Lindsey Graham, 1955-2026

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What a sad and tragic epitaph for a once-wise man: ‘and Staunch Trump Ally.’

I’ve called Lindsey Graham a stand-up guy here before, and I’d really like to have reason to do so again.

— me, Dec. 1, 2017

The saddest thing, to me, about our senior senator’s sudden death is that I never got to say that about him again.

I had hoped something would happen to return him to good sense — the good sense that he still had just a year before, when he said this:

He was absolutely right. “We” — the Republican Party, he meant… was almost completely destroyed. The party of Lincoln — which all my life had frequently produced candidates that were better than those from the opposing party — was no more. The process was complete by 2014. More than that, the America that was founded as a monument to deliberative government lay in pieces in the acrimonious dust. But I’ve addressed that before; back to our subject at hand…

During the 2016 campaign, Graham played the role of the acid-tongued party jester, daring more than anyone to speak the truth about Trump, and do it in a way that got widely quoted. You may recall some of the things he said. Here’s one:

“You know how you make America great again?” Mr. Graham said in a CNN interview in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

But that’s not the Lindsey Graham I appreciated most. It’s not why, in 2007, I called him a “stand-up guy.” It wasn’t for being a wiseacre. The world has plenty of those. It was for being an actual wise — and courageous — senator who in the years before American went mad, had distinguished himself for exercising nonpartisan judgment over and over. He was the guy you could depend on most to try to hold back the ill tides that brought about the disastrous things that were poised to destroy our country, from hyperpartisanship to xenophobia.

Of course, as the obituaries are saying, he was — with two of my other favorite senators in that time, John McCain and Joe Lieberman — one of the “Three Amigos,” who believed fervently that the strongest nation in the world was obligated to live up its global role since 1945. That meant standing up for liberal democracy and collective security, no matter how much that ticked off either the kind of Republicans who would embrace Trump’s advocacy of “America First,” or Democrats still deeply traumatized by Vietnam.

I was with him there, but I was just as proud of him for his activities as a gang member. I mean the Gang of 14 and the Gang of 8. (If you don’t remember what those were, click on the links.)

The Gang of 14 was about the way the Congress (and the country) was being torn apart by absurdly fierce, take-no-prisoners, partisan battles over judicial nominations. This had been getting worse and worse every year since about 1973, and the partisan nastiness was spoiling the country’s ability to deal with anything else. Graham was a leading member of the Gang, and the best at articulating its reason for being. He kept saying “elections have consequences,” and he proved that he meant it by backing Democratic nominees (assuming they found them objectively qualified) when there was a Democratic president.

Such an attempt — and in Graham’s own case, a reality — was based in belief in two things that had long been missing in the confirmation process: rationality, and a sense of proportion.

The Gang of 8 was just one instance of the most politically suicidal stand Graham ever took: trying to create a sensible, truly American, and workable immigration system. He did it right at the moment when his party was going into full-xenophobe mode — which of course is what created Trumpism, the rebirth of Know-Nothingism.

But he bravely stood up against the backlash that came his way over the next couple of years. I particularly recall the time when he was booed by the mob attending a South Carolina Republican Party gathering when he stood to speak. He just brushed it off with a surprising insouciance, waiting for those people to shut up so he could go on with his speech.

When was it that Lindsey Graham stopped standing up? When did he become the most lickspittle toady of Donald Trump? Apparently, a lot of people have trouble remembering. The New York Times this morning said, after mentioning Lindsey’s goading of Trump in 2016, “A decade later, though, he was regularly and effusively lauding Mr. Trump.”

Well, that’s true. But that wording makes it sound like a long, slow process over the course of a decade. It most certainly was not. It was sudden, and stunning. Of course, I remembered it slightly inaccurately myself — I thought it happened as soon as the 2016 election was over. It really occurred over the following year.

That quote at the top is from a Dec. 1, 2017 post headlined “Would the real Lindsey Graham please stand up?” But the signs of Lindsey’s crack-up had started earlier in the year. In October, I cited with horror a NYT piece headlined, “As Other Republican Senators Bolt, Lindsey Graham Cozies Up to Trump.” My words for it were, “What a disgusting headline about Lindsey Graham.” But I knew it was true. Here’s how I ended that post:

It’s really a shame to see this. Especially when Lindsey’s best buddy John McCain, as sick as he is, is determined to go down swinging against the guy Graham once quite rightly termed “the world’s biggest jackass.”

Because the thing is, he does know better. And therefore, he owes us better…

Several months earlier, there were signs Graham would be a Republican who would stand up to Trumpism with the same lack of personal regard as he had against isolationism, hyperpartisanship and xenophobia. But that was at an end.

It’s a tragedy for Lindsey Graham, and the country, that he never went back to being the man whom I had admired for very good reasons — before he let Trumpism overwhelm him.

Why did he do it? It’s an inadequate explanation, but the most convinceing one to me is simple and personal: Lindsey Graham was a guy who had nothing to fill his life but being a United States senator. He had never married, and had no kids or grandkids. His parents had both died by the time he was 20. There was only his little sister, 11 when he was 20, whom he finished the process of raising. She has always expressed her appreciation to him for that, but she grew up and had her own family. A guy can only fill up so much of his life being the bachelor uncle.

And being a senator, and one of the most notable and quotable senators in Washington, was so immensely fulfilling to him. How could he stand going back to S.C. and trying to build a new persona — maybe starting his own private law practice — as he was moving into his 70s?

Anyway, that’s my theory.

So what happens now? An anecdote…

A couple of days ago, a good friend who lives in my neighborhood called me and asked if I’d let him put an Annie Andrews sign in my yard. This was something that I hadn’t thought about, and I hesitated for a second or two, before remembering that this friend was someone who agreed to let me put a Russell Ott sign his yard two years ago. A this point I said “yes.”

I was out at the time, and when I came home, there it was.

This morning, a little before 9 a.m., that same friend called to tell me that Lindsey Graham was dead. He also expressed amazement that I hadn’t heard that, but I hadn’t. I do sleep sometimes.

A few minutes after that call, I went out and took down the “Annie” sign. Not for good, necessarily. I just took it down for two reasons:

  1. Respect for the dead. I’ve got one of those short flagpoles by my front door — the kind that hangs diagonally from a wall. There’s no way to lower it to half-staff. So I did this instead.
  2. I was supporting Andrews, even though I knew little about her, because I didn’t know anything bad about her, and since 2017, I have voted for any decent candidate who opposed Graham in a general election. But now, I wasn’t sure about who would be facing whom in the general. Henry McMaster will be appointing a replacement for Lindsey, and then there will be a special Republican primary.

Now, do I think that in this age of Trumpism, I will like either Henry’s appointee, or the winner of that special primary? No, probably not. But maybe the fallen GOP will surprise me with an unknown — somebody I will have to learn about just when I’m doing what I hadn’t really done before that phone call Friday (which is what made me hesitate about the sign) — study Annie Andrews as a candidate.

I need some time — the thing Lindsey didn’t get enough of, in the sense of enough to return to being the man he had been — to figure this out.

Happier times. Now all three amigos are gone.

OK, the BoSox are no longer in the cellar…

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This just happened last night, when the Red Sox beat the White Sox, 8-1.

And it’s been awhile.

So you know what this means, right? Haven’t you ever seen a baseball movie about a hapless but loveable team that goes from worst to first? Think “The Natural.” Think “Major League.”

This is the point in the plot — somewhere near the middle of the season, or a bit past that — when the team makes the turnaround, but the pennant still seems beyond its grasp.

You might run some numbers and say with the number of games left, it’s highly, highly unlikely. But remember, we’re now in the era of playoffs, and it’s possible for a Wild Card team to win it all.

Oh, I should add: This formula also applies to basketball. Think “Hoosiers.”

When did you take algebra? And should everyone do the same?

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When I attended Karr Junior High School in New Orleans for my 7th and 8th grades, standardized testing had me on the college-prep track, along with a lot of my friends at the time.

But not one of us took algegra in the 8th grade. We weren’t allowed to. Everyone had to wait until the 9th. The thing is, I was no longer living there in the 9th.

That year, which my Dad spent in the mangrove swamps of IV Corps in Vietnam, I attended Bennettsville High School (an institution that, like the once-magnificent State newspaper building, has vanished from the Earth). We stayed there with my grandparents while my Dad was at war.

And in B’ville, the most academically inclined kids had taken algebra in the 8th grade, when I was taking plain “math” (and frankly, not doing too well at it). So I took algebra in the 9th with the cohort of kids who were also probably headed to college, but were not overeager to get there.

This will surprise some of you whose experience of South Carolina public schools has come after real integration came to the state in 1970. That’s when all the seg academies cropped up, and from then on white voters became gradually less and less invested (monetarily and in terms of giving a damn whether the public schools succeeded or not). I arrived at BHS three years before that happened, and things were in many ways the way they had been when my mother attended the older BHS downtown. All the middle (and upper) class white folks did what they could to support the Green Gremlins (easily the best and most original mascot name of all the schools I attended).

Also, economically, Bennettsville was a far more prosperous place than it is now. That helped.

Anyway, at that point South Carolina was ahead of Lousiana in math, in spite of all those free textbooks Huey Long passed out during the Depression. Still, only those kids assessed as having the skill were taking algebra in the 8th.

