"Elitism"

 The photo was taken in the summer of 1951, with me on the far left. My youngest two brothers were yet to be born. We are in the backyard, sitting on a rock on which is mounted a granite carving of mother and child, which my father had sculpted ten years earlier. We are holding examples of my parent’s artwork.

 

I included the photo, as this essay incorporates a little of my personal (and unique) non-elitist upbringing.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Elitism”

October 29, 2025

 

“When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.”

                                                                                                Mark Twain (1835-1910)

                                                                                                A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889

 

The word “elite” has roots in both Latin and Old French, meaning to choose. As an adjective it meant “elected,” or “chosen.” While the word appeared briefly in Middle English (1100-1500AD), it only reappeared in the mid-19^th Century, meaning a “choice or select body.” The word is not in Webster’s 1828 dictionary. Wikipedia defines the word: “A small group of powerful or wealthy people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group.” Nevertheless, when used today to describe the politically and financially powerful, the word is often used as a pejorative. 

 

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Just as cream floats to the top of an unhomogenized bottle of milk, the brightest and most talented, left untethered, will rise to the top of society. That is nature’s way. It is when position and power are used to enhance and protect one’s privileged status that corruption ensues. 

 

For most of our Country’s history, elites who ran our financial and industrial businesses, who educated our young at prestigious universities and who governed our Country were drawn from east coast, WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) families – those who were wealthy, educated and civic-minded. They embodied the concept of “noblesse oblige,” but they protected their position through discrimination in education, in business opportunities, and in their social lives. However, time caught up to them. Their wealth, singular education, and political influence began to wane following the Depression and World War II. Like today’s elites, they had little in common with the average American. In a recent issue of The Spectator, Madeline Grant wrote of how WASPs are now in their twilight years, as “meritocracy and modernity” have edged them out. Ms. Grant, in my opinion, is late with her analysis, as I believe this transition has been underway for eighty years. While our nation was better off when merit replaced privilege, today it feels like the same game, but with different players. 

 

I had a seat to this transition. My parents were born into wealth and privilege – my mother’s family in New Haven and my father’s in a Boston suburb. They grew up in large houses with servants, separate summer residences and had traveled abroad. My maternal grandfather, however, fell victim to the Swedish financial swindler Ivar Krueger in 1932, the same year my father left Harvard, after four years but without a degree. A budding sculptor and artist, he had no interest in following his father into the world of finance. My parents met five years later while studying sculpture in Gloucester, Massachusetts and were married in 1938.

 

They raised nine children in an early 19^th Century farm house owned by his parents in circumstances quite different from their upbringings. There was a woodstove in the kitchen for cooking and heating and another in the dining room for heat, along with a fireplace in the living room. A coal furnace furnished hot water and an oil burner in the stairwell provided some heat to the upstairs. Horses were a vestige of their prior lives, but goats and chickens provided milk and eggs. When visiting grandparents, I saw the other side. 

 

When a vacuum develops, as it did with WASPS fading from halls of political power, nature requires it be filled. Washington’s progressive politicians, bureaucrats, along with their Wall Street friends, Hollywood’s hypocrites, and union leaders were ready. In 1962, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, which gave the right of collective bargaining to federal employees. Today, two unions represent 930,000 federal employees, or about 15% of total U.S. union membership. In 1960, the average federal employee made about 15% less than a private sector employee in a similar job. Today, the average salary for a college-educated federal employee is higher than his private sector equivalent, and with better benefits. It is unsurprising that three of the five wealthiest counties in the United States are in the Virginia suburbs: Loudon, Falls Church and Fairfax.

 

Everything in Washington has become grander and more expensive, as a new class of “progressive” elites assumed the mantle. They wanted bigger government. The cost to win a seat in the U.S. Senate has risen by 50 to 100 times over sixty years. While accurate statistics are not available, I am informed by AI that “Congress,” in 1960, “was generally more representative of the country’s economic makeup” than it is now. Today, the median net worth of members of Congress exceeds $1 million. Again, and again according to AI, a 2022 analysis found “97 lawmakers [out of 535 members of Congress] or their families traded stocks in industries that could be affected by their committee memberships between 2019 and 2012.” Both major political parties are guilty. Using inside information for personal gain is one area where there appears to be consensus among Party leaders. As well, and fueling charges of elitism, about 17% of Congress have Ivy League degrees, while the comparable number for the U.S. is roughly 0.3%. Turnover in Congress has declined, as re-districting has limited interparty competition. One-Party states have become more common. For example, in New England where about one third of voters are registered Republicans, there are no Republicans in the House of Representatives and only one Republican Senator, Susan Collins of Maine. 

