The real work of rebuilding the Provo Tabernacle Temple now begins.
Provo's government should support and carry out the following policy items concerning the project:
1 Rebuilding the Tabernacle-temple will be an expensive, difficult, major undertaking. However, Provo City government must insist the foundation have earthquake seismic reinforcements and seismic shock absorbers similar to what the Utah State Capitol has under it. It is not a question of whether Provo will get rocked by a 7.0+ earthquake; the question is when. The city must require the temple be prepared.
2 Provo should insist the temple employ fire protection and alarm systems we can trust implicitly. That should go without saying, but the problem with that is people would not say it.
3 Those ancient, nineteenth-century brick walls need steel reinforcement and seismic reinforcement. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should also assure Provo smoke damage to the walls will not cause bad smells and lung-breathing risks to temple workers or patrons.
4 Provo should encourage the Post Office to move and sell its property to The LDS Church for its new temple square. For starters, the building is old (nearly 50), way out-of-date, and too small for Provo's needs. Furthermore, its location has never really been ideal. The 100 North 100 West Post Office location (pre-1963) made a far better site. That was why the feds took it for The Will Robinson Federal Building. Provo should encourage the Post Office to build a big and modern facility somewhere in central Provo.
5 The location of the Provo Tabernacle Temple poses security problems that Provo should address without delay. The building stands close to both 100 South and University Avenue, a sitting duck for drive-by terrorist outrages from two streets. Provo should volunteer to close down 100 South between University Avenue and 100 West and give it to the new temple square. Thus, the temple will address security risks from only one street. Provo set the precedent by closing a street for the NuSkin project. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints deserves the same consideration.
6 100 South Street running west will become an important access street to the new temple square. This means it will need a traffic light at 500 West Street.
7 When the piece of 100 South Street closes, 200 South Street will become a major east-west thoroughfare. It will need new traffic lights at 500 West, Freedom Blvd., and University Avenue.
8 Provo should encourage if not insist The L D S Church build an underground parking garage under the park. We do not want to encourage much of ugly parking around a beautiful Church Building. Frankly, Provo should encourage NuSkin to donate their parking garage land to the Church and then build a new parking terrace in the block to the west. If the Church builds its own parking structure, it will need to build a sophisticated planter box structure for the trees, shrubs, lawn, and flowers in the park. Fortunately, experienced architects can design such a structure. The added parking out-of-sight will benefit everyone in the long-run future.
This restoration can evolve into something good or something great depending on what sort of planning goes into the project, starting today.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
THE NATIONAL DEFENSE TEST DAY BROADCAST: prophecies of the Instantaneous Electronic Communications Age
September 2011 marks the 87th anniversary of a landmark military radio broadcast. Western Electric recorded the broadcast from the telephone lines, which is now one of the oldest existing original radio broadcast recordings in history. I write “original” because a number of famous radio recordings that come from an earlier date (the KDKA 1920 presidential election returns comes to mind) actually were recreations. The KDKA 1920 election returns recording was recreated in 1936 and 1950.
On 12 September 1924, the US military mobilized for a National Defense Test Day. The entire concept alarmed the nations and militaries of Europe, but the military mobilized mostly was a publicity gimmick, a male bonding ritual, and a stunt in honor of General of the Army John Pershing, who retired from the Army the next day.
The culminating event of the Test Day was a live coast-to-coast radio broadcast, starting at 8:00 EST. One old time radio history website described the broadcast and the surviving recording this way:
“9/12/24-- National Defense Test Day Broadcast. WEAF-WCAP network of eighteen stations. Linecheck recorded by Western Electric. A ninety-minute program aired to demonstrate how radio could respond to national emergencies thru the interconnection of stations in various cities. Speeches by Secretary of War Weeks, General Pershing, General Saltzman of the Signal Corps, and General J. F. Carty of AT&T. This broadcast marked the first major demonstration of multiple remote cut-ins on a single program, with engineers in fourteen cities responding on cue, followed by two-way conversations between General Pershing and generals representing each of the Army Corps areas. Most of the program was recorded and pressings of the discs were presented to General Pershing. Sets of the discs are also held by the Library Of Congress and the National Archives. Audio quality of the recording is excellent, but two of the sides recorded were damaged during processing and do not survive.”
Let me clarify some points made in this summary. The broadcast originated from the radio station in Washington D.C. The military selected the other radio stations in this ad hoc network for maximum nation-wide radio coverage. Their selection of stations performed successfully, though the whole intermountain west had limited coverage from one station in Denver – two if you count the station in Omaha. California’s coverage was limited to one station in Oakland. The military could have improved Coverage in The West by adding KSL and KNX, but apparently the generals did not care that much about The West. They provided pretty thorough coverage in The East though.
THE BROADCAST
The recording features numerous joys for old radio enthusiasts. For starters, at the very beginning someone taps on the microphone (a big ancient canister models from the sound of the reverb) like it was amateur night in Weehawken. The voices sound as if they were recorded in a long metal tunnel, which was typical of old radio’s sound. The announcer lists every last radio station in the network, something that soon became impractical to do when NBC and CBS eventually created their national networks in 1926 and 1928. This is the first radio recording of multiple remote cut-ins on a single program; it may have been the very first coast-to-coast multiple radio station broadcast with remote cut-ins. It featured a roll call of radio broadcast telephone operators starting in Washington and sounding off in a line that stretched in less than a minute to Oakland. This is the first radio recording that featured a participant in Salt Lake City – and villages in Wyoming and Nevada for that matter.
Nowadays only listeners with patience can sit through the whole recording. It has no commercials, being a federal broadcast. It has no orchestra or band music. It features a cabinet secretary and a bunch of generals speaking about military strategy and radio technological details – neither of which will leave the audience laughing. However, in 1924 the broadcast must have been revelation to small town and rural radio owners.
General Pershing’s address still feels like revelation, considering how frank he is about his experience in World War I and coordinating the American mobilization in 1917-1918 for the Great War in Europe. He admitted publicly that the military made mistakes in the mobilization. It is true: the American mobilization made many mistakes and missteps, took too much time, too much money, crowded too many boys in too few training camps. It will be darned interesting to see if any modern general will someday make the same sorts of admissions in public about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pershing also talked live over the radio with four generals who oversaw Defense Test Day activities in various regions. He talked first with a general headquartered in New York, then a general in Chicago, then a general in Omaha, and then a general in Oakland. The yokels sat before their radios listening in enraptured silence.
Pershing’s talk with his general in New York is one of the few humorous highlights of the broadcast. The New York general seems to have a few too many martinis to celebrate Test Day’s conclusion or to steady his nerves for the nation-wide radio hook up. At one point, he sings (off key yet) a few lines of an old barracks song, much to Pershing’s horror.
The broadcast also gave the rural radio audience a sense of the scale of America. Pershing in Washington, which was in nighttime, asked the general in Oakland about the sunset, which had just occurred and was then lingering in golden twilight.
The generals’ main broadcast goal consisted in teaching citizens how the government could use radio to instantaneously broadcast information to the entire nation during a crisis using a radio network, ideally a radio network with telephone lines and/or shortwave. It was also clear that the military could use radio for its instantaneous private communications as well. That night saw an altogether prophetic broadcast, maybe THE most prophetic radio broadcast ever done.
QUICK COMMUNICATION
Consider the old days.
It took days for telegraph reporters to get the news of the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to the rest of the northeast USA, even longer out to the west coast.
In contrast, 17 years after the Test Day broadcast, the Japanese Air Force followed a commercial radio station frequency into the Island of Oahu and bombed the US military installations on the island. Within minutes, the commercial radio stations of Oahu were broadcasted information, warning and instructions to the residents. Interestingly enough, the radio news networks did not get wind of the situation for more than two hours. The attack started at noon, eastern time, but John Daly did not read the first live CBS radio report until 2:30 p.m. ET. If KNX in Los Angeles or KCBS in San Francisco had received reports from Honolulu earlier than that, the whole CBS network could have reported the attack considerably sooner.
In contrast, 19 years after the test day broadcast, the allied command in England signaled NBC Radio a warning about the impending D-Day Invasion (a Morris code V repeated three times), NBC warned its executives and radio stations to activate (a special four note NBC chimes), and within minutes, the entire continental USA got the news that the invasion had started.
When President Lincoln was assassinated it took several hours, sometimes a couple of days for the telegraphs and newspapers to disseminate the bad news.
In contrast, consider when President Roosevelt died 20 year after the test day broadcast. Roosevelt died at 3:45 p.m. Central Time in Warm Springs Georgia. Roosevelt’s administration did not release the new for nearly an hour. The first newscaster to broadcast a news bulletin was John Daly on CBS, who interrupted a program at 5:40 p.m. ET (4:40 p.m. CT) with the first report. Never the less the whole nation knew about the death in less than an hour after it occurred, though the nation could have learned quicker if the administration had been willing.
President Kennedy was assassinated nearly 40 years after the Test Day broadcast. Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy at 12:30 p.m. CT, and within 4-10 minutes, radio and TV news reporters broadcast bulletins locally in Dallas and then nation-wide. Walter Cronkite of CBS TV News broadcast its first TV network bulletin ten minutes after the shooting; Alan Jackson of CBS Radio News broadcast its first radio network bulletin shortly thereafter. In the first hour, as evidenced by a recording made by the White House, both an Air Force jet-liner transporting half of the President’s cabinet to Japan and the officials in the White House situation room used the private news services to gather their information. The administration made the official announcement of the death of the president 35 minutes after he died in the Parkland Hospital emergency room.