But suppose you see your entire community as the most academically advanced in the nation? What happens if you try to prove how wicked smaht all your kids are? (Although in Cambridge, they probably don’t say it that way, but leave that to the Southies.)

Apparently, this happens:

Cambridge made all eighth-graders take algebra. It went so poorly that 60 percent of students will have to retake it.

In other words, living near Harvard Yard, or even MIT, did not automatically endow children with outstanding math skills.

Perhaps they were skilled in other ways. You know how there are word people and number people? Maybe some of them repeating algebra will someday write the Great American Novel. Or become awesome auto mechanics (who can also be found in Cambridge). Different strokes. Also, even if kids have the same inclinations, their brains develop at different rates.

The Globe story contains a lot of fingerpointing, with some teachers charging (anonymously) that the administration rushed the rollout of this experiment, and and administrators saying no we didn’t.

The larger issue, of course, is whether all kids should be forced to learn at the same rate as those who are more gifted in what the Brits call “maths.” This seems doubtful to me, and in this passage the story backs me up:

Other districts and at least two states have tried offering Algebra I to all or most eighth-graders, and studies of those efforts have found negative results for less well-prepared students….

Secondary school is when you start individualizing education according to children’s personal talents and interests. It’s not the time to make them proceed at the same rates in every possible direction.

Anyway, thoughts? And what was your experience with math in school? Did that help or hurt? And do you recommend tailoring the curriculum to each individual student (as public schools have traditionally done, to the extent possible), or expected everyone to keep up on everything at the same rate (which trends more toward the small private school approach)?

Top Five Best Presidential Elections

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A couple of times during that last post, I mentioned how well things were going in this country until the presidential election of 2016. At every point before then, while one party or the other might have been bitterly or even childishly disappointed (like the Democrats in 2000, or the Trumpistas in 2020), our system had worked wonderfully, for the nation and the world.

That got me thinking. Yes, things worked well for those first 56 national elections. But which were the elections when it all worked out best?

Which seemed to me like a situation that called for a Top Five List. So here goes. Note that this time, I’m not ranking the five, but putting them in chronological order:

  • 1800 — This is the one that proved our system could survive, that one party actually could peacefully relinquish power and step aside, and the nation would continue. We all know that my man John Adams lost this one, but we don’t talk much about the fact that it remained tied between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, which was a real crisis. But the backup plan worked (barely), as Jefferson won in the House of Representatives, thus protecting the nation — if not poor Alexander Hamilton — from the execrable Burr.
  • 1824 — This is another that went to the House (although under the new rules of the 12th Amendment), which protected the nation from the awful Andrew Jackson, and gave us the last of that string of extraordinary founding presidents, John Quincy Adams. But this did not last. We got stuck with Jackson in 1828, and this lowered expectations almost to Trumpian levels, and Old Hickory was followed by a string of mediocre-to-bad presidents that most of us would be hard-pressed to name in order. And who would want to, anyway? This one was not lasting in its effect — much like the election of 2020, which gave me such joy and hope for the nation at the time, before we learned that madness still gripped our country. But I include it so that we remember John Quincy, perhaps our most-qualified presidential candidate ever.
  • 1860 — The one that elected our greatest president, and launched our bloodiest war — the one against each other. This was the pivotal moment in our history. Abraham Lincoln was the only man in our history who could have gotten us through what was to come, and with the right outcome. No one else in our history ever possessed such eloquence, such brilliance as a leader, such high ideals, and such an exquisite political skill, which guided him to do the right thing at the right moment at every critical step.
  • 1864 — In its way, just as critical as 1860. The threat from the useless McClellan and the Democrats, the Copperheads and people who were simply sick of our bloodiest war ever, was created a real possibility that we would not complete the task that all this bloodshed was about, and therefore fail to live up to the promise of this country. But Lincoln won re-election, delivered the best inaugural speech ever, rammed the 13th Amendment through the House, thereby ensuring the actual end of slavery (even though most Americans think the Emancipation Proclamation did that, Lincoln knew it did not). And he got it all done before he was uselessly martyred. If only he could have still been around to lead us into the Reconstruction.
  • 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944 — Yes, every election in which FDR was elected. I couldn’t make up my mind which was most important. The year he was first elected, with the country in its worst economic mess ever? Or 1940, with the war having started in Europe and the Pacific and our country’s ability to act crippled by isolationism? Or 1944, when it would have been crazy to change captains with a war still to be won? I don’t know enough about 1936 to assess it, except that this group of four seems a critical series to me.

Those are my picks — sorry about cheating a bit on that last one, but I really don’t think one of them would have done without the other three. Franklin Roosevelt was our second-greatest president, and we needed him throughout that period.

We’ve had other good ones, and a couple that gave me great joy in my lifetime, but none with the same positive impact.

What are your picks, and your justifications for them? And more importantly, when will we ever have such great elections again?

Random thoughts on our 250th Independence Day

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The Ecuadorean Guayas, named for the river that was the home of the city where I lived in the early ’60s. Nice to see them celebrating, even though this isn’t the Nueve de Octubre.

And I mean really random. So have my thoughts been in the big buildup to this day — random, confused and even conflicted at times.

I didn’t feel a bit that way 50 years ago today. The Bicentennial was pure, unadultered celebration of the country I loved then, and have loved all my life, including now. Proceeding with subheds, as a demonstration of just how random my thoughts have been this time…

The Bicentennial

I got up late this morning after going with my younger son and my grandson to see “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” I may review that later, but I mention it here only to note that I didn’t get up until after 10, because the show was at 8:55, and what with all those previews and such, I didn’t get home until well after midnight.

Celebrations were under way as I broke my fast. One of my wife’s classmates from high school — there were 37 girls in the St. Agnes Academy class of ’71, and they’ve stayed close — texted her to say she was watching the “tall ships” parade in New York Harbor. So my wife tuned it in, and we watched for awhile. It was enjoyable, just as it was 50 years ago. Other members of the Class of ”71 joined in, and one sent a picture of my wife standing with her dear late mother, both smiling hugely, on the Bicentennial Day. My wife was four months away from giving birth to our first child, and all was happy and beautiful.

And I don’t mean just for us on a personal level, but for the country as well. To me and to so many others, there was nothing but pride as I watched those ships on the small, low-res screen, and otherwise observed the occasion. To me, the American experiment was a tremendous success at 200. My love of country hadn’t been warped, as it was for so many, by Vietnam. And to my mind, Watergate had simply proved that our system — carefully devised more than a decade after 1776 — still worked. Then, we had a prominent Republican who asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?,” and proceeded, along with his colleages, as the facts warranted And when it was plain that Nixon would be impeached, he resigned to spare the nation and himself that shame (for which I honor him still). Today, there is no shame, and no working system to protect our country. We have a president who was convicted of 34 felonies in the summer of 2024, and he was subsequently elected rather than serving a sentence or paying any penalty. So he tears a significant portion of the White House down, messes with the nearby Reflecting Pool, and holds a UFC event on the ground to celebrate his own birth, and continues on his merry way, unmolested. (And we thought Andrew Jackson’s raucus inauguration party was an embarrassment.)

Back then, Gerald Ford was our president, and that was fine. He was a good man. I would soon be overjoyed that Jimmy Carter would replace him — things were just getting better and better. We had 40 good years ahead of us. We could reflect on the triumph of 200 years of America taking giant steps to make its union more perfect for all, and its leadership of the Free World since 1945.

A Linguistic Question

I was thinking this morning a thought identical to one I wondered about in 1976: Why were we calling them “tall ships?” At the time of our revolution, wouldn’t they just have been “ships?” Although some — compared, say, to a frigate — did seem to have unusually tall masts. What do you call sails that fly even higher than the royals? Because I think I saw some of those.

Speaking of frigates… I wished the USS Constitution could have been there, as the U.S. Navy’s only still-commissioned square-rigged warship. I mean, I think I saw the Blue Angels, so why not Old Ironsides? I guess because although she occasionally gets under way, the old girl never leaves Boston Harbor anymore. Of course, despite being fabulously old, she’s still young enough to be slightly anachronistic. She wasn’t launched until 1797. But she was much, much closer to the period than anything else I saw sailing today.

We can still celebrate, but we do it 2 days late

I’ve mentioned before the live history lectures I help the Relic Room stage twice a month. Yesterday’s was a triumph — we drew a crowd of 80 (our previous record was 62), and we ran out of both chairs and space in the museum’s small Education Room. The speaker was award-winning high school history teacher Michael Burgess, and his topic was “We Hold These Truths to be Self-evident – the Declaration of Independence at 250.”

He was excellent as always, and the crowd enjoyed it. But as good as Mike’s words and delivery always are, perhaps the best part for me was the clip he played from HBO’s “John Adams,” which celebrates my favorite Founding Father (and fave Founding Mother, Abigail). It was this part, when the Continental Congress actually votes to declare independence:

After the clip, Mike encouraged us all to notice how quiet all those men were once it was announced that “the motion carries.” Everyone, including the nervous, foppish young Edward Rutledge from South Carolina (seen in the still on the video link above), was overwhelmed, struck to silence, at the enormity of what they’d just done, breaking away from the world’s greatest superpower. No fireworks. No “shot heard ’round the world.” Just thoughtful sobriety.

