United States presidency was, unconsciously, my idol.  (He agreed with that and offered to pray for me.)  My feeling about the presidency is equivalent to Winston Churchill’s love for the British Empire and the English monarchy.

I’ve been increasingly concerned about the health of the institution of the presidency since the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  It seems to me that Americans did wake up on the morning of Saturday, November 23, 1963 stripped of their innocence.  Take this additional confession as you must, but I’m a full-throated innocent.  I love to empathize and even admire some political and social rogues, although I do have my limits.  In other words, I’m no fan of George Zimmerman or David Duke, but I do find Aaron Burr and even Spiro Agnew intriguing.  In addition, I’m fascinated with John Adams’ decision to defend the British soldiers who participated in the March 1770 Boston massacre as he sought to be elected to the Massachusetts legislature.  (Fortunately, both for the nation and posterity, Adams was successful as both a defense attorney and as a political candidate that year.)  My guess, however, is that I’m not alone in this tendency to be fascinated and intrigued by people, events and institutions.

As I’ve observed in these pages, there have existed three worldwide institutions over the centuries.  The first is the Roman Catholic papacy.  The British monarchy is the second and, since the era of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the Presidency of the United States is the third.  In order to achieve the papacy, one must be steeped in Roman Catholic history and doctrine.  Those first in line for the British monarchy are, from almost the day they’re born, extensively educated to meet their royal responsibilities.  Under our constitution there are no specific qualifications for election or appointment except age, citizenship and, by implication, good behavior.  This is also true of the judiciary.  In other words, if you’re 35 years old and a citizen who “…comes under the tongue of good report,” as Kentucky Senator A.B. (Happy) Chandler used to put it, you may, without any other qualification, be elected President of the United States of America.  Therein, as I see it, lies a formidable weakness in our socio/political system!

I see this lack of expectation or qualification as part of the reason for the increasing ambiguity when it comes to affection for and respect for the presidency.  Although no president, be he named Washington, Lincoln or Roosevelt, has escaped severe criticism and even reprimand, I remember a time when few serious minded people regarded the office of the president with anything less than awe.

For the last 50 years, presidential candidates and presidential incumbents alike have suffered a level of continuous public abuse that is more intense than in any other era of our history.

Today, we live under an expectation of political hatred.  President Trump insisted in his recent inaugural address that all presidents up until his newly minted incumbency were primarily self-serving.  And why shouldn’t he say that?  After all, politics has finally become like sports; winning isn’t only necessary, it’s everything.

Thus the American voter is encouraged to demonize rather than minimize socio/political differences.  No longer are differences a matter of strategy or emphasis.  Differences are matters of morality verses immorality.  Thus, by the time one side of a moral debate is elected over the other side of the moral debate, the office of the presidency is forever tarnished.

A very, very close friend of mine, I’ll call him Mr. Leopold (that’s not his name!), recently told me that he’s actually lost all respect for the office of President of the United States.  After all, he hasn’t cared much for any candidate recently and he finds our incumbent president the worst of them all. (By the way, this gentleman is no liberal by any means! Furthermore, he’s one of the two smartest men I’ve ever met.  He has a towering intellect and is very judicious in his conclusions.)  What I think my friend Leopold may be missing is that all of the great offices of the world, the papacy, the British monarchy and the American presidency, have had their moments of shabbiness and shame as well as glory and greatness.

Forty-six years ago, President Richard Nixon turned LBJ’s common holidays act from being known as George Washington’s birthday to that of Presidents’ Day to honor all presidents of the United States.  Since the Nixon presidency, which ended in President Nixon’s resignation in disgrace, it seems that both major political parties have worked strenuously to minimize the efforts and morals of each other’s leadership to the extent that by the time their own candidate takes office his range of opportunities for compromise and creativity, let alone his freedom to even associate with the political “loyal opposition,” has become as close to a “Cardinal sin” as can exist in secular America.

Today begins the second month of President Donald Trump’s term in office.  As I see it, so far the Trump experiment has been pretty close to a disaster.  There is, however, a way to turn President Trump’s presidency almost 180 degrees around.

Should President Trump champion a major liberal cause and make it stick, he’ll energize the “body politic” like no chief executive has since the president who defied “…fear itself.”

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING

By Edwin Cooney

Originally posted February 2007

I wasn’t going to write about this subject.  I really wasn’t!  Then, someone wanted to know:

“What does love have to do with Valentine’s Day?”

The inquirer went on to say that she wasn’t putting the romantic aspect of Valentine’s Day down, but she suspects that Valentine’s Day has more meaning for greeting card and candy companies than it does for lovers.

Cynical as this question may sound on its surface, it seems that this lady is in rather good company.  The late great comedian Will Rogers spent nearly a half hour of radio time on Mother’s Day 1935 expounding on the observation that florists benefit as much if not more than mothers do from Mother’s Day.  Noting that florists, of course, have mothers too, Rogers went on to observe that florists invariably “…got more flowers than they got mothers!”