In October 1958, NBC broadcast live to the entire nation the ceremonies surrounding the grand opening of its new broadcast facilities in Washington D.C. It broadcasted part of that ceremony in color on live TV; the videotape record of that broadcast is the oldest surviving color videotape still in existence. President Eisenhower attended the broadcast and spoke – it was the first time he appeared on a color TV broadcast from Washington. He said that government should attach itself to the very best communications available to keep the citizens alert and informed. Eisenhower’s remarks seem remarkably candid today, considering how many political leaders do not want to keep the citizens in any sort of loop.
On 11 September 2001, at 8:42 ET, an airliner crashed into the almost top floors of the north World Trade Center Tower. The various networks started reporting the news within 1 - 4 minutes. All of them reported and showed the second airliner crashing into the south World Trade Center on live TV. This event broadcast illustrated graphically that TV viewers not only could get instantaneous information all over the world, but that it was also possible from them to get mass induced instantaneous stress disorders from watching disaster. In the 21st Century, one does not have to live through disaster to feel as if one has lived through disaster.
President Bush the Second was visiting a school in Florida at the time of the attacks. The military and the secret service quickly evacuated him and his entourage to Air Force One. The military decided not to fly it directly back to Washington. Instead it took the better part of the day to lolly-gag its way back via Louisiana and Omaha. This was done out of fear that the Washington air space was not secure of lurking terrorists. The president did not make any sort of information speech to the nation until later in the evening, but he could have given the public up to the minute information if he wanted to. He did not.
Thus, the National Defense Test Day broadcast was indeed prophetic about how quickly governments could get important information to the citizens in times of crisis. When it wanted to.
INSTANT MISCOMMUNICATION
What the September 1924 Test Day broadcast did not tell us was how much hatred, propaganda, lying, and out right miscommunication radio and TV networks can broadcast quickly.
For example:
In October 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast a live dramatic adaption of H G Wells’ old science fiction novel “The World of The Worlds.” Welles and his writers gussied up the old book by setting it in modern times and presenting the narrative as if it were a series of radio news bulletins and live news broadcasts. The Mercury Theater did not have a big audience that night (it was opposite Edgar Bergen’s megahit Sunday night comedy-variety program), but a considerable percentage of those who listened to the broadcast thought it was really describing a real invasion of Earth by Martians.
The day before D-Day’s Normandy Invasion in June 1944, news broadcaster Robert Trout at CBS was involved in a miscommunication that resulted in a bulletin announcing that the Normandy Invasion had started when it was in the preparation stage.
I once heard as part of an Old Time Radio program recording, a news bulletin that announced that the USA had dropped an atomic bomb on a Japanese city other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In September 1945, the day before the Japanese surrendered, a couple of networks did bulletins announcing the surrender of Japan – prematurely.
On 8 July 1947, radio stations in New Mexico and some network news broadcasts reported that an unidentified flying object had crashed in the plains near Roswell, New Mexico.
When Kennedy was shot, some reported that a secret service agent had also been killed in the shooting. I suspect they got the details of the Officer Tippetts shooting confused. The networks all reported early on accounts of gun fire coming from the grassy knoll as well.
In 1992, when President Bush the First vomited on the prime minister of Japan at an official state dinner, CNN a few hours later got a report and came very close to announcing on live TV that President Bush had died.
THE LEARNING CURVE
The Defense Test Day radio broadcast demonstrated the future of broadcasting to its listeners that night, and made a number of prophecies that came true very quickly. The generals failed to tell us one important thing about radio and television networks – the technology is morality neutral. It is good or bad depending on the morality of those who control the cameras and microphones.
On 12 September 1924, the US military mobilized for a National Defense Test Day. The entire concept alarmed the nations and militaries of Europe, but the military mobilized mostly was a publicity gimmick, a male bonding ritual, and a stunt in honor of General of the Army John Pershing, who retired from the Army the next day.
The culminating event of the Test Day was a live coast-to-coast radio broadcast, starting at 8:00 EST. One old time radio history website described the broadcast and the surviving recording this way:
“9/12/24-- National Defense Test Day Broadcast. WEAF-WCAP network of eighteen stations. Linecheck recorded by Western Electric. A ninety-minute program aired to demonstrate how radio could respond to national emergencies thru the interconnection of stations in various cities. Speeches by Secretary of War Weeks, General Pershing, General Saltzman of the Signal Corps, and General J. F. Carty of AT&T. This broadcast marked the first major demonstration of multiple remote cut-ins on a single program, with engineers in fourteen cities responding on cue, followed by two-way conversations between General Pershing and generals representing each of the Army Corps areas. Most of the program was recorded and pressings of the discs were presented to General Pershing. Sets of the discs are also held by the Library Of Congress and the National Archives. Audio quality of the recording is excellent, but two of the sides recorded were damaged during processing and do not survive.”
Let me clarify some points made in this summary. The broadcast originated from the radio station in Washington D.C. The military selected the other radio stations in this ad hoc network for maximum nation-wide radio coverage. Their selection of stations performed successfully, though the whole intermountain west had limited coverage from one station in Denver – two if you count the station in Omaha. California’s coverage was limited to one station in Oakland. The military could have improved Coverage in The West by adding KSL and KNX, but apparently the generals did not care that much about The West. They provided pretty thorough coverage in The East though.
THE BROADCAST
The recording features numerous joys for old radio enthusiasts. For starters, at the very beginning someone taps on the microphone (a big ancient canister models from the sound of the reverb) like it was amateur night in Weehawken. The voices sound as if they were recorded in a long metal tunnel, which was typical of old radio’s sound. The announcer lists every last radio station in the network, something that soon became impractical to do when NBC and CBS eventually created their national networks in 1926 and 1928. This is the first radio recording of multiple remote cut-ins on a single program; it may have been the very first coast-to-coast multiple radio station broadcast with remote cut-ins. It featured a roll call of radio broadcast telephone operators starting in Washington and sounding off in a line that stretched in less than a minute to Oakland. This is the first radio recording that featured a participant in Salt Lake City – and villages in Wyoming and Nevada for that matter.
Nowadays only listeners with patience can sit through the whole recording. It has no commercials, being a federal broadcast. It has no orchestra or band music. It features a cabinet secretary and a bunch of generals speaking about military strategy and radio technological details – neither of which will leave the audience laughing. However, in 1924 the broadcast must have been revelation to small town and rural radio owners.
General Pershing’s address still feels like revelation, considering how frank he is about his experience in World War I and coordinating the American mobilization in 1917-1918 for the Great War in Europe. He admitted publicly that the military made mistakes in the mobilization. It is true: the American mobilization made many mistakes and missteps, took too much time, too much money, crowded too many boys in too few training camps. It will be darned interesting to see if any modern general will someday make the same sorts of admissions in public about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pershing also talked live over the radio with four generals who oversaw Defense Test Day activities in various regions. He talked first with a general headquartered in New York, then a general in Chicago, then a general in Omaha, and then a general in Oakland. The yokels sat before their radios listening in enraptured silence.
Pershing’s talk with his general in New York is one of the few humorous highlights of the broadcast. The New York general seems to have a few too many martinis to celebrate Test Day’s conclusion or to steady his nerves for the nation-wide radio hook up. At one point, he sings (off key yet) a few lines of an old barracks song, much to Pershing’s horror.
The broadcast also gave the rural radio audience a sense of the scale of America. Pershing in Washington, which was in nighttime, asked the general in Oakland about the sunset, which had just occurred and was then lingering in golden twilight.
The generals’ main broadcast goal consisted in teaching citizens how the government could use radio to instantaneously broadcast information to the entire nation during a crisis using a radio network, ideally a radio network with telephone lines and/or shortwave. It was also clear that the military could use radio for its instantaneous private communications as well. That night saw an altogether prophetic broadcast, maybe THE most prophetic radio broadcast ever done.
QUICK COMMUNICATION
Consider the old days.
It took days for telegraph reporters to get the news of the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to the rest of the northeast USA, even longer out to the west coast.
In contrast, 17 years after the Test Day broadcast, the Japanese Air Force followed a commercial radio station frequency into the Island of Oahu and bombed the US military installations on the island. Within minutes, the commercial radio stations of Oahu were broadcasted information, warning and instructions to the residents. Interestingly enough, the radio news networks did not get wind of the situation for more than two hours. The attack started at noon, eastern time, but John Daly did not read the first live CBS radio report until 2:30 p.m. ET. If KNX in Los Angeles or KCBS in San Francisco had received reports from Honolulu earlier than that, the whole CBS network could have reported the attack considerably sooner.
In contrast, 19 years after the test day broadcast, the allied command in England signaled NBC Radio a warning about the impending D-Day Invasion (a Morris code V repeated three times), NBC warned its executives and radio stations to activate (a special four note NBC chimes), and within minutes, the entire continental USA got the news that the invasion had started.
When President Lincoln was assassinated it took several hours, sometimes a couple of days for the telegraphs and newspapers to disseminate the bad news.
In contrast, consider when President Roosevelt died 20 year after the test day broadcast. Roosevelt died at 3:45 p.m. Central Time in Warm Springs Georgia. Roosevelt’s administration did not release the new for nearly an hour. The first newscaster to broadcast a news bulletin was John Daly on CBS, who interrupted a program at 5:40 p.m. ET (4:40 p.m. CT) with the first report. Never the less the whole nation knew about the death in less than an hour after it occurred, though the nation could have learned quicker if the administration had been willing.