Quiet. I was wishing for some of that when I watched the “tall ships” this morning. My hearing aids distort loud sounds of certain pitches, to a painful degree. So I turned them off, and then turned off the volume so I could enjoy the spectacle without listening, say, to the overexcited, bombastic, stentorian announcers. One of the wonderful things about sailing ships is that when you’re sailing, you hear little more than the wind. And if you’re sailing before the wind, you don’t even hear that.

Oh, one last point on this part (and one I’ve mentioned before, many times) — that vote depicted in the video clip was on July 2, which John Adams always thought would be celebrated as our Independence Day — instead of the day of the signing of the document that the Committee of Five had drafted, with Jefferson doing much of the work at Adams’ behest. Jefferson hadn’t said a word during the debate, when Adams was browbeating those guys into voting “yes.” But Adams knew Jefferson was handy with a pen, and was also way more popular than Adams himself was. A situation that sadly exists to this day.

The Tax Revolt

Y’all know how I enjoy listening to Tom and Dominic on “The Rest Is History.” And of course their often mocking, wiseacre delivery helps make it enjoyable, particularly when they speaking of, say, the French. They’re English of course, and it’s sort of refreshing to listen to their somewhat exaggerated (for entertainment effect) John Bull patriotism in a time when there’s so much sad turmoil in Britain.

But it can be a tad uncomfortable to listen to them dismiss our revolution as a petulant “Tax Revolt,” and air the same views common to most Britons at the time, which can be summarized as “Why can’t those whiny colonists pay the taxes necessary to protecting their homes (such as in the Seven Years War), and shut up about it?”

Still… they have a point.

Make no mistake. I think the fact that the United States came into being as one of the best things that ever happened in human history. And as Mike Burgess stressed, our example (that is, our example prior to 2016) is still an inspiration to so much of the world. As you know, I’ll argue vehemently with cynics who run our country down.

But I’ve never felt good about the original excuses we offered for our revolt. The great thing about the Declaration, which we celebrate today, was the fact that we were legitimizing the war that had started more than a year earlier. At the point of July 1776, we had more legitimate grounds for a group of serious, sober men to gather and declare our split. After that, there was a legal justification to continue fighting. At Lexington and Concord the year before, there was not. Nor were many of the acts of resistance committed before that. The Stamp Act, for instance, was not a valid reason to take up a gun (many stages later in the escalation of hostility) and shoot at the only legally consituted authority our county had at the time.

‘No Kings’

Therefore, I have somewhat tempered views of some of the things that many of my fellow Americans think our independence is all about.

Do you get those texts urging you to participate in (or contribute money for) an upcoming “No Kings Rally?” I kind of wince at those. The problem today isn’t that we have a president who thinks he’s a “king.” The problem is that we have a president — a democratically elected president, elected after he had demonstrated previously just what he was — who is Donald John Trump. And that means our real problem is the American electorate, which has gone seriously mad. This would never, ever have happened before 2016. We had our problems, but we weren’t this crazy and depraved in those first 240 years. The great mass of American voters laughed anyone like Trump right off the stage back then.

We all quote Churchill saying “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” We do that because both parts of his statement were correct. Although I would have said “representative democracy” or “liberal, constitutional democracy” rather than just that one word, which can be highly problematic by itself.

The word certainly made our Framers nervous, which is why they set up our federal system so that pure democracy came into play only in one half of one of the three branches — the House of Representatives. And even that, thank God, was representative, not direct, democracy.

But a lot of Americans have not been nearly as wise as the Framers, and while our country has done many wonderful things over the centuries — such as ending slavery, whipping the Nazis and freeing Western Europe, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — we’ve also steadily eaten away at the safeguards against the most dangerous elements of democracy. Probably the worst change in terms of our present problem was demolishing the party convention system to guarantee that the candidate who won the most votes in primaries and caucuses would win his party’s nomination, and therefore have at least an even chance of becoming president.

A lot of Democrats warned that Trump was a “threat to democracy,” reflecting our national habit of inadequately summing up the virtues in a single word — which doesn’t hold up upon examination. So I was encouraged, back during the 2024 election, when I was having breakfast at a local restaurant with a couple of friends, and one of them — a committed Democrat — said he didn’t think that was the problem. I eagerly agreed with him. Trump wasn’t a threat to democracy, he was an example of the harm that democracy itself can wreak in a time when our electorate has gone mad and lost its way.

Democracy’s great when you have serious voters who want the best possible leaders for our country — which is what we experienced for most of our history. But what do you do when a majority actually wants the worst candidate ever to step forward and ask for the job?

Time to celebrate

As concerned as I am in these times, I’ll still celebrate the promise of America today. We’re going to a cookout, and looking forward to it. And while I lightly disparaged noisy celebration and praised sober contemplation above, I took my grandchildren to the ballpark last weekend to hear the South Carolina Philharmonic play stirring music ranging from John Philip Sousa to John Williams. And it was perfect when, after dark, the fireworks started precisely as the “cannonfire” part of Tschaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” It was wonderful, as always (especially when you can turn off hearing aids during the banging, and still hear the music quite well).

God Bless America. And in our troubled times, God Save America, because what those sober men started 250 years ago is eminently worth saving.

The Peruvians showed up, too. I hope they didn’t get too close to the Guayas. Last time I was down that way, some Ecuadoreans were still pretty sore about the War of ’41. Nautical footnote: What was going on in that harbor, in terms of wind conditions? The Ecuadorians had all their squaresails aloft, and the Peruvians had nothing flying but staysails…

Grok this: Everything needs editing

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The version of the book that two or three generations grew up on. As you can see, my copy is a little worse for wear (and I think maybe this was my SECOND copy). But it still reads better than the ‘new’ edition.

That’s a variation on the usual truism, “Everybody needs an editor.”

I changed the wording to emphasize that, even if you don’t have someone else to edit you (which you should, if at all possible), whatever you’ve written deserves a hard second (or third or fourth or fifth) look from you, the writer.

That’s not nearly as good, for catching errors, as a fresh set of eyes. The problem with editing yourself is that you know what you meant to write, and there’s an overwhelming tendency on the writer’s part to see the intention instead of what’s actually there. Whereas another person is far more likely to say, after the briefest glance, “What the hell do mean here?”

But if you’ve looked away for awhile, you can come back with at least a relatively fresher eye than immediately after writing the copy in question.

More than that, if the type of editing needed is to make the copy shorter, you’re the best person to do the job. You’re less likely to chuck out the nuances of what you were trying to say in the process of cutting.

Of course, people don’t often trim their copy unless an irresistible outside force is making them do it. And since online writing is almost completely without space limits, such outside forces have almost completely disappeared. It takes strong personal discipline, which I utterly fail to bring into play except on rare occasions. I don’t really have time to check for errors on this blog — which is why so many occur — much less slash and trim to make the copy more svelte. Hey, I didn’t have time to write the post in the first place, which is why I do it so seldom these days.

Cutting your own copy is a very time-consuming process, which is why Mark Twain wrote “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” When I was writing for the paper, my Sunday columns usually took me about two hours to write. Then, because writing in a free-association manner made the columns twice as long as we had room for, I turned to the second half of the process. Cutting them down (usually to half the unedited length) took another two hours. But this pretty much always made them better. (Why not make it the right length to start with? That didn’t work — for me. I had to get the whole idea down in front of me, and that meant letting the words flow until I’d set it all out. Otherwise, I’d lose it. I couldn’t stop to worry about leaving things out. I needed to get it all in front of me before whittling down to essentials.)

That’s the thing. Cutting almost always makes the copy better. Carefully considering every single word in terms of whether it adds to or detracts from what you’re trying to say makes a difference.

Recently, I’ve learned that the same applies to novels. Last year, I found myself with a little time to kill in a Barnes & Noble. So I grabbed a book off a shelf and plopped down in an upholstered chair to start reading. Since I wouldn’t have time to finish it, I grabbed something I’d read before, many times since 1970: Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. At least, I thought that’s what it was.

Right away, something surprised me: The very first lines were quite different. It started like this:

Those first two lines threw me, on two levels. First, it was unfamiliar, and second, it didn’t quite work. I was used to it beginning like this:

I’d always admired that lede. The first line was great, as a summary of what the book would be about, flavored with the irony of an alien from space having such a name.

After that, no time was wasted. The next words launch immediately into the narrative, with no mucking about. In other words, no pointless, silly lines such as “Valentine Michael Smith was as real as taxes but he was a race of one.” Something that adds nothing, and is obviously something that at some point, the author thought sounded clever. Never mind the silly cliche of “when the world was young.”

The preface of this new edition explained why I was reading something so odd and overwritten. It seems this was the original text of the novel, as Heinlein had sent it to his publishers in 1960. The publishers thought the book was so far off the beaten path (which it was) that they wanted him to cut it down to minimize their risk. So he did. He cut it down from 220,000 words to 160,000.

As near as I can tell — I later ran quickly through this new-old version from beginning to end (at my request, someone gave it to me as a gift last year) — he didn’t cut out big chunks, such as entire chapters. He cut it the same way I would cut a column — a few words from practically every paragraph, eliminating phrases or sentences that were truly unnecessary to telling the story, and that added nothing that was worth keeping.

But Robert Heinlein’s widow, Virginia, found this version after his death, and she explains in the preface, “I came to the conclusion that it had been a mistake to cut the book.” She then showed it to the late author’s agent, who agreed with her. The agent showed it to the publishing house, and they agreed, too.