 

It is my belief that we are in the early stages of the diminishing influence of identity politics and the progressive elites who have dominated our schools, big businesses, and government for the last twenty-five years. Today’s Democrats are reminiscent of postbellum Republicans in their maintaining and continuing positions of privilege and political power. In admissions to the country’s oldest and finest universities, progressives replaced meritocracy with a preference for race, diversity and inclusion. (WASPs had shown a preference for their own kind.) In the classroom, they denigrated conservative opinions. They forewent a belief in a universal Judeo-Christian morality and advanced the concept of moral relativism. In Washington they favored politically palatable industries, and they used lawfare to disparage the democratically elected President Trump throughout his first term.

 

Whether Mr. Trump represents the peak of moral relativism and the end of progressive elitism, I don’t know, but my sense is that we are at a turning point. Regardless, in time progressive elitists will, like their WASP predecessors, be relegated to the dust bins of history. But whoever replaces them they, too, will eventually fall into the same trap, for human nature is unchanging. They will use their influence to maintain their positions, bring along their allies and political preferences, and they will foil and delay change. Creative destruction – when driven by merit and where change leads to improvement – is positive, not just in the world of business, but in personal and political lives. When that next batch of elites becomes pervasive, forego accountability, and when they feel irreplaceable – that they are deserving of their unearned positions – it will be time for still another change.

 

If I am correct that the current ephemeral elitism of identity-fixated progressives, hastened by what looks to be the election of the Socialist and anti-Semite Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s next mayor, is being propelled, gradually, out of the ring, we may well be in for a few years of relief. One can hope.

"Lighten Up, America"

 Tuesday morning my wife and I will go to the polls at the Essex Town Hall. Afterwards, we will drive to the Griswold Inn, also here in Essex, where my daughter-in-law Beatriz Williams and her two co-authors, Lauren Willig and Karen White, will discuss their latest book, An Author’s Guide to Murder, over lunch. The book is being released that day. The event promises to be good fun – three delightful, smart, articulate and funny ladies, as they take the audience through a rollicking good mystery. Agatha Christie, eat your heart out!

 

On Wednesday we begin a six-day trip to visit two grandchildren in college in Pennsylvania and one in boarding school in Virginia, so your e-mail in-box will be free of my offerings, at least for a few days.

 

God speed, and may your candidate win…though I hope mine does!

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Lighten Up, America”

November 3, 2024

 

“Like a welcome summer rain, humor may

suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.”

                                                                                                                The Book of Negro Humor, 1966

                                                                                                                Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

 

While Kamala Harris began her campaign with a promise of joy, it soon deteriorated into character smears against her opponent, with Ms. Harris calling him “fascist” and a “Hitler,” and with President Biden referring to Mr. Trump’s supporters as “garbage.” What makes the “fascist” label ironic is that, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in last Thursday’s issue of American Greatness, “…he [Trump] has been the target of fascists machinations from her own party and supporters for nearly a decade.”

 

Mr. Trump has always appeared devoid of humor, except when polls swing his way. Writing in the current UK issue of The Spectator, Kate Andrews noted “…in the past few weeks, something has restored Trump’s humor.” As the audience left a recent rally in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she quoted a man speaking to his family: “That was better than Netflix.”  Most of us smiled when Mr. Trump, wearing an orange reflector vest (and in response to Mr. Biden’s remark), jumped into a garbage truck in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump does have a habit of calling his opponents names that would make Gordon Gekko blush. Amidst this war of words, America seems an unhappy place. Last Thursday, The Washington Post editorialized: “…in an increasingly angry nation…incidents of road rage escalate across the country.”  As in 1888 Mudville, there is little joy in the U.S. today.