President Kennedy was assassinated nearly 40 years after the Test Day broadcast. Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy at 12:30 p.m. CT, and within 4-10 minutes, radio and TV news reporters broadcast bulletins locally in Dallas and then nation-wide. Walter Cronkite of CBS TV News broadcast its first TV network bulletin ten minutes after the shooting; Alan Jackson of CBS Radio News broadcast its first radio network bulletin shortly thereafter. In the first hour, as evidenced by a recording made by the White House, both an Air Force jet-liner transporting half of the President’s cabinet to Japan and the officials in the White House situation room used the private news services to gather their information. The administration made the official announcement of the death of the president 35 minutes after he died in the Parkland Hospital emergency room.
In October 1958, NBC broadcast live to the entire nation the ceremonies surrounding the grand opening of its new broadcast facilities in Washington D.C. It broadcasted part of that ceremony in color on live TV; the videotape record of that broadcast is the oldest surviving color videotape still in existence. President Eisenhower attended the broadcast and spoke – it was the first time he appeared on a color TV broadcast from Washington. He said that government should attach itself to the very best communications available to keep the citizens alert and informed. Eisenhower’s remarks seem remarkably candid today, considering how many political leaders do not want to keep the citizens in any sort of loop.
On 11 September 2001, at 8:42 ET, an airliner crashed into the almost top floors of the north World Trade Center Tower. The various networks started reporting the news within 1 - 4 minutes. All of them reported and showed the second airliner crashing into the south World Trade Center on live TV. This event broadcast illustrated graphically that TV viewers not only could get instantaneous information all over the world, but that it was also possible from them to get mass induced instantaneous stress disorders from watching disaster. In the 21st Century, one does not have to live through disaster to feel as if one has lived through disaster.
President Bush the Second was visiting a school in Florida at the time of the attacks. The military and the secret service quickly evacuated him and his entourage to Air Force One. The military decided not to fly it directly back to Washington. Instead it took the better part of the day to lolly-gag its way back via Louisiana and Omaha. This was done out of fear that the Washington air space was not secure of lurking terrorists. The president did not make any sort of information speech to the nation until later in the evening, but he could have given the public up to the minute information if he wanted to. He did not.
Thus, the National Defense Test Day broadcast was indeed prophetic about how quickly governments could get important information to the citizens in times of crisis. When it wanted to.
INSTANT MISCOMMUNICATION
What the September 1924 Test Day broadcast did not tell us was how much hatred, propaganda, lying, and out right miscommunication radio and TV networks can broadcast quickly.
For example:
In October 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast a live dramatic adaption of H G Wells’ old science fiction novel “The World of The Worlds.” Welles and his writers gussied up the old book by setting it in modern times and presenting the narrative as if it were a series of radio news bulletins and live news broadcasts. The Mercury Theater did not have a big audience that night (it was opposite Edgar Bergen’s megahit Sunday night comedy-variety program), but a considerable percentage of those who listened to the broadcast thought it was really describing a real invasion of Earth by Martians.
The day before D-Day’s Normandy Invasion in June 1944, news broadcaster Robert Trout at CBS was involved in a miscommunication that resulted in a bulletin announcing that the Normandy Invasion had started when it was in the preparation stage.
I once heard as part of an Old Time Radio program recording, a news bulletin that announced that the USA had dropped an atomic bomb on a Japanese city other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In September 1945, the day before the Japanese surrendered, a couple of networks did bulletins announcing the surrender of Japan – prematurely.
On 8 July 1947, radio stations in New Mexico and some network news broadcasts reported that an unidentified flying object had crashed in the plains near Roswell, New Mexico.
When Kennedy was shot, some reported that a secret service agent had also been killed in the shooting. I suspect they got the details of the Officer Tippetts shooting confused. The networks all reported early on accounts of gun fire coming from the grassy knoll as well.
In 1992, when President Bush the First vomited on the prime minister of Japan at an official state dinner, CNN a few hours later got a report and came very close to announcing on live TV that President Bush had died.
THE LEARNING CURVE
The Defense Test Day radio broadcast demonstrated the future of broadcasting to its listeners that night, and made a number of prophecies that came true very quickly. The generals failed to tell us one important thing about radio and television networks – the technology is morality neutral. It is good or bad depending on the morality of those who control the cameras and microphones.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
9-11: FACTS, PERCEPTIONS, CAUSES, EFFECTS, SECRECY
From 1972 to 2011, the World Trade Center stood at the southwest tip of Manhattan as a gigantic prophecy of its destruction on Tuesday morning, 11 September 2001. The day after the terrorist attack that reduced North America’s tallest office buildings steaming, smoking rubble, I sat looking at old photos of the buildings and concluded that whoever planned the act was some sort of evil genius – for any picture of the two buildings will only remind us of the day of their destruction.
Almost ten years later, I listened with grim bemusement at politicians make speeches at the Pennsylvania site where United Flight 93 crashed. 9-11 is now so encrusted with legend and sentiment that it is hard to find the facts of the case. Some today like to call Flight 93 the first battle of the War on Terror. If that is the case, it was a lost battle in the sense that all the civilians caught in the middle of the battle died when the hijackers should have been captured alive. Of course, the politicians like to spin the incident to say we won the battle in the sense that the hijackers did not get a chance to ditch the plane into the U S Capitol. We tend to forget that if the passengers had failed, U S Air Force fighter pilots would have shot down the flight before it reached Washington.
We also tend to forget that Flight 93 could have turned out quite differently had the hijackers had not delayed in taking over the plane. If they had taken it over while flying over eastern Pennsylvania instead of eastern Ohio, they might have been over Maryland or even the District of Columbia itself before anyone in authority could focus on them.
WTC: LEGEND VS FACTS
The terrorist destruction of WTC-1 and WTC-2 transformed that real estate development into hallowed territory, just as the Battle of Gettysburg hallowed both a sleepy Pennsylvania crossroads and a flawed battle strategy. People today tend to forget that from 1966 to 2001 many found the center controversial and ugly.
The World Trade Center was a monument to the edifice complex of international financier Laurence Rockefeller and his brother New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who oversaw its financing and constructing. From the start, the center was not exactly necessary. It was also a monument to the impersonal ugly business architecture of the 1960s – the buildings were basically two enormous glass, steel, concrete and cast stone rectangles completely lacking in the architectural and decorative sophistication of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building -- the two great art deco skyscrapers ever to grace a skyline. One had to really love the Internationale style to love the World Trade Center, sometimes described as the boxes the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building arrived in.
An incident from my life illustrates the center’s lack of personality. After the buildings caved in, my mind went back to May 1997 when I saw the New York skyline from an airliner preparing to land in Newark International Airport. I remembered gazing over the George Washington Bridge, the Chrysler Building, that east-side bank with the ski-slope roof, the Empire State Building, the Bayonne Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge Bridge. I did not remember seeing the World Trade Center. At all. Obviously it was there; however, it did not register with me.
In the year before the attack I remember that the center appeared in the news a few times, and the news was not necessarily complementary. The center struggled for profitability, and it was profitable only after a bunch of New York state and federal bureaucracies rented offices in it. Its owners wanted to divest themselves of it. As it turned out, the terrorists divested it for them.
THINKING CLEARLY WHEN SCARED
Let me tell a story from my family history that illustrates something about the way we felt after the attack.
My grandfather wrote in his history that when the Japanese military attacked US military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December 1941, he was all alone in his house when he heard the first radio bulletin at or around 12:30 p.m. mountain time and the subsequent radio news reports throughout the afternoon. His family left him at home in Orem, Utah, to visit relatives in Magna, Utah.
He wrote that he got so nervous that he went around his property locking doors. Obviously, if the Japanese military planned to bomb Orem, locking doors would provide no protection. However, why would the Japanese air force want to bomb rural Orem Utah – even if it could? And it could not. If Japan had spies in the USA, it is hard to believe they would waste them in Utah let alone Orem.
Grandpa action resulted because he was angry and scared. That combination always undercuts clear thinking. We saw examples of that over and over from 11 September 2001 onward.
The news reports about the first plane flying into the first World Trade Center building started up around 6:52 a.m. Mountain Time. As I wrote that morning in my home office, I did not know what was happening until my Mother, who even as an old lady liked to arise at 6:30 a.m MT to watch NBC Today, told me what was going on a little before 7:00 a.m.
Within an hour I found her crying in the hallway asking why anyone wanted to do this sort of thing to us. Her words certainly speak volumes about what happened that day and how most of us felt about it. Television has many advantages. However, its major disadvantage is that it can make it feel as if major disasters have happened in our living room. We learned we can now get post traumatic stress reactions to events that we actually do not experience first hand.
PERCEPTION OF REALITY
I continued taking my morning walks in the days after the attack. I found it strange, eerie even, that no airplanes flew in the sky for about four days. I found it even more eerie that practically every home owner displayed American flags. I remember thinking as I looked carefully around at Grandview and Provo scenery during my morning walks that the world really was just the same. Our perceptions had changed.
Our perceptions certainly did not change for the better. In September 2011, I taught three English courses at what was then called Utah Valley State College. My Tuesday-Thursday afternoon class contained one of the most troubled male personalities I ever encountered as a teacher. He did bodybuilding; he showed off his body in tight t-shirts and shorty shorts; he drank water compulsively; he had anger control issues and thus he was divorce and a Mormon returned missionary evolved into an anti-Mormon. On either the Thursday or the Tuesday after the attack, he got into a long ramble rant in which he predicted that if terrorists ever attacked the USA mainland again, the government would simply panic and put the whole culture into military marshall law more or less permanently.
That student turned out to be somewhat prophetic.