But they were all wrong, probably for their own reasons. The widow probably thought every word her dear husband had written was golden, so how dare anyone make him cut 60,000 of them out? And while I don’t mean to cast aspersions, I expect the agent and publishers saw dollar signs as they imagined putting out a “new” Stranger in a Strange Land.

(By the way, I keep saying “new.” Actually, this “uncut” version — that’s what the publishers call it; my description would be “unedited and therefore incomplete” — first came out in 1991. I just didn’t run across it until last year. Even when I had downloaded a Kindle edition earlier in this decade, it had been the version I was used to. It’s confusing.)

I was unimpressed with the opening you see above, and had the same reaction throughout the text, over and over. I’ll share a couple of other examples, chosen rather randomly. The first is from the section when Gillian Boardman and Smith have recently taken refuge with Jubal Harshaw. I’ll start with the cut version that I had read and enjoyed for decades:

And here’s the longer version that Heinlein’s widow thought was better:

Sorry, folks, but I don’t see it. That business about linguistics and Jill’s youth is unnecessary. That, and especially the knotty phrase “I misdoubt I am not” really needed to go. I would had tossed them in a second reading even if I hadn’t been under pressure to do so.

Then there’s this, after the “battle of the swimming pool” at Jubal’s place. First, the cut version:

Works for me. And now the uncut:

Did that add any value for you? All that extra verbiage was just a boring delay to me. We don’t need the “what makes the frog jump” line. We know Jubal likes colorful metaphors. A certain number of them help to define his crusty character. But the ones Heinlein kept were better than this one. Just get on with your point, doctor.

NOTHING that I read for the first time in this long version made me think “this makes it better.” That fact made me more impressed than ever with the shorter version. It showed that Robert Heinlein had great judgment, and knew just what to cut to make the book better, not just shorter.

Why do I tell you all this? Because I think it’s a good way of illustrating something I learned, often painfully, over the course of my newspaper career. However much you may love your prose, if you’re forced to cut it, and you do so carefully and thoughtfully, it will almost always turn out better.

Nothing in the history of writing needed 60,000 surplus words to delay and bore the reader. That won’t make the frog jump at all…

The ‘new’ edition of the book, with 60,000 utterly unnecessary words.

Happy Birthday, Mel! Now, the rest of you — let’s have this out, right now!

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I really enjoyed the tribute The New York Times posted today, on Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday.

And it was certainly well-deserved. Mel is a genius, and maybe the funniest guy to live anytime in the past, well, century.

I liked that they included this Brooks quote, which I read a bunch of years ago, but enjoyed reading again:

My God, I’d love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, “Well done, you goddam genius.”

It makes me want to do the same with regard to Mel. Trouble is, I can’t dig him up, because he’s still alive. Is he actually shooting for 2,000?

But while we’re on the subject, I want to settle something. The NYT’s piece today makes the same mistake people have been making since 1974. When it says….

In 1974, two of his most beloved hits, “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” began their climb to the top of the box office.

It shamefully neglects to add: “Of course, ‘Young Frankenstein’ is at least 10 times better than ‘Blazing Saddles.”

They’re always leaving that out. Worse, a lot of people go so far as to say that “Blazing Saddles” was his best, funniest movie — which of course is raving nonsense. It’s embarrassing.

Sure, it was funny, in a “let’s see how tastelessly outrageous we can be” kind of way. I mean, stuff like that can be funny — or rather, could be funny, back in the days when you could get away with it.

And let me defend it from the low opinion of very young people who congratulate themselves that they are part of a society that has grown beyond laughing at scenes such as this:

These enlightened young folks don’t know that in 1974, we lived in a society that had much earlier ceased to laugh at such things, like a decade or two earlier. And Brooks was rebelling against that self-restraint. He was removing certain fetters of decency from comedy — as he had done with “Springtime for Hitler” and as SNL, building on Brooks, would do one year later with this skit.

Now that I’ve stuck up for that freedom of expression, and admitted that it made me laugh, I have to be honest and add that… it’s not really for me. I laugh, but then I’m embarrassed for laughing. Especially if my wife is in the room.

But “Young Frankenstein” gives me guilt-free laughter. And the humor is on a higher plane. Sure, there are laugh lines like this one:

But that’s not only funny, it’s positively genteel compared to half the humor in “Blazing Saddles.” Also, it shows that Mel Brooks is still running the show. And it’s good to be the king. And the king is in on the joke that sex makes us, up to a point, very comical creatures.

Speaking of being in charge — you may say I’m taking away from Mel by preferring YF, because it wasn’t his idea. It came from Gene Wilder, who pitched it to him when they were making BS. But beyond that, it was a collaboration that has Mel Brooks’ fingerprints on every monochromatic frame. If Wilder had tried to make it on his own, or with a different collaborator, it would have flopped.

In the end, it just has a magical, special feel to it — a feel that has a lot to do with the faithful reproduction of presenting the brilliant humor within the context of an early-30s horror flick. It has class, at least in an aesthetic sense, all the way through it, a kind of class that BS not only lacks, but fiercely rejects. And that raises it to a level well above the junior-high humor of the predecessor. Even though a lot of it is the same humor, from the same guy.

Beyond that, it’s just funnier.

Many of you will disagree. This is a fact of life. There are still people going around insisting that “Godfather II” was better than the original. Which is nuts, but — despite our current president’s most determined efforts — it’s still a free country. I defend your right to say such things, despite the fact that you are so clearly and embarrassingly wrong…

You thought Madeline Kahn was funny in ‘Blazing Saddles?’ Fine. But for FUNNY, see her in ‘Young Frankenstein.”

 

 

The best SC election result in a while

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Screenshot — click to see source.

Last night, I started to text Alan Wilson my congratulations. I was going to say:

Alan, I’m very happy for you tonight, and very relieved for South Carolina.

But when his number came up, I realized it was a landline, probably at the AG’s office. I guess I don’t have his mobile. So I’ll just say it here.

I’m happy for Alan not only because he’s a good guy, but because he was the only remotely decent, qualified, sane candidate seeking the GOP nomination. He was a guy who was running because he thinks S.C. needs a good governor (near as I can tell, that idea was nowhere in the minds of his opponents), and that he could do the job.

And I think he’s right. Let’s hope so, because he’s now the guy who will be elected governor in November. That is, officially elected governor, in the de jure sense. The de facto election was yesterday.

Is that a crack at Jermaine Johnson? Absolutely not. I don’t know him, and know little about him (factors that most voters in South Carolina share), but I know a lot of people who do know him and say only good things about him. He seems to have clearly been a stronger candidate than the other two who ran. But among those people who say good things about him and are thoroughly versed in the realities of South Carolina politics, I don’t think a single one thinks the Democrats are going to win this time.

Just to review: No Democrat has been elected governor in this state in this century. The last was Jim Hodges in 1998, and he had to sell out completely on the state lottery (he was a staunch and articulate opponent of the idea before that) in order to win. Before that, the last had been Dick Riley, who was first elected in the ’70s and was already out of office when I arrived at The State in 1987.

Since then, the Democrats have had two strong candidates — Vincent Sheheen and James Smith, whom I helped make a run at the office in 2018. Vincent made a very good showing in the 2010 race — a tough one because that was the year of the Tea Party and the beginning of the state GOP’s slide into very disturbing territory. But he didn’t do as well.

There was no one as strong as those two seeking the Democratic nomination this year.

So for me as a voter, the issue was as always: How do we get the best — or least bad — result out of this election? Given that the Republican was almost completely certain to win, that meant Alan Wilson had to win. Because the rest of the field was… disturbing, to use that relatively neutral word again.

Never mind the bullets South Carolina dodged on June 9. In yesterday’s runoff, Alan was up against a woman who had offered zero reasons why any voter who cares about good governance would vote for her to become our state’s chief executive. Go look at her website if you doubt me.

And yet, she had received more votes than Alan Wilson had on June 9. That was worrisome, since to beat her, Alan had to get the votes that had gone to the other candidates who didn’t make the runoff cut. Arguments can be made that those people were worse options than Pam Evette. And Wilson would need the support of people who actually voted for those people.

And he got them, I’m happy to say. In fact, he crushed Pam Evette, by a proportion you would have expected back in the days before the American and South Carolina electorates went mad about a decade ago. He got 69 percent of the vote, at last count.

That’s what makes this the best election result in SC since… well, since Russell Ott beat first Dick Harpootlian, and then the Republican to become my new senator in 2024. In this election, people who had just voted for some of the worst candidates possible somehow managed to see by yesterday that Alan was clearly the better choice. Which he was, for all sorts of reasons that used to matter in elections, but seldom do these days — things like experience, understanding of the job, character, temperament, and ability to see beyond the pettiest concerns of your own partisan base.

Cindi pointed out some of those things in her paper’s runoff endorsement of Alan. I was reminded of such point again this morning. I had coffee with James Smith to talk about something totally unrelated to this stuff, but of course the runoff came up. James told me about something I had totally missed.

Did you watch the GOP gubernatorial debates? I tried to watch one for about two minutes, but stopped so I wouldn’t hurl. James tells me that Pam Evette tried to make an issue of him. She blathered on about Alan having supported a “liberal judge” candidate — that candidate being James. That’s the level on which she operates — Trumpian labels, rather than facts or other relevant considerations.

I hadn’t remembered Alan supporting him, but James did not dispute that fact, and if it’s correct, that would make sense.