 

We have, as J.D. Vance recently reminded us, become overly sensitive, unable to distinguish between a comedian’s attempts at humor and the mean-spiritedness of a politician. Nevertheless, as a society, we (if not our politicians) have also become more sensitive to the feelings of others, a good thing. For generations, tasteless ethnic, racial, religious and sexual jokes were common. Perhaps because of that we were told that words could not hurt us. However today, we are told they can. Students and employees are warned against using “harmful” words. One consequence: we may become less of a melting pot than in those pre-and-post-World War II years – that our differences, not our similarities might define us. When my wife grew up in New York City, Little Italy, Chinatown, Germantown and Spanish Harlem were distinct places. While new enclaves have developed with new immigrants, those old boundaries can now be found only in history books. Immigrants of yesteryear, whether from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Puerto Rico, or Asia, found it more comfortable, initially, to live in neighborhoods with people who spoke their language and understood their customs. Many new immigrants do so today. As time went by, those earlier immigrants added to the quilt that is the American people, and they became indistinct from their neighbors. Let us hope that today’s politics aimed at dividing us will not prevent the natural forces that unify us. Integration into our nation’s culture is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

 

It is important to remember that the build-out of a diversified population over the past half century happened despite an array of tasteless ethnic, religious and racial jokes. Those jokes – common forty-fifty-and-sixty-years ago – did not hinder the intermarriage of immigrants’ children and grandchildren. The Census Bureau reports that White-Hispanic marriages, White-Asian and White-Black marriages have soared over the past few decades. In 2022, 19% of newlyweds in the United States were married to someone of a different race or ethnicity, versus 3% in 1967. Will political correctness, which has led to the compartmentalization of people, cause that trend to slow or reverse? I don’t know. I am not advocating we revert to telling ethnic jokes. What I am saying is that, accompanied by self-deprecation, that form of humor did no lasting damage.

 

Campaigns, politics and governing are serious endeavors. But perspective is wanted. As the late, legendary ballerina Margot Fonteyn once said: “The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking one’s self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.” In dividing people into groups – ethnic, religious, racial, gender – progressive politicians have focused on our differences rather than our similarities. The poking of fun is no longer allowed. This fear of offending others has ushered in a culture of avoidance, for fear of affronting – widening already existing gaps between political parties, and gender and ethnic groups.

 

In the Essays of Michel Montaigne, the 16^th Century French philosopher wrote: “The highest wisdom is continual cheerfulness; such a state, like the region above the moon, is always clear and serene.” Humor prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously. It helps us find the balance between being sensitive to the needs and wants of others, while being honest about ours, and others, strengths and weaknesses. When the going gets tough, humor greases the skids. Mark Twain is alleged to have once said: “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.” 

 

We live in serious – some might say perilous – times. Nevertheless, laughter has long been an antidote to dreariness. In his 1851 novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote: “However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity.” It is not mindless ‘joy’ we seek, but respectful and good-humored toleration of our differences, be they racial, gender or political. Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s opening stanza to her 1883 poem, as printed in The New York Sun, lends pertinence:  

 

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep and you weep alone:

For the sad old world must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.”

 

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In two days the tension of the election will be behind us. Half the country will be happy; the other half disappointed, but we will survive. Results of elections are never as good as winners would have us believe, nor as bad as losers claim. My recommendation is to pick up a Wodehouse. Sink back into Edwardian England where the sun always shone, birds flew overhead, bees buzzed about, and Uncle Fred could be found flitting along a garden path, spreading “sweetness and light.” Whether or not your choice for President was successful, a smile will crease your face.

"Patriotism"

This is being sent on the evening of July 3, as my wife and I plan to drive to Massachusetts tomorrow morning to attend a family softball game, which was originally played in 1889. To the best of my knowledge, every game over those 135 years has ended in a tie.

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In the midst of celebrating the birth of our country, we should take a few minutes to consider how fortunate we are to be here. According to Freedom in the World 2023, only about 20% of the world’s population live in free countries. And median income in the U.S. is about ten times higher than for the world as a whole. We are far from perfect, but we keep striving; we should be thankful for the United States of America. It is okay to be patriotic.

 

I wish you a joyous 4^th of July!

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Patriotism”

July 4, 2024

 

“Spirit, that made those heroes dare

To die, and leave their children free,

Bid time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee.”

                                                                                                                                Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

                                                                                                                                Concord Hymn, 1837

 

“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened

than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

                                                                                                                                Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

                                                                                                                                Democracy in America, 1835

 

Today we celebrate our nation’s 248th birthday. It is the day when, traditionally, patriotism rises to its highest level of the year. Yet, many Americans are conflicted in their attitudes toward their country. We are divided to a greater extent than at any time since the Civil War. Identity politics has become ubiquitous. Anti-Semitism is experienced on college campuses. We cannot even agree on the definition of a woman. We are told that democracy is under threat: The Left cites January 6 and the behavior of Donald Trump and his claim that he will be a dictator for the first day. The Right speaks to the “weaponization” of the intelligence services – the Russian collusion fabrication by the Clinton campaign in 2016, and the statement by 51 intelligence officers, in 2020, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

 

Patriotism, to those on the political extremes, is dependent upon who holds power. In 1905, addressing this concern, Mark Twain wrote an essay “The Czar’s Soliloquy” for North American Review: “True patriotism, real patriotism: loyalty, not to a Family and a Fiction, but loyalty to the Nation itself.” Twain was commenting on Tsar Nicholas’ habit of ignoring the needs of his people while meditating for an hour every morning after his bath. While Twain wrote 120 years ago about a monarchy that no longer exists, his words are applicable today. Patriotism is not based on family, personal biases or party affiliation, but of love for country – in our case the United States, with its history, complexities and opportunities.