Technically the terrorists attacked the New York and New Jersey Port Authority and the professional U.S. Military headquarters. If the plane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside had actually achieved its mission, if the terrorists had ditched the airliner into the United States Capitol while Congress was in session and working in it, then that could be defined as an attack against civilian Americans generally. The military and the command in chief wasted no time in persuading Americans that the dead terrorists had attacked all Americans. That started with the President’s speech to the nation on the evening of 11 September 2001.
GRAB POWER
The terrorist attack of 9-11 posed a problem to those who wanted revenge: the actual perpetrators were all dead the moment of the attacks. The attack had planners, organizers, and financiers, but who were they? and where did they live?
The new book Top Secret America details some interesting facts about what happened in the days after the 9-11 attack. For starters, the Central Intelligence Agency had plans ready within days, if not hours, which makes me wonder what they were doing making these sorts of plans before the attack. The military apparently did not have a plan of attack ready. Many in government saw the attack as an opportunity to get more funding for militarism, to gather more power unto themselves, to decrease the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, and to personally dominate the public. Homeland Security, the NSA, the CIA, the TSA, and the JSOC, all profited handsomely both in monetary and in power gains. Congress thoroughly avoided any sort of oversight; the secret Fourth Branch of Government has evolved into a separate power unto itself – a power inside America, not outside.
One should be careful about generalizing in the wake of an attack that produced a lot of hasty, unfounded generalization. However --
The 9-11 aftereffects has taught us that mankind’s modern systems and institutions do not self correct. They made our problems worse; our leadership became more barbaric, paranoid, and suspicious – not less. We will see how soon Top Secret America becomes obsessed with American enemies within.
TRIBUTE TO THE DIPLOMATS
I pay tribute to leaders and staff in the U.S. State Department who had the good sense to try and stop the War in Iraq and to try and bring some sense into the Afghanistan campaign. They did not succeed, but they tried when everyone else around them had cold-blooded revenge on their minds.
TRIBUTE TO SOLDIERS
On this anniversary, I think about all those military and private contracting volunteers who found themselves in Afghanistan, one of the truly terrible places to fight a war. The Afghans have always found the terrain – rugged terrain -- just right for picking off their enemies one by one.
Since 2001, I have known a number of America’s soldiers studying at Utah Valley University and working in the United States Census. I think today of those young men and women who fought The Second Persian Gulf War in Iraq, a War that truly never should have happened, for all of its premises were either wrong, false, or faked. Its despot, Saddam Hussein is gone, but Iraq’s problems linger on -- and on. Iraq really constitutes three nations held together by despots and arbitrary boundaries set up by the British Empire for its own purposes. This is to say for purposes that no longer exist. No one in Bush administration or even in the Obama administration seems willing to deal with those sets of facts.
The troops took the brunt of the last ten years’s worth of horrors. 10 years is too long to fight a war, especially a war as shape-shifting as the War on Terror, so-called.
Our troops’s political leaders and generals hurt them in both wars. They held vague, contradictory, or conflicted attitudes and goals. They wanted to obtain an American victory from plans that had misguided or unclear goals. That proved to be a recipe for disaster in the past – and the present.
The opposition military leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan did bad to and for their soldiers as well. It is a war with few political victors.
SUMMARY
The real villains of 9-11 all died the moment the War on Terror started. .
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld all somehow escaped international trials for crimes against humanity. Secretary of State Powell wound up looking like a prophet without honor in his own country.
The new government of Iraq, a branch office of The Coalition of the Willing, did put Saddam Hussein on some sort of trial, and executed him. In reference to 9-11, he had little if anything to do with the attacks. Iraq’s troubles, meanwhile, live on without him.
Osama bin Ladin, the man who came up with 9-11 abstraction, planning, and financing, somehow alluded capture and trial in an international court for nearly a decade. His enemies martyred him, which is hardly ever a good idea for despots who do wars for Pleasure and Glory.
However, we should never assume that God does not notice our deeds on Earth.
Almost ten years later, I listened with grim bemusement at politicians make speeches at the Pennsylvania site where United Flight 93 crashed. 9-11 is now so encrusted with legend and sentiment that it is hard to find the facts of the case. Some today like to call Flight 93 the first battle of the War on Terror. If that is the case, it was a lost battle in the sense that all the civilians caught in the middle of the battle died when the hijackers should have been captured alive. Of course, the politicians like to spin the incident to say we won the battle in the sense that the hijackers did not get a chance to ditch the plane into the U S Capitol. We tend to forget that if the passengers had failed, U S Air Force fighter pilots would have shot down the flight before it reached Washington.
We also tend to forget that Flight 93 could have turned out quite differently had the hijackers had not delayed in taking over the plane. If they had taken it over while flying over eastern Pennsylvania instead of eastern Ohio, they might have been over Maryland or even the District of Columbia itself before anyone in authority could focus on them.
WTC: LEGEND VS FACTS
The terrorist destruction of WTC-1 and WTC-2 transformed that real estate development into hallowed territory, just as the Battle of Gettysburg hallowed both a sleepy Pennsylvania crossroads and a flawed battle strategy. People today tend to forget that from 1966 to 2001 many found the center controversial and ugly.
The World Trade Center was a monument to the edifice complex of international financier Laurence Rockefeller and his brother New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who oversaw its financing and constructing. From the start, the center was not exactly necessary. It was also a monument to the impersonal ugly business architecture of the 1960s – the buildings were basically two enormous glass, steel, concrete and cast stone rectangles completely lacking in the architectural and decorative sophistication of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building -- the two great art deco skyscrapers ever to grace a skyline. One had to really love the Internationale style to love the World Trade Center, sometimes described as the boxes the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building arrived in.
An incident from my life illustrates the center’s lack of personality. After the buildings caved in, my mind went back to May 1997 when I saw the New York skyline from an airliner preparing to land in Newark International Airport. I remembered gazing over the George Washington Bridge, the Chrysler Building, that east-side bank with the ski-slope roof, the Empire State Building, the Bayonne Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge Bridge. I did not remember seeing the World Trade Center. At all. Obviously it was there; however, it did not register with me.
In the year before the attack I remember that the center appeared in the news a few times, and the news was not necessarily complementary. The center struggled for profitability, and it was profitable only after a bunch of New York state and federal bureaucracies rented offices in it. Its owners wanted to divest themselves of it. As it turned out, the terrorists divested it for them.
THINKING CLEARLY WHEN SCARED
Let me tell a story from my family history that illustrates something about the way we felt after the attack.
My grandfather wrote in his history that when the Japanese military attacked US military installations at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December 1941, he was all alone in his house when he heard the first radio bulletin at or around 12:30 p.m. mountain time and the subsequent radio news reports throughout the afternoon. His family left him at home in Orem, Utah, to visit relatives in Magna, Utah.
He wrote that he got so nervous that he went around his property locking doors. Obviously, if the Japanese military planned to bomb Orem, locking doors would provide no protection. However, why would the Japanese air force want to bomb rural Orem Utah – even if it could? And it could not. If Japan had spies in the USA, it is hard to believe they would waste them in Utah let alone Orem.
Grandpa action resulted because he was angry and scared. That combination always undercuts clear thinking. We saw examples of that over and over from 11 September 2001 onward.
The news reports about the first plane flying into the first World Trade Center building started up around 6:52 a.m. Mountain Time. As I wrote that morning in my home office, I did not know what was happening until my Mother, who even as an old lady liked to arise at 6:30 a.m MT to watch NBC Today, told me what was going on a little before 7:00 a.m.
Within an hour I found her crying in the hallway asking why anyone wanted to do this sort of thing to us. Her words certainly speak volumes about what happened that day and how most of us felt about it. Television has many advantages. However, its major disadvantage is that it can make it feel as if major disasters have happened in our living room. We learned we can now get post traumatic stress reactions to events that we actually do not experience first hand.
PERCEPTION OF REALITY
I continued taking my morning walks in the days after the attack. I found it strange, eerie even, that no airplanes flew in the sky for about four days. I found it even more eerie that practically every home owner displayed American flags. I remember thinking as I looked carefully around at Grandview and Provo scenery during my morning walks that the world really was just the same. Our perceptions had changed.
Our perceptions certainly did not change for the better. In September 2011, I taught three English courses at what was then called Utah Valley State College. My Tuesday-Thursday afternoon class contained one of the most troubled male personalities I ever encountered as a teacher. He did bodybuilding; he showed off his body in tight t-shirts and shorty shorts; he drank water compulsively; he had anger control issues and thus he was divorce and a Mormon returned missionary evolved into an anti-Mormon. On either the Thursday or the Tuesday after the attack, he got into a long ramble rant in which he predicted that if terrorists ever attacked the USA mainland again, the government would simply panic and put the whole culture into military marshall law more or less permanently.
That student turned out to be somewhat prophetic.
Technically the terrorists attacked the New York and New Jersey Port Authority and the professional U.S. Military headquarters. If the plane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside had actually achieved its mission, if the terrorists had ditched the airliner into the United States Capitol while Congress was in session and working in it, then that could be defined as an attack against civilian Americans generally. The military and the command in chief wasted no time in persuading Americans that the dead terrorists had attacked all Americans. That started with the President’s speech to the nation on the evening of 11 September 2001.
GRAB POWER
The terrorist attack of 9-11 posed a problem to those who wanted revenge: the actual perpetrators were all dead the moment of the attacks. The attack had planners, organizers, and financiers, but who were they? and where did they live?