Let me tell you an anecdote from the 2018 election. One day, Alan was presiding over a ceremony on the south lawn of the State House that was honoring — I think (it’s been awhile) — public officeholders who have served in the National Guard (or in the military generally — as I said, it’s been awhile).

Alan and James are officers in the Guard. Alan is a JAG officer, and James was a JAG officer who, after 9/11, resigned his commission to enlist as an infantry soldier. He eventually regained his commission in that capacity, and led troops in combat in Afghanistan. That gained him a place in the Guard’s Hall of Fame. He’s now a lieutenant colonel. If there are any officers in the Guard who don’t deeply respect his service, I haven’t met them.

I was standing on the edges of that gathering, waiting for James to come down from his office in the Blatt Building (where I think he was making calls to potential donors or something else dreary but necessary). As I waited, Alan came up to me to ask whether James was going to make it. He was very anxious to make sure James would be there to be recognized and honored. He was very clear and insistent on that point, and his tone and facial expression strongly emphasized his words.

Or to put it another way, the Republican attorney general was very worried he wouldn’t get a chance to honor the Democratic nominee for governor, in the middle of the general election. That’s the way Pam Evette would have put it, and she would have expected voters to be totally outraged at such a display of honor and decency.

So I went up and told James “We have to go NOW,” and he came along, and as I recall, Alan was quite relieved.

To the Pam Evettes of this world, that story would damn him. So I’m quite relieved that she won’t be our governor beginning next year.

 

Did anyone else out there vote today? How did it go?

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I expect the answer from most of you will be “no.”

But I did. This is the kind of situation in which careful, thoughtful voters have the greatest obligation to vote. Primaries are bad enough — for the most part, the only people who turn out (for both parties) are the most devoted party members, and therefore, far too often, the most dangerous ideologues.

But runoffs are worse. Fortunately, some of the most dangerous characters (Ralph Norman and Nancy Mace) were eliminated on June 9. And happily, we won’t have either of them in Congress any more after this year, either.

The runoff is still critical, as it’s between the best of the lot from the original crowd, and someone who had no business running for the office she had already held since 2018, much less for governor. (Things could have been very different, as I have explained before — but voters threw away that opportunity.)

By contrast, Alan Wilson is an intelligent, decent person who has an unusual amount of experience in government at the statewide level. Does he say some ridiculous stuff in the course of a GOP primary? Yep. Because you have to do that to win a Republican primary (which is the only way to get elected governor, unless you’re a Democratic governor of greater popularity than we’ve seen in a generation; if James couldn’t do it, no Democrat on the scene today can).

If you wonder how Alan differs from his opponents (including the only surviving one) in this contest, look at that editorial I called your attention to yesterday. The older I get, the less and less it’s about the “issues” pols yammer about, and more and more about character.

That’s why I voted for him two weeks ago, and again today. And fervently hope he wins, because the one who wins today will be our governor starting next year.

The problem is, how many people like me — people who despise parties and do all they can to elect the best (or at least, least bad) candidate — voted today?

Not as many as should have, I’m sure. But will the ones who did be enough?

Hail the new Editorial Page Editor!

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Maybe that’s not the best way to wish Cindi Scoppe well as she takes the helm of the Post and Courier‘s editorial pages, but it sounds right to me. No one ever greeted me that way when I was an EPE, but of course they should have.

Anyway, she deserves it. The best possible person is now heading the only functioning editorial board in the state of South Carolina, and that’s good for the paper, and good for all of us.

Here are her thoughts on her new job. An excerpt:

Now, back to the main topic: The values that are most important to me and us involve how we live together in society and how we find solutions to the problems that most of us face regardless of our politics.

That starts with focusing on improving our communities and state rather than winning prizes or appealing to people who already agree with us. We’re happy to win prizes, but the real prize is guiding conversations and decisions in a positive direction.

It means focusing on what’s best for our communities rather than us personally. A small example: I hate the law that says you can’t touch your phone while you’re driving, but I wrote editorials advocating for it (and yes, I obey it), because it would save lives with only minor inconvenience.

We aim to be pragmatic and strategic in what we write about and what we don’t. We’re not worried about offending readers or lawmakers, but we’re not going to do that absent a good reason; we pick our battles….

We believe there’s rarely a single right approach to any problem, and we support consensus and compromise rather than an all-or-nothing answer. We’re not going to reject solutions that match our values perfectly, but we’ll rarely condemn a solution that gives us only part of what we want.

In other words, Cindi is continuing the mission. She could have written the same words to describe our approach back in the day at The State. The place where we used to do that is now rubble. So it’s great that the Post and Courier still provides her with a platform from which she can carry on.

Congratulations to Cindi, and especially to the Post and Courier for being smart enough to see she’s the one for the job.

This is going to be good…

My answer to Barry

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Hi, I’m your tour guide. I’m standing at the Navy Yahd in Charlestown. That’s downtown Boston across the hahbuh. That steeple in the middle is Old North Church. I think. I’m not claiming to be a wicked smaht tour guide…

I don’t have time for a regular post, but I thought I’d use the blog as a workaround for an email problem.

Our regular Barry wrote to me to say he and his wife were going to Boston soon, and asking for suggestions regarding “must do” things.

Since I had a great time in Boston several years back, I wrote a lengthy response — and the email kept failing to send. So I’ll just post it here, on the off chance that he checks the blog, even though it’s been awhile since I’ve posted or even looked at comments (the spam comments just keep piling up, waiting for a day when I can spend a couple of hours on the phone with GoDaddy again, and see if I can shut it off…).

Anyway, here’s my response:

Barry,
That’s great! I hope you have a fun trip.
We didn’t stay in a hotel. We stayed in a B&B out in Newton (the town Fig Newtons are named for), which is basically just part of the sprawling megacity of Boston. We loved it there, especially since it was a block from the “T,” which is Boston’s subway/mass transit system. And you know how I love public transportation. From there, it was just a straight shot to the East into downtown, on the Green Line.
I don’t know if you could find a vacancy in that place on this short notice. Better stick with your hotel reservation.
Your best bet, in terms of history, is to follow the Freedom Trail that winds through downtown and hits spots like Paul Revere’s house and Old North Church (where the lanterns that signaled to Revere were placed). There’s a trolley bus service that you can ride on that route. It’s on a hop-on, hop-off basis. Another trolley comes every few minutes. I rode that on our last day (my wife stayed at the B&B with back trouble). I only stopped at the two stops mentioned above, then rode it across the river to visit the USS Constitution AGAIN (since I was alone and wouldn’t be boring my wife, who’d been there with me over the weekend). I walked from there up to the Bunker Hill monument. It didn’t look like much of a hill from the Navy Yard, but it was quite a climb.
Another historical jaunt that we spent a whole day on was our trip to Quincy on our first day (on the T’s Red Line). We enjoyed it enormously because I’m a huge John Adams fan.
One other thing we particularly enjoyed — the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I had never heard of it before we went there, but it really blew me away. Isabella was probably the richest woman in America in the late 19th century, and she largely spent her fortune on art and cultural artifacts from all over the world — and then left it all for the world to enjoy. I sort of doubt that even Jeff Bezos could afford a collection like that today.
Have a great time!
Brad

Here’s hoping you see the message, and that you have a great time in Beantown!

What I learned in college this time

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My “report card,” as it were. There are a couple of things I wonder about on it, but I’m not going to rock the boat.

Remember a few months ago when I wrote about my college transcript from back in 1975, which I had just received from the university formerly known as Memphis State?

Well, it was a cautionary tale that warned youth not to be wastrels and get themselves in a hole, and then have to get almost straight A’s the last two years in order to barely pull their GPAs up to exactly 3.0.

I was so proud of that final grade, even though it came too late (the very last A I received, days before graduation, pulled me to that point) for me to sit among the cum laudes. Like I cared, right?

Now, I can afford to chuckle at that simple youthful pride, because we’ve got a whole new ballgame going.

At this moment in the Year of Our Lord 2026, my actual, official, real-life grade point average is now 4.0. My college record, right here at USC where last century’s sordid story began, is now… perfect. Pristine. Couldn’t be better. Not a hint of scandal.

Here’s my three-step formula for achieving this:

  1. Start your whole college career over, a full 50 years after the previous one ended. No one will judge you because no one will remember you. (This is a sort of time travel story, but for real.)
  2. Take one course, while your fellow students are killing themselves with full loads, and devote all your academic energies to doing exactly what the syllabus says to do. By doing that, earn an A.
  3. Don’t take any more courses.

At least, this is my plan at the moment. I may weaken at some point and blow the whole thing by taking another course. But right now, I’m holding solid at 4.0.

So, what did I learn by going back to college as a septuagenarian in this unimaginably distant future time? (When I was last in school, it still seemed to us that 1984 would never come. And 2001 was ridiculously far off.)

To start with the obvious, I learned a bunch of stuff about a field that interested me but that I had never studied before: Linguistics. I’ve always earned my living with words, and loved everything about them. Well, a lot of things about them, such as etymology, philology, and the relationships between different languages. My interest went well beyond English. I had spoken Spanish fluently as a kid, and had those two years of Latin and a bit of German in high school, and that had given me enough grounding to figure out a lot about other Western languages. But I wanted to know more, and now I do, so mission accomplished.