 

Of course excessive patriotism – the wrapping of oneself in the flag – is off-putting and has been condemned by many. On April 7, 1775 James Boswell wrote that Samuel Johnson, taking a swipe at then prevalent jingoism, pronounced patriotism to be the last refuge of the scoundrel. A hundred and forty years later, disillusioned by the horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) wrote the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which ends with these haunting lines:

 

“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dolce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.”[1]

 

Nevertheless, patriotism is critical for the success of a nation. However, we seem to have lost our way. Divisive politics, with its emphasis on racial and gender identity rather than on a shared identity as Americans, has made us angry and sad. Following the recent debate many concluded that the “Biden-Trump reality show,” as Daniel DePetris put it recently in The Spectator, “is a reflection of our decline and an indictment on waning US global power.” But is it? I am not so sure. We are unique in the annals of nations. We are not British, French, Latvian, Chinese, Japanese, Israeli, Jordanian, Nigerian, Algerian, Angolan, Peruvian or Ecuadorian. We are all of them and many more. And, while we are each unique, with myriad skills and varying abilities, we are “We the people,” as the preamble to the Constitution begins. We live in a country founded under Judeo-Christian principles and governed by laws, not men. We have a Bill of Rights that guarantees freedom of speech, assembly and religion, and a Constitution that provides equality before the law. We are free to peacefully protest what impinges on our beliefs. A secret ballot assures we can vote our conscience without fear of retaliation. We live in an economic system that allows individuals to rise as far as aspiration, talent, effort (and luck) take them. We have survived a British invasion in 1812, a Civil War, two world wars and four assassinations. As for our democracy: “It won’t be dismantled so easily,” wrote Matthew Hennessey in an op-ed in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.

 

We should honor the memory of those who fought, died and won our independence 241 years ago – among them recent immigrants to what would become the United States of America. And we must never forget the men and women who fought and died in subsequent wars to keep this nation’s (and other nations’) people free. We should laud the Founders, imperfect though they were, for their vision embedded in the Declaration of Independence. We should study the history of our country, its perfections and its blemishes, and we should understand the three distinct branches of our government and how it operates. We should support the right of every individual to speak for what they believe. We can disagree, but we should not disparage. We should be respectful, not blasphemous. No matter our heritage, race, gender, religion, political affiliation, or economic class, we pledge allegiance to our “flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” As David Wolpe, emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “There are people of good heart and good will, of soulfulness and love, all over this great nation.” Americans, wear your patriotism with pride. 

 

HAPPY 4^th!

 

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[1] It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Owen was killed in France one week before the Armistice.

"James," Percival Everett - A Review

  

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

James, Percival Everett

May 11, 2024

 

“‘And who are you?’ ‘I am James.’ ‘James what?’ ‘Just James.’”

                                                                                                                James, 2024

                                                                                                                Percival Everett (1956-)

 

Slavery is evil. It is an abomination – the degradation of one human by another. But it has been in existence for most of human existence, and it still exists in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Estimates are that about 50 million people are enslaved today. Prior to the 19^th Century slavery was normal in most parts of the world. 

                                                                

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Just as Huck was the voice in Mark Twain’s 1885 Huckleberry Finn, the enslaved (and runaway) Jim is the voice in Percival Everett’s 2024 novel, James. The setting of both books would be early 1861. Lincoln had been elected. Slavery was on the docket, as was secession. Abolitionists were ascendant in the north. Plantation owners, with their thousands of slaves, dominated politics of the south.

 

Like John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn has been (and is) banned in many schools and libraries, generally because of its racist language. While many words are offensive, they reflect the dialect of the time. A warning: Everett uses similar language. Through his character Huckleberry Finn, Twain explored conflicting values – Huck’s desire to see Jim free versus the fact that, under laws that then existed, he (Jim) was the property of another person, Miss Watson. In the end, Jim’s freedom was more important to Huck. Everett explores the inner tension of a literate man who must endure and conform to what is expected of him as a slave. 