The new book Top Secret America details some interesting facts about what happened in the days after the 9-11 attack. For starters, the Central Intelligence Agency had plans ready within days, if not hours, which makes me wonder what they were doing making these sorts of plans before the attack. The military apparently did not have a plan of attack ready. Many in government saw the attack as an opportunity to get more funding for militarism, to gather more power unto themselves, to decrease the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, and to personally dominate the public. Homeland Security, the NSA, the CIA, the TSA, and the JSOC, all profited handsomely both in monetary and in power gains. Congress thoroughly avoided any sort of oversight; the secret Fourth Branch of Government has evolved into a separate power unto itself – a power inside America, not outside.
One should be careful about generalizing in the wake of an attack that produced a lot of hasty, unfounded generalization. However --
The 9-11 aftereffects has taught us that mankind’s modern systems and institutions do not self correct. They made our problems worse; our leadership became more barbaric, paranoid, and suspicious – not less. We will see how soon Top Secret America becomes obsessed with American enemies within.
TRIBUTE TO THE DIPLOMATS
I pay tribute to leaders and staff in the U.S. State Department who had the good sense to try and stop the War in Iraq and to try and bring some sense into the Afghanistan campaign. They did not succeed, but they tried when everyone else around them had cold-blooded revenge on their minds.
TRIBUTE TO SOLDIERS
On this anniversary, I think about all those military and private contracting volunteers who found themselves in Afghanistan, one of the truly terrible places to fight a war. The Afghans have always found the terrain – rugged terrain -- just right for picking off their enemies one by one.
Since 2001, I have known a number of America’s soldiers studying at Utah Valley University and working in the United States Census. I think today of those young men and women who fought The Second Persian Gulf War in Iraq, a War that truly never should have happened, for all of its premises were either wrong, false, or faked. Its despot, Saddam Hussein is gone, but Iraq’s problems linger on -- and on. Iraq really constitutes three nations held together by despots and arbitrary boundaries set up by the British Empire for its own purposes. This is to say for purposes that no longer exist. No one in Bush administration or even in the Obama administration seems willing to deal with those sets of facts.
The troops took the brunt of the last ten years’s worth of horrors. 10 years is too long to fight a war, especially a war as shape-shifting as the War on Terror, so-called.
Our troops’s political leaders and generals hurt them in both wars. They held vague, contradictory, or conflicted attitudes and goals. They wanted to obtain an American victory from plans that had misguided or unclear goals. That proved to be a recipe for disaster in the past – and the present.
The opposition military leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan did bad to and for their soldiers as well. It is a war with few political victors.
SUMMARY
The real villains of 9-11 all died the moment the War on Terror started. .
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld all somehow escaped international trials for crimes against humanity. Secretary of State Powell wound up looking like a prophet without honor in his own country.
The new government of Iraq, a branch office of The Coalition of the Willing, did put Saddam Hussein on some sort of trial, and executed him. In reference to 9-11, he had little if anything to do with the attacks. Iraq’s troubles, meanwhile, live on without him.
Osama bin Ladin, the man who came up with 9-11 abstraction, planning, and financing, somehow alluded capture and trial in an international court for nearly a decade. His enemies martyred him, which is hardly ever a good idea for despots who do wars for Pleasure and Glory.
However, we should never assume that God does not notice our deeds on Earth.
Monday, September 5, 2011
LIFE IS NOT FOOTBALL
It is September again. Cool weather. Beautiful leaf colors. Picnics in the autumn. Football season. In autumn, not one in five men I know can talk about anything other than their work, girls, sex, or the religion of the oblong pigskin ball.
The other day I noted on my Facebook account that
"My favorite definition of football -- a game where you hurt guys, and people cheer.
"My favorite quote about college football -- college football is about as central to college academics as bullfighting is to horticulture. (Paraphrasing from Frank deFord editorial)"
Someone I accepted as a Facebook friend wrote me this
(brace yourself)
“One of my favorite quotes,
Elder Boyd K. Packer: “You are mistaken. There is a great purpose in it. You have not understood.
He tells you that this is not a spectator sport—it is for the participants. It is for their sake that he permits the game to continue. Great benefit may come to them because of the challenges they face.
He points to players sitting on the bench, suited up, eager to enter the game. “When each one of them has been in, when each has met the day for which he has prepared so long and trained so hard, then, and only then, will I call the game.”
Until then, it may not matter which team seems to be ahead. The present score is really not crucial. There are games within games, you know. Whatever is happening to the team, each player will have his day.” -- Mystery of Life
(Football is a great metaphor, a brutal one, but this is life!)”
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
I do not know where to begin with this.
These comments may be the most idiotic things I have ever seen printed in my Facebook account.
For starters: Life is not football or a football metaphor.
Aside from the patronizing tone of both quotations involved, we should not make the mistake of believing life is supposed to be vicious just because it happens to be vicious. That makes as much sense as believing the Republican Party is stupid because it has people in it believing stupid ideas.
Football is primarily masochism versus sadism. The teams come and go. ULCA vs Stanford. BYU vs. Utah. Sodom vs. Gomorrah. Sadism represents the viewers and coaches. Masochism represents the players. If guys want to test their manhood, they should do it the way men have always tested their manhood – get married, make money, or go to war.
Football is a bu$ine$$. That is true in professional sport, but it is even true in college football. Consider all the money generated by football. Consider the money donated to schools by wealthy alumni attracted by the game. Consider the money first; consider the money foremost. Salaries aside the point, most in college football get some sort of financial take from the bu$ine$$. They might lose interest in the game if it weren’t for money – both over and under the table.
Betting represents the most important part of football finance This also means the most important part of the game is how it is set and fixed.
I find it hard to take seriously the contention that America suffers a financial crisis when the money continues to flow so completely into football.
REAL MANHOOD
Too many fathers think of football as a rite of passage to manhood. If guys want to prove their manhood, they should prove it the old fashioned ways – warfare or marriage.
Frank deFord spoke this on National Public Radio, 30 December 2009. Although he discusses professional football, I quote it at length because he could have just as easily said roughly the same things about college and high school ball:
“Only now, at last, are the people in the sport beginning to acknowledge what has been obvious: Football is a gladiator entertainment. Indeed, let us give credit to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Yes, it took him long enough — but in the past month, he has finally begun to take the league out of the same kind of denial that baseball suffered so long vis-a-vis steroids.
“Goodell has issued new, more stringent rules with regard to concussions and has urged former players to will their brains to a study at Boston University, which is seeking to determine how much the sport scrambles brains.
“Invariably, however, when any attempts to improve football safety are suggested, a cry goes up that the spoilsports are out to destroy the very essence of the game. Hey, it's supposed to be a cruel sport. And, yes, it not only is, but as the players get bigger and faster, the collisions increase in their raw manpower.
“Moreover, in a real way, the focus of the action has moved, inexorably, up the body. What was originally football became more legball, then armball and now, essentially, headball.
“Don't worry, fans — none of this is going to endanger the spectator sport. Indeed, if anything, football becomes more popular, more vicariously exciting, as it becomes more dangerous. No, the greater cultural question is at the American grass roots: whether the new enlightenment — which will include yet another congressional hearing Monday — will affect the way the sport is viewed for our children.
“I can remember when educated, middle-class parents let their children smoke — and that's simply not accepted today. Will the same sort of people now conclude that they don't want their sons going out for football?
“Far more boys play football in high school than any other sport — well more than a million each autumn. For many Americans, it's a rite of passage for their sons to be on the football team.
“Nobody says that you learn to be a man playing baseball, say, or basketball. But that has always been a romantic part of the attraction of American football.
“But as the risks of football injury and long-term disability become more exposed, will many parents decide that it's better for their boys to play a safer but less glamorous sport? What price manly?"
RIGHT ASCENSION CALL TO ACTION
Well, readers – it may be too much to urge people to take a football free autumn. But we would all feel better.
At most, we should allow our children to play touch football in the park. Anything beyond that is dangerous to their health and character.
The other day I noted on my Facebook account that
"My favorite definition of football -- a game where you hurt guys, and people cheer.
"My favorite quote about college football -- college football is about as central to college academics as bullfighting is to horticulture. (Paraphrasing from Frank deFord editorial)"
Someone I accepted as a Facebook friend wrote me this
(brace yourself)
“One of my favorite quotes,
Elder Boyd K. Packer: “You are mistaken. There is a great purpose in it. You have not understood.
He tells you that this is not a spectator sport—it is for the participants. It is for their sake that he permits the game to continue. Great benefit may come to them because of the challenges they face.
He points to players sitting on the bench, suited up, eager to enter the game. “When each one of them has been in, when each has met the day for which he has prepared so long and trained so hard, then, and only then, will I call the game.”
Until then, it may not matter which team seems to be ahead. The present score is really not crucial. There are games within games, you know. Whatever is happening to the team, each player will have his day.” -- Mystery of Life
(Football is a great metaphor, a brutal one, but this is life!)”
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
I do not know where to begin with this.
These comments may be the most idiotic things I have ever seen printed in my Facebook account.
For starters: Life is not football or a football metaphor.
Aside from the patronizing tone of both quotations involved, we should not make the mistake of believing life is supposed to be vicious just because it happens to be vicious. That makes as much sense as believing the Republican Party is stupid because it has people in it believing stupid ideas.
Football is primarily masochism versus sadism. The teams come and go. ULCA vs Stanford. BYU vs. Utah. Sodom vs. Gomorrah. Sadism represents the viewers and coaches. Masochism represents the players. If guys want to test their manhood, they should do it the way men have always tested their manhood – get married, make money, or go to war.