I gained a bit of further insight into myself. I think. I don’t know whether this is about me, or something about aging in general. Most of my life, I found learning easy (despite my abysmal grades) and I was always confident that I could learn and do anything. That’s apparently not true, or at least not anymore. I’ve found in recent years that I’m pretty good at learning things that interest me, and that my brain shuts down on other things. My head was for instance closed to the subfields of linguistics that were irrelevant to my interests, such as phonetics and phonology. I know how to talk, and I’m not planning to be a speech therapist, so it’s irrelevant to me where my tongue is or where in my throat or mouth air is constricted when I make a certain sound. And I didn’t care that, to quote Google AI, the symbol [ʃ], in the “International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative, commonly known as the ‘sh’ sound.” I’m happy calling it “the ‘sh’ sound.”

I also had a bit of a problem with terminology, and I know that’s aging. I might know an answer, but if it involves a new term, I had to work at it some to come of with the word. That was not the case in my youth.

But I knew lots and lots of other stuff, and it was gratifying, in a petty way, to find that in the course of living our lives, we old guys actually have learned a boatload of stuff younger people don’t know. The professor would ask the class as a whole if they knew X, and look around, and I’d raise my hand and answer the question, and go on and talk a little about Y and Z, too. Sometimes, I wouldn’t bother to raise my hand, but just blurted it out. I did too much of this, and worried about it, and apologized after class about it to my professor, Stan Dubinsky, but he didn’t mind — not much, anyway. He kept saying he had wanted me in that class, which was an honors class, because he thought the other students would benefit from having an old writer and editor in the class. Personally, I suspect the kids were a little creeped out by the old guy who thought he knew everything.

As for my fellow students, I was very impressed with them. They were very bright, and knew a great deal for people so young. Some had specialized knowledge. One was from Syria, another from Vietnam, and they provided various insights from the perspectives of their first languages. Another was fluent in sign language, which was also touched upon in the course, and could stand up and give demonstrations.

But mostly, I didn’t learn how smart they were from class discussions — the way it would have been when I was their age. Although the prof — Stan Dubinsky — managed to bring them out a bit toward the end, I was amazed earlier in the term that they were so reticent. They hardly said anything, even when called upon individually. This was the precise opposite of the clamorous verbal competition in which I eagerly and aggressively participated in high school and college.

I wondered at it, and wondered aloud to various people when not in class. Someone suggested it had something to do with their COVID experiences. I don’t see how. If I had been at home from school for several months, or a year, I’d have come back like a bomb ready to explode with classroom debates, on any subject that came up.

Personally, I think it has to do with the economics of higher education. In my day, college was not a big, high-stakes, stress-causing endeavor. As I’ve written, it cost me $174 a semester to take a full load at Memphis State. No, that wasn’t a small bill at that time, but my parents could easily write that check twice a year. And they weren’t rich. My father was a naval officer in the days long AFTER such sources of wealth as prize money.

Now, affording college is a meat-grinder, and the stress starts early and lasts for decades after. By the time they’re in high school, kids — I mean the ones like my classmates, who were honor students — have had it fully impressed upon them that they have to excel, and get all the scholarships they can. And after graduation, they have a debt that is frequently as large as a house mortgage, and just as much of a burden.

Consequently, the smartest students might tend to bury their noses in the books and keep stumm, rather than publicly attracting attention.

That’s my theory, based on a sample of one classful of students, which you might say is not a scientific sample. It could well be that all the other classes are voluble, and these young people were simply freaked out by the weird, talkative old guy in their presence. Anyway…

The way I knew they were smart and thoughful was due to a teaching method that would, of course, have been impossible when I was their age. This was a neat thing that Stan did.

At first, I had been put off by his syllabus. There was going to be NO exam, which dismayed me greatly. Back in my slacker days, I passed courses by acing the exam, after doing none of the homework or studying that was expected. The usual stuff wasn’t going to work, so I applied myself to the tasks I was bad at — showing up on time, doing the reading, doing the homework, turning in projects on time — all of which was built solidly into the final grade. And did I mention I got an A?

As to the cool teaching method. Aside from the homework — exercises from the main textbook — each week we also turned in notes on our readings. This was a remarkable device. Of course, we were turning these in by email. Stan would put everybody’s notes into a single file, and highlight questions or remarks, and answer them in red type. Then, he’d share the whole file on a projectors during class, and review our thoughts and his answers. Finally, he’d send the file to all of us for closer reading or for our records.

From this, I think I learned more about my fellow students, and how bright and thoughtful they were, than I would from any amount of loud debate in class.

Maybe other professors do this, even though I thought of it as a Stan thing. Maybe they don’t talk because they no longer have to. In a way, that’s sad. But in another, it’s encouraging. I remember that decades ago, the semiotician Umberto Eco predicted that in the future, people would use written language less and less. (At least I think that’s what he said; I can’t seem to find confirmation of that.) If he did say it, he found he was a little off, as the internet allowed “legions of idiots” the same power as a Nobel Prize winner to express themselves — in writing, however poorly worded — to the entire planet, in seconds. Once their thoughts were heard only at the end of a bar. Now, they were published to a readership far greater than that of The New York Times. Hence our dysfunctional politics today. We have lost the ability to engage in rational discourse.

But I feel better now. My classmates have reminded me that smart people write, too. And they do it quite well. Now if we could just find a way to make their thoughts more available than all the shrieking nonsense out there.

A sample from my reading notes. You’ll note I didn’t so much ask questions as argue.

Still struggling with technical problems…

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Hey, y’all, you remember that a few days back, my blog crashed, and my hosting service jumped in to save it, but in the process made changes that have led to other problems, such as a tsunami of spam comments.

These problems continue. I just glanced to see, and I had 62 comments pending, and the vast majority appeared to be junk.

Well, my priority is to fix that before I get to the routine business of moderating the real comments. I don’t have time to do either tonight, and hope I can make a successful phone call to GoDaddy tomorrow, but I might not, because we’re getting ready for a celebration of two of my granchildren graduating from high school, and that takes priority.

I used to have more patience with malfunctioning blogs. I don’t anymore. I don’t mind dealing with them when they’re working, but not otherwise.

Here’s hoping we’ll be back to normal in a day or two…

Meanwhile, here’s somebody I’d like to vote for

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If you have a good memory, you may recall that when I was James Smith’s communications director, I worked with a young guy named Noah Barker, as I mentioned him a couple of times back then.

And when I say “young,” I mean he was 17, and just days out of high school when I joined the campaign that July, and he was preparing with great excitement to vote for the first time.

But you wouldn’t have known he was that young if you had talked politics with him without seeing his face. He had the kind of encyclopedic knowledge not only of the present situation, but of the political history of our state and nation (something I like to talk about, since back in the day, our politics made some sense).

He was also the only staffer on the campaign who had actually won a gubernatorial election. At the time, he was the serving governor of Boys State. Which may not sound like much to you, but it was at least something.

Since then, Noah has gotten through college and started a career, and stayed extremely involved in politics even as I’ve put it behind me. He worked as a volunteer to help Joe Biden get elected in 2020, God bless him, and has helped run a bunch of campaigns on a more modest level — legislative, local council and the like. And he’s won some of them — which despite my advanced age and abundant wisdom, I have never accomplished.

Now, he’s running for office himself. On June 9, he’s seeking the Democratic nomination to represent District 70 — the Kershaw/Richland district in which he’s lived all his life — in the South Carolina House of Representatives.

Now, you may smile indulgently and say, “Of course he’s running for office. You knew Noah would do that eventually.” And that’s true enough. But in his case he has an excuse, a reason, a justification for running that most people of any political persuasion you can name would probably see as sound. The first issue on his Issues page is this:

Showing Up

When we elect a legislator, we expect them to show up and do their job. Our current representative in the South Carolina House of Representatives, Robert Reese, doesn’t show up to work.

In his first term as our state legislator, Reese has been one of the worst offenders when it comes to skipping votes. So far, he has missed 153 votes.

That’s 153 times that our district has been left voiceless. That is unacceptable…

For Noah, this is not just a statistic he read somewhere. As a legislative monitor, he’s at the State House every day the General Assembly is in session, and all too often his representative is not.

I’m believing Noah on this. Since I’m no longer being paid to do real journalism, I have not called his opponent to cry “J’Accuse…!” and demand he justify himself. In fact — and you can dismiss all I say on this basis if you’re so inclined — I don’t know Rep. Reese. (I hear that quite a few legislators don’t know him, either, so I don’t feel alone on that point.)

If Mr. Reese presents overwhelming evidence that either he has too been there, or that his absences are entirely justified, I’ll be happy to run that, too.

But his quality of representation is not why I, personally, would vote for Noah if I lived in his district. I have a bunch of other reasons. Two big ones are:

  • The rest of what’s on his Issues page. Sure, I might be able to quibble on a point or two — there’s not one person on this planet I would agree with about everything. But what he has here is solid, sensible, pragmatic stuff that has nothing to do with what political tribe he belongs to, or whom he resents, or where he stands in the Kulturkampf. And although this shouldn’t be remarkable at all, the thing that really makes his list stand out is that all these issues are actually relevant to the office he is seeking. That’s because unlike most candidates (and definitely unlike most voters), Noah actually has an extensive, working understanding of the job he is seeking.
  • Everything else I’ve learned about Noah over the years.