 

Like Twain’s Jim, James is decent and empathetic. Additionally, Mr. Everett has him as well-read (through access to Judge Thatcher’s library), something, as a slave, he must hide from white people. In giving lessons to his daughter Lizzie and other children, he tells them of how “the more you talk of God and Jesus and heaven and hell, the better they feel.” The children then respond: “And the better they feel, the safer we are.” Jim then asks, “February, translate that:” She responds, “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.” Jim replies, “Nice.” Whites, Everett infers, need to feel superior to slaves, especially when they are not. 

 

Like the original, when Jim hears that Miss Watson plans to sell him down the river, he tells his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie that he must leave but will return to get them. For a slave to run away took courage. Free states, like Illinois across the Mississippi River, would often capture and return run-aways. Punishment was lashing or hanging. So Jim first escapes to Jackson’s Island where Huck joins him. Jim had brought with him a bag of books: “Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. But then I thought, How could he know I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters…” So he opens the book, and “the smell of the pages was glorious.” “In the country of Westphalia…” – he reads the opening sentence of Voltaire’s Candide. Later, while still on Jackson’s Island, Jim gets bitten by a rattle snake, and in his delirium is visited by Voltaire. He talks to him “about slavery, race and, of all things, albinism.” In another scene, Jim argues with John Locke, father of liberalism who helped write the 1669 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina that justified slavery: “What you’re saying,” Jim retorts, “is that if someone pays you enough, it’s okay to abandon what you have claimed to understand as moral and right.” “When you put it that way,” Locke replies.

 

Percival Everett, an African American professor of English at USC, has given us Jim’s side of Huck’s story.

We meet many of the same characters we know from Huckleberry Finn: Huck, Miss Watson, Aunt Polly, Judge Thatcher, the “Duke,” the “King,” and others. Following Twain’s story, using history, compassion and humor, he offers a worthy companion to Twain’s story, highlighting the indignity and horrors of slavery.

"Are Things as Bad as They Seem?"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Are Things as Bad as They Seem?”

March 11, 2024

 

“Just when you thought that things couldn’t get any worse, you find out that they’ve

always been a lot worse than you thought they were. And then they get worse.”

                                                                                                                                Philip Kerr (1956-2018)

                                                                                                                                The Pale Criminal, 1990

 

Debt, including unfunded liabilities, threatens to bankrupt us. The southern border has become a porous venue for a record number of illegals and the drugs many bring into this country. An epidemic of crime has transformed our cities. Democrats have weaponized the criminal justice department to go after political opponents. Republicans, in a rush to isolationism, have abandoned global responsibilities – underestimating threats to democratic institutions posed by Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Iran’s Mullahs. Color-blind meritocracy and biological sex have given way to harmful fantasies, with preferential treatment for some groups and favored pronouns for others. A desire for clean energy is countered by demand for clean-technology factories and electricity-hungry data centers, “leaving,” as Evan Halper wrote last week in The Washington Post, “utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.” Biden’s mandate that two thirds of all new cars be electric by 2032 will increase the demand for electricity. One asks: is the country witnessing the death of common sense and entering a death spiral? 

 

I suspect everyone, no matter their political preferences, agrees that we live in contentious times – politically, technologically, and culturally. Of the two Presidential candidates, one is visibly senescent and the other is “the crudest trash-talker in politics,” as Barton Swaim wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. AI threatens to disrupt our lives in unknown ways. DEI, CRT, gender neutral bathrooms and gendered-altered athletes have turned high schools and universities into places alien to parents and alumni.

 

Perhaps we should step back. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is an aphorism usually attributed to Mark Twain. It suggests that while each era is different, there are recurring themes. And as George Santayana observed, we are disadvantaged regarding the present and the future when we ignore the past. And, while our current situation is unique, the United States has survived bigger schisms – the biggest being the Civil War when eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. That Lincoln was able to prevent England and France from recognizing the Confederacy and keep the Union intact, while abolishing slavery, is something for which every American should be grateful. 