Football is a bu$ine$$. That is true in professional sport, but it is even true in college football. Consider all the money generated by football. Consider the money donated to schools by wealthy alumni attracted by the game. Consider the money first; consider the money foremost. Salaries aside the point, most in college football get some sort of financial take from the bu$ine$$. They might lose interest in the game if it weren’t for money – both over and under the table.
Betting represents the most important part of football finance This also means the most important part of the game is how it is set and fixed.
I find it hard to take seriously the contention that America suffers a financial crisis when the money continues to flow so completely into football.
REAL MANHOOD
Too many fathers think of football as a rite of passage to manhood. If guys want to prove their manhood, they should prove it the old fashioned ways – warfare or marriage.
Frank deFord spoke this on National Public Radio, 30 December 2009. Although he discusses professional football, I quote it at length because he could have just as easily said roughly the same things about college and high school ball:
“Only now, at last, are the people in the sport beginning to acknowledge what has been obvious: Football is a gladiator entertainment. Indeed, let us give credit to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Yes, it took him long enough — but in the past month, he has finally begun to take the league out of the same kind of denial that baseball suffered so long vis-a-vis steroids.
“Goodell has issued new, more stringent rules with regard to concussions and has urged former players to will their brains to a study at Boston University, which is seeking to determine how much the sport scrambles brains.
“Invariably, however, when any attempts to improve football safety are suggested, a cry goes up that the spoilsports are out to destroy the very essence of the game. Hey, it's supposed to be a cruel sport. And, yes, it not only is, but as the players get bigger and faster, the collisions increase in their raw manpower.
“Moreover, in a real way, the focus of the action has moved, inexorably, up the body. What was originally football became more legball, then armball and now, essentially, headball.
“Don't worry, fans — none of this is going to endanger the spectator sport. Indeed, if anything, football becomes more popular, more vicariously exciting, as it becomes more dangerous. No, the greater cultural question is at the American grass roots: whether the new enlightenment — which will include yet another congressional hearing Monday — will affect the way the sport is viewed for our children.
“I can remember when educated, middle-class parents let their children smoke — and that's simply not accepted today. Will the same sort of people now conclude that they don't want their sons going out for football?
“Far more boys play football in high school than any other sport — well more than a million each autumn. For many Americans, it's a rite of passage for their sons to be on the football team.
“Nobody says that you learn to be a man playing baseball, say, or basketball. But that has always been a romantic part of the attraction of American football.
“But as the risks of football injury and long-term disability become more exposed, will many parents decide that it's better for their boys to play a safer but less glamorous sport? What price manly?"
RIGHT ASCENSION CALL TO ACTION
Well, readers – it may be too much to urge people to take a football free autumn. But we would all feel better.
At most, we should allow our children to play touch football in the park. Anything beyond that is dangerous to their health and character.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE UTAH REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION
I have been a member of the Republican Party since 1974, but here lately I feel like I am in a family that has gone dysfunctional.
Republicans in Congress express shock – shock! – at the federal deficit and propose huge spending cuts, mostly against the interests of poor and middle class people. Republicans will leave no billionaire behind in this crisis, of course; they will continue somehow to grow the military budget.
I find Republican hypocrisy about debt utterly breathtaking. The founding fathers wrote the Constitution in part to consolidate commerce, currency, and debt. The USA fought the Revolutionary War, Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars all on borrowed money. Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush the Second, and various congresses all increased federal debt and debt ceilings
Americans have for ages purchased The American Dream with both federal and individual debt.
The American Way has always pushed payments two generations into the future. Why has the current crop of Republicans suddenly become righteous about debt?
Debt is not the main problem.
Americans consume mass quantities and shift payment into the future. We cannot sustain The American Dream and American in current funds. This has been our situation for ages. We always insist that Congress fund several federal pet programs to the max, but we want someone else to pay for those programs. Americans want the services of government but do not want to pay for them in taxes. So, both Democrats and Republicans implicitly supported deficit spending policies.
Most of your constituents will support federal budget cuts so long as Congress cuts programs where they do not have any sort of vested interest.
American culture is the problem.
Meanwhile, Congressional leaders and President Obama make speeches, go through complex public spectacles and rituals, and do not deal with the real problems of a culture too big to fund.
FIVE CALLS TO ACTION
I realize that a good letter deals in only one big issue at a time. However, today I do not quite have time to do that.
1. I would find it interesting to hear you express for the public record what we should reduce or eliminate in American culture.
2. The House and the Senate will need to raise the debt ceiling quickly.
3. The tax system is too complicated. Congress should reform it so everyone pays something into the funding of America.
4. Congress will have to raise taxes on the very rich and revoke a lot of tax credits on corporations and individuals, even the ones with political clout.
5. The oversees Empire of the United States has become too complicated and expensive to maintain. This means that the military needs streamlining, modernizing, and reducing.
Republicans in Congress express shock – shock! – at the federal deficit and propose huge spending cuts, mostly against the interests of poor and middle class people. Republicans will leave no billionaire behind in this crisis, of course; they will continue somehow to grow the military budget.
I find Republican hypocrisy about debt utterly breathtaking. The founding fathers wrote the Constitution in part to consolidate commerce, currency, and debt. The USA fought the Revolutionary War, Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars all on borrowed money. Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush the Second, and various congresses all increased federal debt and debt ceilings
Americans have for ages purchased The American Dream with both federal and individual debt.
The American Way has always pushed payments two generations into the future. Why has the current crop of Republicans suddenly become righteous about debt?
Debt is not the main problem.
Americans consume mass quantities and shift payment into the future. We cannot sustain The American Dream and American in current funds. This has been our situation for ages. We always insist that Congress fund several federal pet programs to the max, but we want someone else to pay for those programs. Americans want the services of government but do not want to pay for them in taxes. So, both Democrats and Republicans implicitly supported deficit spending policies.
Most of your constituents will support federal budget cuts so long as Congress cuts programs where they do not have any sort of vested interest.
American culture is the problem.
Meanwhile, Congressional leaders and President Obama make speeches, go through complex public spectacles and rituals, and do not deal with the real problems of a culture too big to fund.
FIVE CALLS TO ACTION
I realize that a good letter deals in only one big issue at a time. However, today I do not quite have time to do that.
1. I would find it interesting to hear you express for the public record what we should reduce or eliminate in American culture.
2. The House and the Senate will need to raise the debt ceiling quickly.
3. The tax system is too complicated. Congress should reform it so everyone pays something into the funding of America.
4. Congress will have to raise taxes on the very rich and revoke a lot of tax credits on corporations and individuals, even the ones with political clout.
5. The oversees Empire of the United States has become too complicated and expensive to maintain. This means that the military needs streamlining, modernizing, and reducing.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
100 YEAR S OF MY FAMILY HISTORY ON GRANDVIEW HILL
This is the text of the talk I presented to my ward's primary sharing time. The information in the brackets adds details for a general readership / adult reading audience.
I always wanted to start a church talk this way:
Brothers and sisters -- young and old and indeterminate:
boys and girls and budding little wise guys:
100 years ago, in 1911, my grandfather and grandmother bought a farm and built a brick home a mile north of this church [Grandview South Stake Center]. They planted peach and apricot trees and raised a family of four boys and a girl. They watered the trees and plants, trimmed them, and harvested fruit from them. They sold peaches and apricots. They grew grapes and made grape juice. Very old grape juice.
My father started to milk the family’s cows at age 6. His father also taught him how to prune and water trees and pick the fruit. He learned how to grow grapes from his father and how to grow raspberries in Lincoln High School in Orem.
74 years ago [1937], my father bought a farm on Grandview Hill [1650 West 1460 North Provo]. Westridge Elementary School and Rotary Park are where his farm once stood. My father’s farm had apple, pear, and peach trees, grape rows, raspberry patches, flowers, and vegetables gardens . Father trimmed trees in winter. He sprayed the trees with stuff to get rid of bugs and watered trees in summer. He and his workers picked fruit in Septembers and Octobers.
70 years ago [c 1941], Father planted that row of tall old pine trees east of Westridge school and north of the parking lot. The pine trees were all about five inches tall. His barn stood 150 feet north of the last pine tree of that big row of pine trees.
63 years ago [18 July 1949], my Father married my Mother.
61 years ago [January 1950], He built our first red brick home where the park restroom now stands.
I arrived here 55 years ago [September 1956]. The street in front of Westridge School did not have sidewalks when I walked to and from Grandview School. The neighborhood had a few homes, and many open fields where kids played. There were other farms, too.
My father liked to do concrete in April, so I help him. In spring we would burn the dry weeds off ditch banks so water could flow to the trees. When I got older, I drove tractors and trucks around the farm and helped watered trees.
About 69 years ago, [1942], my father built a white wood building called a “packing shed.” Where the tennis court now stand at the corner of the park, In that building, he and his workers (including me) sorted the fruit by size using a noisy machine. Big Medium Small Tiny. We put the fruit in baskets and boxes, placed them in big refrigerated cooler rooms to stay fresh until we sold them. I helped sell fruit when I was a boy.
41 years ago [April 1970], my family moved into the house where I now live. The neighborhood then had the street in front of Westridge School [1460 North Street], and the street where the C***l family now lives [1750 West] and the street where the R******* C******** family now lives [1400 North]. The street where the S******t and S****s families now live [1500 West] was a dirt lane lined with wild roses and tall shade trees and fruit trees. The street where I live was then a dirt road with an open irrigation ditch and no sidewalk.
My relatives started joining the Church [of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] in the 1930s. When I was your age, I attended church in an old chapel 9 blocks northeast of this building [Columbia Lane, Provo]. It belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints then. Today, the Baptist Church owns it.