Bottom line, Noah is the kind of person I’m always hoping to find on a ballot and seldom do these days. His intelligence, his moral compass, his sincere passion about his state and country, his willingness to work hard not just for people who look like or sound like or think or feel like him, but everyone in our society… they all add up to a rare opportunity for voters.

Noah, unlike me, is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, which is fine because he fits into that small subset that is too rare in his party (and in the Trump era, almost nonexistent in the other party). I’m talking about people I’d go out of my way to vote for: James Smith and Mandy Powers Norell, Joe Biden, Russell Ott, Joe Riley, Vincent Sheheen, Joel Lourie, and God Rest His Soul, Jimmy Carter.

You see that picture at the top of this post? I shot that of him last year, standing behind his car after we’d had coffee in Five Points to talk about his candidacy. Note the green bumper sticker to the left in the picture. That is not a sticker issued by an “Andy Beshear for President” campaign. Noah had it made himself. He likes Andy Beshear, and he loves Jimmy Carter, and so he made for himself a Beshear sticker in the Jimmy Carter style. When Jimmy ran in 1976, I’d never seen a green campaign sticker. It was quite distinctive, and I really liked it. So does Noah. Look at his website’s color scheme.

How does this kid know that? Well, he does. He also understands something that too few people of any political persuasion understand these days, which is that LBJ was probably the most effective president this country has had since FDR, and he accomplished a staggering number of huge, good things for this country. Hence that other sticker.

Well, that’s all I want to say, except that I’m proud of Noah and the campaign he’s running, and he’d better send me one of his bumper stickers, which I understand are a lot like Jimmy’s. I can’t vote in his district, but I can put one of those on my old truck. Maybe it will do him some good somehow…

I’m happy to say I NEVER talked like that…

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I hadn’t thought about Doonesbury in awhile, but Mullins McLeod brought him to mind this week with one of his campaign texts.

There are a number of reasons one might not choose him as our governor, some more lurid than others, but this text (and the others like it that punctuate my days with unsolicited beeping) would be enough to keep me off his bandwagon:

Do not be deceived this election. My opponents are not for the people; they represent the political class and donor class.

The biggest threat the people of S.C. face is our own government selling us out to artificial intelligence because once you replace human intelligence with A.I. there will be no more jobs.

My opponents’ websites do not talk about data centers or A.I. stealing our jobs. One of them is invested in A.I. and the other voted for the Energy Security Act which allows power companies to raise our power rates to ensure their profitability as data centers are built. He also voted to allow data centers to conceal from us how much of God’s gift to us, our water, they take from us. I am the only candidate calling to shut down data centers before it’s too late.

I am also the only candidate who: demands a livable wage; demands increased pay for teachers; shuts down crony capitalism and insider deals; reduces our income tax; attacks power companies who raise our bills; helps student loan borrowers; protects our elderly; fixes the state pension and guarantees a veto on bills that limit women’s healthcare rights.

You judge a candidate not by what they promise but by the deeds they have done. The contrast between my record of being the voice of the people when it matters the most speaks for itself…

… and yadda-yadda.

Immediately, when I read that, I remembered this Doonesbury strip from 1973:

It was one of Trudeau’s all-time best. Phred the retired (he thought) Viet Cong has been called back up, and finds himself listening to the kind of bloviating nonsense he hasn’t heard in awhile. He had my sympathy when the strip first appeared, and he has it now.

Back to Mullins… we’ve all seen this kind of appeal to vague resentments and suspicions before — far, far too often. These days, it makes sense to call it the Trump approach. You want to get elected, and you know there are a bunch of people out there who have a lot of rumbling resentment about things they can’t quite put their fingers on, so you tell them you’re the answer to their disaffection. You tell them you’re with them, and against all those folks in, as Mullins puts it, “the political class and donor class.”

You toss out a long list of promises — a wall to keep Mexicans out, or a living wage, or whatever. But one thing you don’t do, if you’re Mullins, is explain how you’re going to get a Republican Legislature to do these things.

And while you say “judge a candidate not by what they promise but by the deeds they have done,” he doesn’t bother to list any, you know, deeds he has done. His website is light on those as well.

This post is not intended to pick on Mullins McLeod particularly. That text just hit the button that made me think of that strip, and I wanted to share it because I’ve always thought it was brilliant.

But no, I would not vote for him. Nor would I vote for most of those people over in the other primary. If you really want to get depressed about the state of politics in America, go over and review some of their nonsense. It follows the same formula — show you resent the same things they resent, and get them to vote for you on that basis (which is, seriously, not a rational basis for governing):

Nancy Mace has a plan to work with President Donald Trump and stem the tide of illegal immigration. She is also the only governor’s candidate to actually fire a sanctuary sheriff in South Carolina!

Nancy Mace has a plan to address crime in South Carolina since our Attorney General and Solicitors won’t do their job.

(Pam Evette:) I’ve been with you from the beginning. I’ve been with President Trump from the start, and I’ve been fighting for conservative values every single day — as a mother, as a businesswoman, and as your Lieutenant Governor. What we’ve seen with President Trump, we can experience in South Carolina

Ralph Norman knows that to change the system, you can’t be a part of it. In Congress, he’s a member of the House Freedom Caucus, pushing to make legislation more conservative and hold weak-kneed politicians accountable for every dollar spent.

To translate…

  • I don’t like those wetbacks any more than you do. And if I find somebody givin’ ’em sanctuary, I’ll kick his ass! I’ve done it.
  • Note that the guy I claim without justification is not doing his job is running against me!
  • I love that guy that you all love because he hates the same people you hate. I promise more of what he’s brought to America. Of course, I’ve never done a thing in office for South Carolina, but you can see I have the right attitude!
  • You can’t be a part of the system… the way, you know, I have been for more than 20 years — holding office and accomplishing nothing while ranting about what an outsider I am.

That’s enough about them. Back to the Dems…

I don’t know Jermaine Johnson, but people who do say he’s a good guy. Of course, he engages in some of the same kind of rhetoric, although perhaps with greater justification:

Dr. Jermaine Johnson wasn’t born into power—he fought his way into it. He’s not a career politician or a wealthy insider…

In his defense, he does list some things he’s actually done, on this page of his website, but it doesn’t take up a lot of space:

In his first term alone he passed a bill to lower sales tax for seniors, repaired a bridge that had been closed since the 2015 Thousand Year Flood and expanded broadband access. Since then, he began construction on an emergency medical center in rural Lower Richland, struck down an anti- DEI bill, and commissioned a statue of Civil War hero, congressman, and civil rights champion Robert Smalls.

Still, it’s something.

Billy Webster can’t claim all that much himself. Of course, he hasn’t held elective office — although he can point to his service in Dick Riley’s U.S. Department of Education.

And in his defense, I found this page of his site refreshing. Nothing about “I resent the same things you do!,” and serious words about things that an actual governor of an actual state ought to be concerning himself with…. Infrastructure, education, healthcare…

My main concern about Billy is his involvement in payday lending. But I haven’t made up my mind about him, either.

And I’m not sure it matters, for two reasons:

There is not one strong, well-known candidate with a proven ability to win a statewide election in the entire Democratic field. No one with a measureable fraction of the experience and name recognition of James Smith or Vincent Sheheen. And they couldn’t get elected in this state. I’m as certain as I can be that none of this year’s candidates have anything resembling a chance. That means the winner of the Republican primary is going to be governor.

The Republcan field, with one exception, is crammed with with people with no useful abilities or relevant experience, and their heads mostly seem crammed with a bunch of nonsense that would never do South Carolina a scrap of good, and probably would do a good bit of harm. So the most important thing is that none of those people get the nomination.

Yeah, the one exception is Alan Wilson. He’s a solid guy — a decent, trustworthy man who has served capably, at the statewide level, for 15 years. I would trust him with the office of governor, and I don’t think he’d let South Carolina down.

You might find it hard to tell that from his website and ads. He can’t be governor without winning the Republican primary, and he knows most of the people who vote in that are people who think having Donald Trump running our country is a good idea.

So we’re treated to things like the appalling “Alan Wilson is Trump-Tough” page. Lord have mercy upon us.

But elsewhere, you’ll find something approaching the kind of pragmatic, to-the-point addressing of issues that I liked on the Webster site. There’s some silly ideological junk there, too, but I’m never going to get what I want at this stage in our history, so I go for what seems least bad.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, eh? Well, it’s not endorsement. This post started exactly as I wrote it. I got irritated by the latest example of McLeod’s ideological nonsense, and got a smile out of remembering a joke from long ago, making fun of the same sort of stuff. Then I figured I’d look around and mention the other people, too.

After all, we do have this election coming up…

The return of the bots

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Not this kind of Spam — which frankly, I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid. No, the other kind…

Well, this is weird…

I saw I had 9 comments awaiting moderation, so I went to deal with them, and they were all spam. I haven’t seen those in awhile — like, years. I guess something happened when the folks at Godaddy did that emergency rebuild to bring my blog back to life yesterday. I know they ditched a bunch of plug-ins. Maybe one of those was protecting me from “comments” such as:

Ignite your originative spark with compound THCA flower. Because hybrids like buy thca flower online connexion the recess between rational distinctness and mortal relaxation, they are incredibly favourite to each artists, writers, and thinkers. It provides due ample physical placidity to calm the fidgets while keeping your certain acrimonious, running, and at the ready to brainstorm. Observation a balanced movement situation like not in a million years before.

A “balanced movement situation?” What is this, dope or laxatives?

Anyway, beyond the amusement, I’m worried that maybe real comments aren’t getting through. In fact, I’m kind worried that no one has been able to see the blog at all.

Let me know if you’re seeing this…

Good for Shane Massey, and the others who voted ‘no’

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Here’s how the NYT recorded this momentous moment at our State House.

Well, the madness has passed us by, for now. Or at least that wave of it has.

I mentioned yesterday that Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey was expected to oppose Trump’s plan to usurp (for his own purposes, as is his wont) a key responsibility of our state Legislature — drawing election maps. And he stood up and did so in fine style:

“If we don’t consider the concerns of South Carolina, there is no one left,” Massey said. “We are the last lines. I have too much Southern blood in me to surrender.”

Amen to that, brother Shane. It’s time that someone in this state stood up for for a States’ right that matters, and is entirely justified. Something good, instead of, you know, what our ancestors stood up for that other time.

Enough Republicans stood up with him to defeat the effort to eliminate the sole Democratic member member of South Carolina’s congressional delegation, Jim Clyburn.

These are the other four:

  • Sean Bennett, R-Summerville
  • Chip Campsen, R-Isle of Palms
  • Tom Davis, R-Beaufort
  • Greg Hembree, R-Little River

Good for Tom Davis and the rest.

Those were the votes that took courage. Of course, they would have accomplished nothing if the Democrats hadn’t all been voting against it. The Dems celebrated appropriately after:

South Carolina Senate Democrats welcome today’s defeat of the sine die resolution that would have allowed the legislature to return for a politically motivated special session on congressional redistricting.

“Today’s vote sends a clear message that South Carolina should not be dragged into another unnecessary and divisive redistricting battle driven by Washington insiders,” said Senate Democratic Leader Brad Hutto. “South Carolinians rejected a politically motivated power grab orchestrated by a White House shaped by perpetually online New York City activists with little understanding of South Carolina. The people of this state expect us to focus on real issues affecting their daily lives, not carry out an outside political agenda.”

Senate Democrats will continue fighting for fair representation, transparency, and a government focused on the needs of South Carolina families rather than national political gamesmanship.

Brad Hutto was also quoted in The State as saying:

“We just don’t take documents from Washington and say ‘thank you, sir. Thank you, ma’am.’ We are the deliberative body,” Hutto said.

No, we don’t. I was afraid we might be, that we might do what just happened in Tennessee, but for now South Carolina did the right thing. It’s nice to be able to say that.

The utter madness going on now at a state capitol near you

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One of the maps being discussed.

Unbelievably, I just learned about this last night, because as y’all know I’m not paying NEARLY as much attention to news as I once did.

Perhaps you’ve been as inattentive as I have. I hope not. But in any case, none of us knows how it’s going to turn out.

I’m talking about this.

Here’s another version from The State.

What’s going on in this: Donald Trump is trying his best to redraw all the Southern states’ maps (and maybe others as well; I’m just looking at the South here) so that there is no hope of them ever electing another Democrat. No Jim Clyburn, and so forth. This is all sparked by the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the Louisiana map, which has thrown the doors open to this sort of thing. This is now apparently a big part of his vision of becoming permanent Fürher of America, along with such things as changing the rules so he can run for a 3rd time in what would likely prove to be our last presidential election (in his lifetime, anyway), and making sure he can win it in the House, no matter what the voters say.

I had sorta, kinda been following this — elsewhere. My wife, who’s from Memphis, had focused my attention on what Tennessee just did. They had torn apart the 9th Congressional District that since the early ’70s had been mostly electing black representatives. (I voted for the first of those, Harold Ford. Later regretted it. But I liked his son.) So now, black Memphians (who are the majority in the city) are raging about the “racist” map, and the current incumbent (who, incidentally, is white and the first Jewish congressman from Tennessee, and can’t really play the usual Memphis race card), is talking about the indiscriminate elimination of Democrats.

Which is somewhat more to the point in the Memphis case. If Trump thought black members would support him as slavishly (and that’s the word here) as white Republicans do, he’d be looking for a way to make ALL the districts majority-minority, if that were possible. For that matter, if only Democrats loved him as the terrified Republicans do, he’d go for more Dems. He’s not particular. But neither of those fantasies being the case, he’ll settle for a plan that elects only Republicans. He only cares about Number One — never forget that.

As for SC, I only heard about this last night from a Democratic friend whom I had called about something else entirely. I’ve talked to a couple of other people since then — well, one other person, a Republican. But I’m trying to reach a lobbyist by text who can tell me what the hell is going on right now. Other that, I’ve been reading but not learning much. Because going into today, nobody knew what was going to happen. This is moving very fast.

It seems it will depend on whether the Senate goes along with a last-second reapportionment. I hear Majority Leader Shane Massey is against it, but I can’t swear to that. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, over in the House, I hear about Republicans running around talking about the latest “White House map.”

Y’all do understand the extent to which this means we are living in a different country than the one in which I have spent most of life. Right? Sure, presidents have always been highly interested in the makeup of Congress, and therefore very interested in the maps, and quietly keeping track of what’s happening.

But that’s not THIS America, in which the president openly barges in and takes over this process, and his minions in Columbia are unembarrassed about making it clear what’s going on.

You see, folks, legally — constitutionally — remapping is entirely the responsibility and prerogative of state legislatures. In any previous decade, lawmakers of both parties would have been fiercely defending their turf, furious if any mere president tried to muscle in.

But not these guys. Not in Trump World.

We won’t even get into the completely uncaring betrayal of the Legislative Black Caucus, which in the early ’90s made the deal with the Republicans that let the GOP take over the S.C. House. But let’s not be too harsh in judging today’s Republican members. They, and their Master, are even more ignorant about history than most Americans. Thirty years ago, when that deal with the caucus was made, I doubt Trump knew where South Carolina was, much less which party was running it. (Here he is in those days.)

At the top of this post, I’ve including one of the maps that’s been floating around. If they go ahead with this, no telling what the final version will look like. This one is intriguing. It does away with the salamanderlike district the Republicans drew for Clyburn back then — not to elect a Democrat, but to get all those black voters out of their districts, to make them “safe.”

So the new 6th looks “normal.” it also looks like something they may regret if they go for it. That Democrat I spoke with about this last night is already thinking about running for it.

But what do the doofuses in the White House know about the political geography of South Carolina?

OK, I’m back. I think…

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Looks like I’m back to DEFCON 5. Whew…

I’m just emerging from a blog crash that occurred around 9 or 10 last night.

After trying for a couple of hours last night to reach a human with my host, I gave up and started over this morning.

Eventually, about 10 minutes or so ago, I was able to log in again — only to find a slight problem in the dashboard. I’m hoping my new buddy at the host — I’ve got his email now — can straighten that out.

Meanwhile, while the experts were working on the disaster this morning, they apparently switched me to the new, improved, ultra-modern writing interface. I’m using it now. I have no idea what the result will be.

But after he fixed the little red warning problem I mentioned above, I may ask my new friend to restore the interface I’m used to. I feel a little like the deputy in the first episode of “The Walking Dead,” coming out of a coma and finding the world is way different that what I knew.

When I get these things sorted, I’ll resume blogging. First topic: This reapportionment mess over at the State House. Something dramatic is likely to happen on that today. I hope Shane Massey sticks to his guns, and the rest of the Senate goes along with him. We’ll see.

I was going to go to the State House and ride herd on this today, but instead of that, I’ve been struggling to put out the aforementioned fires.

See you soon…

Willkommen im Stalaggarten

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From a garden to Stalag Luft III.

Speaking of trying to foil wildlife, I’ve done quite a bit of upgrading to our raised-bed garden since I put out those fig trees.

See how natural and innocent it looked back then?

Well, not long after that, something ate off one of the three measly leaves the smaller of the two trees back. And it still hasn’t been able to grow any new ones since then.

My wife had donated that space, since she didn’t feel up to the struggles of gardening this year — too many hassles, too little produce. So I decided I would do the rest of the boxes — except one we’ve left fallow for the year. Of course, I’m planting okra. That’s my area of agricultural specialization.

But while I was planting the okra, I was thinking about that missing figleaf. I was also thinking about how the deer (who dwell in those woods you see beyond the garden) had feasted on my okra leaves the last couple of years (not the pods, just the leaves — which of course kills the plant). Last year, we put up fences with those green poles and light plastic netting around a couple of the boxes.

This year, with my heavy investment in okra — and the danger to the figs — I went much bigger — I used heavier netting, and I went all around the whole shebang, except for the fallow box. I left one small, easily-blocked gate where I can get in and have access to all the boxes.

I was very proud when I finished putting it up two days ago, just before the rain came.

But then, the next time I walked out, intending to admire it, instead of a garden I saw … one of these. Yeah, a POW camp. A Stalag.

But it isn’t! This isn’t to keep people in! It’s to keep critters out!

It’s morally very different, I think. Oh, and if you think I’m trying to starve the deer like The Squirrel, note all those leaves right behind the garden. Millions of them. Also, I planted some okra in large tubs outside the wire. It’s my “rabbit garden,” only for deer.

And for The Squirrel, I may put out a dish of sunflower seeds. I think that’s what he’s after in the bird feeder…

Don’t tell me I’m going to have to build guard towers now…