When one thinks real hard about it, February 14^th is a rather strange time of the year to be celebrating romance.  I would guess that most think of romance as being associated with flowers—just as mothers are so associated.  Since Mother’s Day is celebrated the second Sunday in May, just at the peak of the spring flower season, one would think that Valentine’s Day might be the third Sunday of May or perhaps the second Saturday of May.  Then the florists would have a truly gigantic bonanza of a weekend!  However, if I’m going to be responsive to the inquiry (what does love have to do with Valentine’s Day?),  I suppose I’d better stop fantasizing and lay out the facts and fables as I’ve found them.

Valentine’s Day had its roots in pagan Rome.  Each year in ancient Rome, the ides of February would find the good citizens of Rome celebrating the festival of eroticism which was called the Lupercalia.  Lupercalia celebrated the Goddess Juno Februata of febris (“fever” of love.)

With the coming of Christianity, there was a movement to replace what Christians thought of as the sinful celebration of the flesh with a more spiritual festival.  At first Christian clerics sought to coax the good citizens of Rome to celebrate the virtues of their favorite saint and to do the celebrating on the day before Lupercalia which traditionally began on February the fifteenth.  However, even as Rome was becoming increasingly dedicated to Christianity, somehow piety was something the people found hard to get excited over.

Then suddenly things changed about 269 A. D.

It seems that Emperor Claudius II was finding it hard to get men to enlist in the army he was trying to put together for fighting his most recent war.    The specific problem was that too many men were getting married and were thus exempt from the Emperor’s draft.  The only solution to that was to hand down a decree outlawing romance and marriage—at least for the present.

Enter the priest who would be known as Saint Valentine.  (His actual name was Valentinus.)

Valentinus began secretly marrying young couples in defiance of the Emperor’s decree.  This wouldn’t do, of course, and one dark night, just as he was performing a secret marriage, he and the couple he was marrying heard soldiers outside.  Fortunately, the couple got away, but Valentinus, not being as agile as he used to be, got caught.

Thrown into prison and sentenced to death, he was visited by hundreds of couples who agreed with him that Claudius the Cruel’s decree was terrible.

While he was awaiting execution, the daughter of his jailor was blinded by a disease and Valentinus was able to cure her.  Hence, she fell in love with Valentinus.  However, being the chaste man that he was and since he was about to die, he couldn’t marry the young lady even in the wake of her intense longing.

On the day of his scheduled execution, he sent her a note which he signed:

“With Love from your Valentine!”

Shortly thereafter, the good priest Valentinus was beaten and decapitated.  In 496 A.D., Pope Gelasius declared Valentinus a Saint and urged that every February fourteenth be celebrated as a day of romance thus superseding Lupercalia.

The mother of modern Valentine’s Day is Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts.  Born in 1828, Miss Howland graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Academy in 1847.  About that time, she received a Valentine from a friend in Britain which, she decided, she could reproduce as well if not even better than the one she’d been sent.  Her father, who owned a book and stationary store in Worcester, ordered some lace paper and Esther put together some samples for the catalogue that was being made up by the store.

It was Esther’s hope to get about two hundred orders once her brother had distributed the catalogue, but she ended up with the unbelievable number of over five thousand orders.  She first advertised her Valentines as messages of romance in the Daily Spy, a local newspaper, on February 5, 1850.  By the time she sold the business, Esther Howland was quite a rich lady.  Miss Howland wasn’t the first person to send a valentine, but she certainly was the major force that popularized the valentine in increasingly commercial America. Esther Howland died in 1904 at the age of seventy-six, believe it or not—a maiden.

Love doesn’t always prevail on February fourteenth.  For example, if you were one of four opponents of gangster Al Capone on Thursday, February 14, 1929, the machine gun blasts you felt pumped into your heart in that Chicago garage may have come from Al’s heart, but they could hardly be described as being of the heart—not even Al’s!

For most of us, Valentine’s Day has been pretty lovely.  February 14, 1859 and 1912 saw the admission into our Union of the states of Oregon and Arizona as the thirty-third and forty-eighth states respectively.  Comedian Jack Benny was born on Valentine’s Day in 1894. And, the first planeload of American prisoners of war from North Vietnam arrived in California on Valentine’s Day 1973.

Can you recall a favorite valentine card from childhood?  I can: it was in the shape of a dump truck and it was sent me by my foster brother Danny.  Its message was simple:

“Here’s a load of love for you on Valentine’s Day.”

No, it certainly wasn’t romantic, but it came from the only person who has ever considered me to be his brother.  Thus I’ll carry the memory of that valentine for the rest of my life!

Not all love is erotic, feverish, or romantic, nor should it be--but it is something else quite special.

Love is definitely what makes Valentine’s Day!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

I JUST FOUND IT - THE KEY TO AMERICAN GREATNESS!