I also attended church in that brown chapel 4 blocks northeast of this church [1350 West]. The church held primary in the middle of the week in the afternoon after school. We primary children studied Jesus and The Articles of Faith. {I held up my old primary bandallo around my neck} On our birthdays, the boys and girls would contribute coins to a bank in the shape of Primary Children’s Hospital. We sent that money to the hospital to care for poor children.
39 years ago when I was a priest, [November 1972] the ward moved into this chapel [Grandview South Stake Center, Grand Avenue]. At that time the church held Sunday school classes separately for adults, big kids, and little children. In fact, I blessed the sacrament for the Junior Sunday School children at this desk right there.
Today [24 July 2011], I remember the open fields and all the fruit trees, white with blossoms in May and glorious in autumn color in October. My grandparents and parents have all long gone.
The past is only the present a second ago. When you get good at writing, I hope you will write down what you do in your homes and in church so that the children of the future will remember you too.
I always wanted to start a church talk this way:
Brothers and sisters -- young and old and indeterminate:
boys and girls and budding little wise guys:
100 years ago, in 1911, my grandfather and grandmother bought a farm and built a brick home a mile north of this church [Grandview South Stake Center]. They planted peach and apricot trees and raised a family of four boys and a girl. They watered the trees and plants, trimmed them, and harvested fruit from them. They sold peaches and apricots. They grew grapes and made grape juice. Very old grape juice.
My father started to milk the family’s cows at age 6. His father also taught him how to prune and water trees and pick the fruit. He learned how to grow grapes from his father and how to grow raspberries in Lincoln High School in Orem.
74 years ago [1937], my father bought a farm on Grandview Hill [1650 West 1460 North Provo]. Westridge Elementary School and Rotary Park are where his farm once stood. My father’s farm had apple, pear, and peach trees, grape rows, raspberry patches, flowers, and vegetables gardens . Father trimmed trees in winter. He sprayed the trees with stuff to get rid of bugs and watered trees in summer. He and his workers picked fruit in Septembers and Octobers.
70 years ago [c 1941], Father planted that row of tall old pine trees east of Westridge school and north of the parking lot. The pine trees were all about five inches tall. His barn stood 150 feet north of the last pine tree of that big row of pine trees.
63 years ago [18 July 1949], my Father married my Mother.
61 years ago [January 1950], He built our first red brick home where the park restroom now stands.
I arrived here 55 years ago [September 1956]. The street in front of Westridge School did not have sidewalks when I walked to and from Grandview School. The neighborhood had a few homes, and many open fields where kids played. There were other farms, too.
My father liked to do concrete in April, so I help him. In spring we would burn the dry weeds off ditch banks so water could flow to the trees. When I got older, I drove tractors and trucks around the farm and helped watered trees.
About 69 years ago, [1942], my father built a white wood building called a “packing shed.” Where the tennis court now stand at the corner of the park, In that building, he and his workers (including me) sorted the fruit by size using a noisy machine. Big Medium Small Tiny. We put the fruit in baskets and boxes, placed them in big refrigerated cooler rooms to stay fresh until we sold them. I helped sell fruit when I was a boy.
41 years ago [April 1970], my family moved into the house where I now live. The neighborhood then had the street in front of Westridge School [1460 North Street], and the street where the C***l family now lives [1750 West] and the street where the R******* C******** family now lives [1400 North]. The street where the S******t and S****s families now live [1500 West] was a dirt lane lined with wild roses and tall shade trees and fruit trees. The street where I live was then a dirt road with an open irrigation ditch and no sidewalk.
My relatives started joining the Church [of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] in the 1930s. When I was your age, I attended church in an old chapel 9 blocks northeast of this building [Columbia Lane, Provo]. It belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints then. Today, the Baptist Church owns it.
I also attended church in that brown chapel 4 blocks northeast of this church [1350 West]. The church held primary in the middle of the week in the afternoon after school. We primary children studied Jesus and The Articles of Faith. {I held up my old primary bandallo around my neck} On our birthdays, the boys and girls would contribute coins to a bank in the shape of Primary Children’s Hospital. We sent that money to the hospital to care for poor children.
39 years ago when I was a priest, [November 1972] the ward moved into this chapel [Grandview South Stake Center, Grand Avenue]. At that time the church held Sunday school classes separately for adults, big kids, and little children. In fact, I blessed the sacrament for the Junior Sunday School children at this desk right there.
Today [24 July 2011], I remember the open fields and all the fruit trees, white with blossoms in May and glorious in autumn color in October. My grandparents and parents have all long gone.
The past is only the present a second ago. When you get good at writing, I hope you will write down what you do in your homes and in church so that the children of the future will remember you too.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
REMEMBERING PRESIDENT'S WIVES: HOSTESSES, ADVOCATES, POWER BROKERS
Here is the short list of wives of the Presidents of the United States who either served in my lifetime or died in my lifetime:
Grace Coolidge died in1957
Edith Wilson 1961
Eleanor Roosevelt 1962
Mamie Eisenhower 1979
Bess Truman 1982 died age 97
Pat Nixon 1992
Jackie Kennedy 1994 died age 64
Lady Bird Johnson 2007 died age 94
Betty Ford 2011 died age 93
Here are the living former and current first ladies:
Rosalyn Carter still alive and now the senior living former first lady
Nancy Davis Reagan still alive and now the oldest of the living group at 90.
Barbara Bush still alive
Hilary Rodham Clinton still alive
Laura Bush still alive
Michelle Obama current first lady. The first president’s wife born in my lifetime
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
First of all, I think, the president's wife should be called the President's Wife. "First Lady" is way too precious for the 21st Century.
In 1976, most conservative Utah LDS political activists and voters disliked Betty Ford. They were uncomfortable for starters that she had discussed openly breast cancer, for they did not want to discuss boobage in public, even in a medical context. She openly campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, which Mormon men detested. The ERA in their minds would open the world up to more radical lesbianism. It also represented in their minds something that would force the LDS Church to admit women to the priesthood and pay women equally with men in the work place. Taking women seriously as equals was just about the last thing the Old Boys in Utah wanted to do under any circumstances.
The Utahns did not like Betty Ford especially after she spoke frankly on 60 Minutes about her children’s marijuana use and premarital sex. Betty made the comments around 1975; at that point she had lived in Washington since 1949. It says a lot about the drug and sexual climate of the place that she made those admissions without batting an eye. Washington has been soggy and kinky for ages; those are workplace hazards of the place. When she went public about her alcohol problem, it was certainly no surprise to people who knew the Washington social scene well. Washington’s cultural tolerances of alcohol caught many public figures and their wives.
The president’s wives are not elected to office with their husbands. Technically the best first ladies were people like Grace Coolidge, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jackie Kennedy, Pat Nixon, and Laura Bush who did hostess duties and little else.
Unfortunately, this nation has endured some Eva Perons of the West.
When I was quite a little boy, Edith (Mrs. Woodrow) Wilson died, almost a year into the Kennedy Administration. She attended Kennedy inaugural with about seven other past and future first ladies. In 1919, her husband suffered a stroke that incapacitated him, but she helped keep up appearances and she in fact did act in some ways as president. Technically, she should have orchestrated a resignation so that a fully functioning President Marshall could have been in place to meet the needs of the 1920s. However, the powerful do not give up power easily, so she became in some ways the first female acting president of the USA.
The first Mrs. Wilson, incidentally, was a civil rights social activist in Washington before her untimely death.
Even today, the hard line conservatives cannot stand Eleanor Roosevelt. It is hard to tell what they dislike most about her – her stands on civil and human rights, her instrumentality in founding the United Nations, or “My Day.” At one point in her first lady career, Hilary attempted to emulate Eleanor with her own weekly column, but she clearly did not have Eleanor’s stamina or clear writing style. Oddly enough, Eleanor influenced an actor/ screen guild president / California governor named Ronald Reagan. From 1975-1979, he presented nearly 1000 short editorials – most from a conservative point of view – on his syndicated radio program, most of them written by himself. The editorials also appeared in some places as a newspaper column. The spirit of “My Day” was not far away.
Americans adored Jackie Kennedy for no substantial reasons other than she was young, beautiful, stylish, glamorous, gracious, and sophisticated. It is interesting how many people prefer a first lady image rather than a working first lady resembling Hilary, who labored on health care (and botched it). She later became an actual elected senator and an actual secretary of state – both of which eluded Eleanor Roosevelt. She did serve as a United Nations delegate. She could have been the first secretary general of the United Nations, a position that her husband Franklin seriously contemplated before his death.
Jackie’s glamour image is somewhat misleading, because she was also bright and a hard worker – particular in the herculean efforts she brought to the White House restoration project from 1961-62.
Jackie was born in 1929 and served as first lady while in her 30s. She might still be alive if her health and emotions and not been undercut by the horrors that she witnessed in her lifetime.
Lady Bird and Betty are my first lady heroes – tough talking, willing to make a difference. Lady Bird was a Texas business woman along with being the wife of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. I could not stand him, but Lady Bird was first rate. First of all, she put up with Lyndon’s eccentricities, and that took real character. Second she got involved in the cause of Texas wildflowers and national beautification. What’s not to love there?
Mrs Carter also had her causes, but she came and went quickly. I find it hard even to remember her as first lady.
Betty Ford spoke out on the dangers of drug addiction and of breast cancer. Heaven only knows how many lives she helped save and redeem. It is true that she supported abortion on demand as birth control, but that was hardly unique in the period – so did Carter, Hilary, Obama, and the Bushes.
Utahns adored Nancy Reagan in 1976. Well, Utahns disliked Betty Ford intensely in 1976. This situation has its ironies: for starters, the Ford family was one of the best looking political families ever with few skeletons in its closet. Certainly the Reagan family was more dysfunctional than the Ford family; heaven only knows their private lives could not stand scrutiny.
Nancy’s Reagan’s interference in the Reagan administration goes beyond legend. It is infamous. Anyone who consults an astrologer before overseeing her husband’s bookings cannot be all good. Peggy Noonan reported in What I saw at the Revolution that Nancy did not particularly care for the Sandinistas; she thought her husband’s public support for them was bad for the president’s image. She also wanted her husband to stop speaking out on antiabortion themes as well. That sort of thing only pleased his base support and did nothing to expand his foundation. She could sometimes satirize her own image – she once sang “Second Hand Rose” at a GridIron Dinner, but basically she and Madame Chiang Kai-shek would have gotten along famously. Who knows, they might have.
Barbara Bush also presented a force to reckon with in her husband’s presidency. She makes an interesting contrast to Betty Ford. Ford turned cancer and addiction adversity into causes that helped redeem thousands, maybe millions of people. In the early 1950s, her daughter died of blood cancer after early experimental chemotherapy treatment. Barbara so internalized her grief that her hair turned prematurely snow white. She could have advocated for childhood cancer victims – as far as I can remember, she did not. At least not to the extent that Betty Ford advocated for cancer and addiction.
Hilary was a power in her own right even in her husband’s administration. As a result, she was the most despised first lady since Eleanor. In all fairness to her, I think she would have been a marginally better president than Bill. She certainly could have done no worse.
She really should have been the first presidential wife to divorce her president in his term. Bill’s extramarital activities with Monica Lewinsky – I called her the courtesan of Lewinsky – certainly caused her plenty of negative emotions and of embarrassment. If her husband had possessed any decency, he should have resigned, but that is another story.
Few public figures are as difficult to write about as Laura Bush. As first lady, she did advocate for literacy, yet her years as first lady tend to fade in the mind – something that we cannot say of Hilary. As a youngster, Laura Welch was involved in an auto accident that killed another teenager. She could have taken that tragedy and used it to advocate for youth driving reforms. Instead she internalized it.
Michelle Obama is the first first lady actually born in my lifetime. I actually remember January 1964, because it was when Joseph Fielding Smith dedicated the church building I attended as a boy.
Grace Coolidge died in1957
Edith Wilson 1961
Eleanor Roosevelt 1962
Mamie Eisenhower 1979
Bess Truman 1982 died age 97
Pat Nixon 1992
Jackie Kennedy 1994 died age 64
Lady Bird Johnson 2007 died age 94
Betty Ford 2011 died age 93
Here are the living former and current first ladies:
Rosalyn Carter still alive and now the senior living former first lady
Nancy Davis Reagan still alive and now the oldest of the living group at 90.
Barbara Bush still alive
Hilary Rodham Clinton still alive
Laura Bush still alive
Michelle Obama current first lady. The first president’s wife born in my lifetime
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
First of all, I think, the president's wife should be called the President's Wife. "First Lady" is way too precious for the 21st Century.
In 1976, most conservative Utah LDS political activists and voters disliked Betty Ford. They were uncomfortable for starters that she had discussed openly breast cancer, for they did not want to discuss boobage in public, even in a medical context. She openly campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, which Mormon men detested. The ERA in their minds would open the world up to more radical lesbianism. It also represented in their minds something that would force the LDS Church to admit women to the priesthood and pay women equally with men in the work place. Taking women seriously as equals was just about the last thing the Old Boys in Utah wanted to do under any circumstances.
The Utahns did not like Betty Ford especially after she spoke frankly on 60 Minutes about her children’s marijuana use and premarital sex. Betty made the comments around 1975; at that point she had lived in Washington since 1949. It says a lot about the drug and sexual climate of the place that she made those admissions without batting an eye. Washington has been soggy and kinky for ages; those are workplace hazards of the place. When she went public about her alcohol problem, it was certainly no surprise to people who knew the Washington social scene well. Washington’s cultural tolerances of alcohol caught many public figures and their wives.
The president’s wives are not elected to office with their husbands. Technically the best first ladies were people like Grace Coolidge, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jackie Kennedy, Pat Nixon, and Laura Bush who did hostess duties and little else.
Unfortunately, this nation has endured some Eva Perons of the West.
When I was quite a little boy, Edith (Mrs. Woodrow) Wilson died, almost a year into the Kennedy Administration. She attended Kennedy inaugural with about seven other past and future first ladies. In 1919, her husband suffered a stroke that incapacitated him, but she helped keep up appearances and she in fact did act in some ways as president. Technically, she should have orchestrated a resignation so that a fully functioning President Marshall could have been in place to meet the needs of the 1920s. However, the powerful do not give up power easily, so she became in some ways the first female acting president of the USA.
The first Mrs. Wilson, incidentally, was a civil rights social activist in Washington before her untimely death.
Even today, the hard line conservatives cannot stand Eleanor Roosevelt. It is hard to tell what they dislike most about her – her stands on civil and human rights, her instrumentality in founding the United Nations, or “My Day.” At one point in her first lady career, Hilary attempted to emulate Eleanor with her own weekly column, but she clearly did not have Eleanor’s stamina or clear writing style. Oddly enough, Eleanor influenced an actor/ screen guild president / California governor named Ronald Reagan. From 1975-1979, he presented nearly 1000 short editorials – most from a conservative point of view – on his syndicated radio program, most of them written by himself. The editorials also appeared in some places as a newspaper column. The spirit of “My Day” was not far away.
Americans adored Jackie Kennedy for no substantial reasons other than she was young, beautiful, stylish, glamorous, gracious, and sophisticated. It is interesting how many people prefer a first lady image rather than a working first lady resembling Hilary, who labored on health care (and botched it). She later became an actual elected senator and an actual secretary of state – both of which eluded Eleanor Roosevelt. She did serve as a United Nations delegate. She could have been the first secretary general of the United Nations, a position that her husband Franklin seriously contemplated before his death.
Jackie’s glamour image is somewhat misleading, because she was also bright and a hard worker – particular in the herculean efforts she brought to the White House restoration project from 1961-62.
Jackie was born in 1929 and served as first lady while in her 30s. She might still be alive if her health and emotions and not been undercut by the horrors that she witnessed in her lifetime.
Lady Bird and Betty are my first lady heroes – tough talking, willing to make a difference. Lady Bird was a Texas business woman along with being the wife of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. I could not stand him, but Lady Bird was first rate. First of all, she put up with Lyndon’s eccentricities, and that took real character. Second she got involved in the cause of Texas wildflowers and national beautification. What’s not to love there?
Mrs Carter also had her causes, but she came and went quickly. I find it hard even to remember her as first lady.
Betty Ford spoke out on the dangers of drug addiction and of breast cancer. Heaven only knows how many lives she helped save and redeem. It is true that she supported abortion on demand as birth control, but that was hardly unique in the period – so did Carter, Hilary, Obama, and the Bushes.
Utahns adored Nancy Reagan in 1976. Well, Utahns disliked Betty Ford intensely in 1976. This situation has its ironies: for starters, the Ford family was one of the best looking political families ever with few skeletons in its closet. Certainly the Reagan family was more dysfunctional than the Ford family; heaven only knows their private lives could not stand scrutiny.
Nancy’s Reagan’s interference in the Reagan administration goes beyond legend. It is infamous. Anyone who consults an astrologer before overseeing her husband’s bookings cannot be all good. Peggy Noonan reported in What I saw at the Revolution that Nancy did not particularly care for the Sandinistas; she thought her husband’s public support for them was bad for the president’s image. She also wanted her husband to stop speaking out on antiabortion themes as well. That sort of thing only pleased his base support and did nothing to expand his foundation. She could sometimes satirize her own image – she once sang “Second Hand Rose” at a GridIron Dinner, but basically she and Madame Chiang Kai-shek would have gotten along famously. Who knows, they might have.
Barbara Bush also presented a force to reckon with in her husband’s presidency. She makes an interesting contrast to Betty Ford. Ford turned cancer and addiction adversity into causes that helped redeem thousands, maybe millions of people. In the early 1950s, her daughter died of blood cancer after early experimental chemotherapy treatment. Barbara so internalized her grief that her hair turned prematurely snow white. She could have advocated for childhood cancer victims – as far as I can remember, she did not. At least not to the extent that Betty Ford advocated for cancer and addiction.
Hilary was a power in her own right even in her husband’s administration. As a result, she was the most despised first lady since Eleanor. In all fairness to her, I think she would have been a marginally better president than Bill. She certainly could have done no worse.
She really should have been the first presidential wife to divorce her president in his term. Bill’s extramarital activities with Monica Lewinsky – I called her the courtesan of Lewinsky – certainly caused her plenty of negative emotions and of embarrassment. If her husband had possessed any decency, he should have resigned, but that is another story.
Few public figures are as difficult to write about as Laura Bush. As first lady, she did advocate for literacy, yet her years as first lady tend to fade in the mind – something that we cannot say of Hilary. As a youngster, Laura Welch was involved in an auto accident that killed another teenager. She could have taken that tragedy and used it to advocate for youth driving reforms. Instead she internalized it.
Michelle Obama is the first first lady actually born in my lifetime. I actually remember January 1964, because it was when Joseph Fielding Smith dedicated the church building I attended as a boy.
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