 

While the Civil War created chaos, the two-and-a-half decades leading up to it were unsettled, and not just because of slavery. In the twenty-four years before Abraham Lincoln was elected in a four-way race in 1860, eight men served as President. The three decades leading to the Civil War saw the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, an event that raised living standards, but that also created winners and losers: Railroads and steamships disrupted traditional means of travel, and the telegraph radicalized the way people communicated. The McCormack reaper increased the value of large Pennsylvania and Ohio farms, while lowering the value of smaller New England farms. The Singer sewing machine revolutionized the clothing industry. All were examples of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative disruption.” More than a third of the nation’s population increase over the thirty years prior to the Civil War was due to immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Germany. Growth spurts are usually accompanied by hiccups. 

 

Turbulent times continued: Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, and over the next thirty-six years two more Presidents would be assassinated – James Garfield in 1861 and William McKinley in 1901. Native Americans continued to be attacked, captured, and placed on reservations. Black Americans continued to experience bigotry and segregation, and the late 19^th Century saw the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. The Industrial Revolution continued, with electricity, autos, and telephones being introduced, creating dislocations for carriage makers and purveyors of gas lamps, but positively affecting living standards.

 

Once again, we live in politically rancorous times, with cultural appropriation in schools, universities, and businesses and disruptive technologies like social media and artificial intelligence. Democrats have what they want in Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee, and Republicans have what they want with Democrats sticking with Joe Biden. Both parties are more interested in attacking their opponent than in promoting their candidate. Neither candidate shows any interest in reconciliation. Trump, in a statement that showed how unhinged he is from reality, claimed to have no need of Nikki Haley’s supporters, Independents, or disgruntled Democrats. In his State of the Union, Biden made no effort to appease Republicans unhappy with Trump. Instead, the speech was, as Ben Domenech wrote in The Spectator, “unhinged…spewing invective at half the country.” – the campaign speech of an angry old man, which served as a preview of the road to November.

 

Unless, unless something changes. Last Friday, No Labels held a virtual 800-delegate meeting, and the members voted, “near unanimously” as NBC put it, to move forward with the process of forming a presidential ticket to run in the 2024 election against Joe Biden and Donald Trump. An official ticket was not put forward, but one is expected. Regardless, given the ages of Biden and Trump and should Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Harvard professor and civil rights activist Cornel West persist in their presidential bids, conventions this summer may be wide-open affairs. 

 

And yet, are things as bad as they seem? No one can see into the future. Classicists remind us that empires end, and so might the United States, a nation that has stood as a defender of freedom for the world’s democracies, and a country that provides hope for the world’s oppressed. But is now that moment? I recall the late 1960s and ‘70s when society was frayed and politics were in disarray, yet we survived. It is possible that the last stanza of Edgar Guest’s (1881-1959) poem published in the March 4, 1921 issue of the Detroit Free Press will prove prescient for today’s over-whelmed American voter:

 

“And you never can tell how close you are,

It may be near when it seems so far,

So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit – 

It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.”

"Integrity"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Integrity”

May 1, 2023

 

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

                                                                                                                                Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

                                                                                                                                “Self-Reliance”

                                                                                                                                Essays: First Series, 1841

 

This essay was prompted by former deputy director of the CIA (2010-2013) Michael Morrell’s interview with House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH). In that interview Morell said he had phoned Antony Blinken in October 2020 about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which had appeared in the New York Post on October 14, 2020. A consequence of that call was that a few days before the 2020 election fifty-one former intelligence officers signed a public letter (a letter prepared by Morrell), which claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. As those officials have since acknowledged, the letter was written without any evidence of Russian involvement; yet those intelligence officers chose to propagate a false story to help Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Reporters from mainstream media were provided an out from having to follow up on the Hunter Biden laptop story. Integrity, where art thou? 

 

Why, I wondered, would someone with Antony Blinken’s pedigree stoop to such a dirty trick?  At the time he was a senior advisor to the Biden campaign, with hopes of a position in a Biden administration. And why would fifty-one former intelligence officers do something that may have affected the outcome of a Presidential election? Is integrity as rare among Washington’s bureaucracy as it is among elected officials?

 

When I first thought of Mr. Blinken, a man raised in privilege – educated at the Dalton School, École Jeannine Manuel, Harvard, and Columbia – abetting the manipulation of an election, my mind went to Eugene Field’s nursery rhyme, “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” only with names and words changed:

 

Biden, Blinken, and Harris

Sailed off in the Ship of State;

Sailed onward toward Utopia,

On a sea of deceit.

And what is your goal, voters did ask?

We have come for the power and glory,

And the gold that will follow,

Said Biden, Blinken, and Harris.

 

Politics and honesty have never mixed. One is reminded of Diogenes searching for an honest man. In his 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad (based on a trip to Southern Europe) Mark Twain wrote: “An honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.” Twenty-six years later, Ambrose Bierce published The Devil’s Dictionary. In it he defined politics: “n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” Written in humor but highlighting a truism.

 

Most politicians, I fear, will never meet Webster’s definition of integrity: “The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.” This is not to say that there are no honest politicians, but, as a species, they are endangered. You are more likely to see an ivory-billed woodpecker out your window than an honest politician on Pennsylvania Avenue. They fabricate, dissemble, and tell half-truths. Elected politicians are accountable to voters, but they evade responsibility for bad decisions. They are masters of illusion and obfuscation. In his taped message announcing his re-election plans, President Biden said he wanted to “finish the job,” a frightening thought. Consider the examples these people set for our children – they lie, blame the other guy, procrastinate, and never take responsibility for bad outcomes. 

 

How will we disengage from this dank and dismal place? Finding honest politicians or government bureaucrats is a dream unlikely to be realized. Extrication may never be possible but if it is, it must lie with the media and education. The former could report facts and leave opinions to editorial pages. The latter could teach students to think independently. A reporter should be interested in uncovering the truth, regardless of where it leads. Will that happen? In today’s polarized environment, doubtful. The better solution – though also a stretch – lies with schools, colleges, and universities where students should be taught to think independently, to study facts, appreciate nuances, and then form and defend their own opinions. Sy Syms used to say, when hawking off-price clothes, “an educated consumer is our best customer.” Similarly, an educated citizen is the best way to keep democracy from collapsing. The most effective response to social media, biased reporting, and hypocritical politicians, is the ability to think for oneself, to read, listen, and to question. That may be wishful thinking, but it is our only hope.

 

Integrity is a personal trait, difficult to practice when society’s emphasis is on conformity; for example, being asked to put one’s signature on a letter that includes a false statement. Employees are warned about using correct pronouns; conservatives are banned from speaking at universities; universities have substituted social justice for merit. Individuals are subjugated to the state, as mandates are issued regarding gasoline-powered cars and as we are told how much electricity must come from renewable sources. Thrift is penalized; under Fannie Mae’s and Freddy Mac’s new rules, those with higher credit scores will be charged higher interest rates, so that people with lower scores can secure mortgages at lower rates – the socialization of credit risk, as The Wall Street Journal put it. Unnecessary government interferences impede free markets; regulations imposed by the Biden administration have had an estimated cost to the economy of over $200 billion, according to the Washington Examiner. Sensitivity readers are employed by publishers to ensure harmful words are eradicated. But perhaps there is hope? At the Time 100 summit last week in New York, Steven Spielberg spoke out against political correctness in the film industry: “No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are either voluntarily or being forced to peer through.” 

 

Technology is changing our lives, with so many “cultural and political earthquakes testing the cohesion of our society,” as Walter Russell Mead recently wrote in Tablet Magazine, that we need the guidance which fundamental principles provide. Integrity is one of those virtues, along with tolerance, fortitude, diligence, charity, humility, and others. In Emerson’s essay, from which the rubric above was taken, he wrote of the “need for each individual to avoid uniformity and false consistency and follow his own instincts and ideas.” In Hamlet, Polonius offered similar advice to his son Laertes: “To thine own self be true.”

 

Eisenhower is alleged to have once said: “The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity.” It is a characteristic missing in almost all public figures, in the media, large corporations, banks and, perhaps most damaging, in schools, colleges and universities. Without principles to guide us, darkness prevails.

"April Fools' Day"

 This is sent a day early, as later this morning we leave for New Hampshire to attend a memorial service tomorrow for a beloved brother-in-law of sixty-one years.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“April Fools’ Day”

April 1, 2023

 

“The first of April is the day we remember

what we are the other 364 days of the year.”

                                                                                                                Attributed to Mark Twain (1835-1910) 

 

Growing up, we loved April Fools’ Day: “Your fly’s unbuttoned!” My fingers reached for the front of my trousers. “April Fool! Made you look, you dirty crook/Stole your mother’s pocketbook!”

 

Like “success,” the origin of April Fools’ Day has many fathers. For a few, it refers to the time when Pluto, king of Hades, carried off Proserpina, daughter of Ceres, goddess of agriculture. Ceres followed the sound rather than her daughter – a fool’s errand. Others suggest the date resembles Hilaria, a festival held in ancient Rome in late March, or India’s celebration of Holi, which welcomes spring. But the likeliest origin is the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. The new calendar changed the start of the year from April 1 to January 1. The change was adopted by Catholic Europe but not Protestant, at least not immediately. It was not until 1752 that England accepted January 1^st as the start of the new year. 

 

Who’s that girl behind you?

 

The best April Fools’ prank of all time, according to the Museum of Hoaxes, a website created in 1997 by Alex Boese of California, was the April 1, 1957 “Swiss Spaghetti Harvest,” perpetrated by the BBC show Panorama. They reported that thanks to a mild winter the dreaded Spaghetti Weevil had been virtually eliminated, so farmers enjoyed a bumper crop. Many viewers were taken in. How, they asked, does one grow a spaghetti tree? The answer: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tomato sauce tin, and hope for the best.”

 

There have been other fun ones. The April 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated announced that the New York Mets had acquired a pitcher named Sidd Finch who could throw a fast ball 168mph, an art he mastered in a Tibetan monastery. Ecstatic Mets fans were disappointed to learn that the story had been written by George Plimpton who left a clue in the sub-heading of the article. On April 1, 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page ad in six major newspapers, which claimed the company had purchased the Liberty Bell and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged people called the National Park Service in Philadelphia. A few hours later Taco Bell admitted it was an April Fools’ joke. The best subsequent line came when President Clinton’s Press Secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale: “The Lincoln Memorial has also been sold and will now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.”

 

Why is there a parrot on your shoulder?

 

Our childhood pranks had none of that originality. We knew, despite being aware of the day, that we would fall victim, lending truth to the old Welch proverb: “If every fool wore a crown, we should all be kings.”

 

Hey, your shoe’s untied!

 

April Fool!  

"Anger"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Anger”

June 28, 2022

 

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in

which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

                                                                                                                Attributed to Mark Twain (1835-1910)

                                                                

The essayist and author Lance Morrow recently penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal: “Could this be an Antebellum Age?” It certainly seems that way, though with luck a Civil War will not break out as it did in 1861. Nevertheless, anger dominates our politics, media and our culture. It separates friends and divides families. It affects judgements and makes impossible civilized debate. It permeates school board meetings, clouds differences regarding climate change, denies respectful discussion of gender politics; it was the impetus behind the January 6 riots and the subsequent, eponymous Congressional commission, and it has distorted the meaning of the Supreme Court’s decision rescinding Roe v. Wade. 

 

It is through the airing of differences that a consensus is found. Debate is integral to our government and our way of life. In his 1990 autobiography, An American Life, Ronald Reagan, wrote that when he became president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, he “learned while negotiating contracts you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: ‘I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.’ If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later...” 

 

In a country as large and as diverse as ours there will always be differences in terms of what constitutes the best way forward. It is why we have elections, and it is why, at least nationally, power ricochets back and forth between the two political parties. Compromise has worked in the past, Consider the relationship between two politicians who had in common only their Irish American heritage, Republican President Reagan and Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neill. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was based on mutual trust and compromise. Similarly, a decade and a half later, Democrat President Bill Clinton reached out to Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the result was the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Yet, similar discussions between President Biden and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are as impossible to imagine as President Trump inviting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a quiet sherry and constructive talk.

 

The “woke” left pontificates about diversity, yet they disrespect those whose opinions diverge from their own; they speak of equity, yet they call those with whom they disagree “deplorables;” they urge inclusion but are intolerant of those who express views contrary to their own. We, who once had the ability to laugh, have grown fearful of provoking offense.

 

Why have we become so divided, so angry? Politicians find it useful to incite their bases, but why does the media not provide perspective instead of fanning the flames of hatred? Is it because profits come before civility? Why did Speaker Pelosi not allow the minority party to appoint members to the January 6 Commission, as had been done with all former such investigating bodies? Was she trying to hide her role regarding security for the Capitol on January 6? Why do some people choose to believe that nine un-elected judges make better decisions than a free, self-determining people through their elected state legislatures? In truth, the decision regarding Roe v. Wade will have little impact on the lives of most people. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent: “States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so.” In seventeen states, the right to abortion on demand is protected by state law. In most others, it is permitted through the first trimester. More states will pass laws protecting abortion rights. Sadly, some will not. But the world will not end.

 

We should not let anger destroy the fabric of this special nation. Joseph Joubert (1754-1854), the French essayist and moralist, once wrote: “The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.” His words were true when he wrote them and are true today. Turn off the TV; shut down your computer, silence your cell phone, place The New York Times on the floor of the bird cage, take your loved one by the hand and go for a long walk. Let nature blossom, not your anger.