By Edwin Cooney

I never thought I’d find it, but I did and if you really think about it, you can too!  I mean the key to American Greatness!  I’m so excited that I’m tempted to blurt it out right here and now, but I think I’ll wait a few paragraphs before letting you in on my golden secret.  First of all, let’s define when a state of national greatness exists whether in America or in any other nation.

A state of national greatness exists when a nation institutes, within its body politic, a quality that’s rare among the nations of the world. It has to be an entity that inspires, includes and rewards its people.  It can be, and indeed it must be, encoded in the law, but it has to be above or beyond the stricture of law.  It must reflect “the better angels” of human nature.

Americans have waxed eloquent on countless Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Veterans’ Day celebrations on the greatness of America.  Usually the emphasis has to do with the sacrifices we’ve made in war or the benefits of freedom guaranteed under our Constitution and protected by the great traditions and alliances we’ve made.  Outside of these patriotic celebrations, Americans are less clear as to what constitutes American Greatness.

Back in the 1960s, the late great Paul Harvey used to assert that the zenith of American greatness occurred during the 19th century when, as he used to put it, “…we minded our own business so well that other nations began to imitate us.”

Others believe that America became really great when it followed FDR’s admonition made during his first inaugural address that we adopt as a key element of our foreign policy the mantle of “the good neighbor.”  The Good Neighbor policy became the basis of our intervention on the side of Great Britain in its struggle against Nazi tyranny.  That led to the founding of the United Nations, the launching of the Marshall Plan and the NATO alliance, and the subsequent Cold War vanquishment of world communism.

Abraham Lincoln believed that the key to our greatness lay in our acceptance of Jefferson’s phrase in the Declaration of Independence that “…all men are created equal and that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Contrary to most people’s interpretation of President Lincoln’s reference to the immortal Jeffersonian assertion, Mr. Lincoln wasn’t stating a fact. He was stating an ideal and an exceedingly vital ideal it is.  After all, a nation left to simmer in the caldron of world cynicism will never be a “great nation.”  As I see it, 21st Century Americans have become so overwhelmed by reality that they have totally lost their ability to set a national goal that’s sufficiently inclusive to inspire a national will.  The last time we created such a national will was in May of 1961 when President Kennedy set the goal of landing a man on the moon by 1970 and returning him safely to earth.  That goal wasn’t universally endorsed.  It was expensive and it seemed to be more about competing with the Russians than anything else.  Americans with competing domestic agendas such as the war on poverty, civil rights for minorities, and adequate funding for education saw little human benefit in the science necessary to send an astronaut to and from the moon.  Only with the passage of time did we discover all the the medical and scientific advances which came with space exploration which were not even imagined when the newly elected John F. Kennedy proposed it to Congress on Wednesday, May 25th, 1961.

This Monday, February 6th, 2017 marks the beginning of the third full week of the Trump administration.  President Trump had promised to “make America great again.”  He is determined to right the wrongs the world community has visited on America in recent decades. He insists that America has been victimized by international greed.  He says that this greed has stolen our jobs, sapped our economic and moral strength, and made us look foolish in the eyes of the whole world.  Millions of Americans, as they view our ever-changing world with all its uncertainties, are drawn to the president’s assessment of our position in the world.  Shifting social and economic conditions and the legitimacy of climate change forecasts make the future more cloudy than is comfortable for most of us.  In short, we enter this unpredictable presidential administration with more worries than solutions.  Hence, I offer the key to American Greatness!

What the president is really saying is that we live in a world without justice and to a large extent he’s right.  As I see it, however, the president is going about attaining justice for Americans in the most ineffective way possible.  Threats to send troops into Mexico or to retaliate against Iran will only exacerbate international tension. The truth is that a just world abroad and a just society here at home are not attainable by settling scores.  Part of the problem with the attainment of justice is its popular definition.

Justice is too often seen as the protection of the good from the wicked rather than the triumphal success of the many.

On several occasions over the last twelve years in the life of this column, I’ve stated my favorite definition of justice.

Justice exists when an individual becomes all he is capable of becoming and is rewarded when successful.  Injustice, on the other hand, exists when a person is prevented from becoming all he is capable of becoming and is punished when he fails.  This is the Greek philosopher Plato’s definition of justice.  It’s broader than the judiciary system and akin to our spiritual values.  Justice is something to which we’re all entitled and, even more, justice is something we all must guarantee to others.

For the past 241 years, America has become a beacon of social and economic liberty.  However, more than anything else, liberty depends on justice.  The creation of a just society will require us to acknowledge and know one another better and more thoroughly than ever before.  A free society must first and foremost be a fair society putting justice first, rather than settling scores with domestic and international antagonists. This constitutes the ultimate foundation of liberty.

President Lincoln was right in his idealism.  Ideals set the national agenda in every generation.

There’s no better example of idealism than what is found in the Declaration of Independence.  Come on, Mr. President —  cease feeding your angry vanity and commence working for justice on behalf of all humanity!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY