Character, courage, redemption and some thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well (hint: mellow isn’t just for coffee and gratitude really is an attitude)

Bill sitting at desk at Wits End

By many definitions, I am now considered a “senior citizen.” I remember when I started this blog back in September 2014, I thought it might be interesting at some point to invite some folks that I knew who were a few years older than me, and perhaps a bit wiser, I suspected, to write some guest columns for SOUNDINGSJOHNBARKER (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) sharing their thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well. I never quite got around to extending that invitation almost eight years ago, but now that I have reached that milestone, I do so here. If you want to contribute some thoughts on the subject of aging gracefully, aging well, this blog is at your service.

My own thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well, might be summarized thusly: Be mellow, be grateful.

First, some words on mellowing with age: As a young reporter, and even much later as an editor, I several times came very close to quitting newspaper jobs as a matter of principle over some story, editorial or column dispute with my bosses. While I still think there are times when that is the only appropriate and ethical thing to do, I have come to realize they are probably few and far between, and ego and arrogance were bigger factors driving my soapbox fury than I realized at the time. As recently as Sept. 11, 2014, I wrote: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).”

While I haven’t revised my view on what I wrote eight years ago, I tend, however, to recall as well now a conversation I had with my parish priest, Father Eugene Whyte, about such a dispute that I was having with my general manager and publisher several years earlier. “John, I have a bishop, I have a superior of my order. I have taken a vow of obedience, and do or don’t do things I might otherwise do.” He also wondered if perhaps my pride was blinding me? While I hadn’t taken a vow of obedience, like a religious, it is true I had a fiduciary duty to my employer(s), that I on more than one occasion served it by making an end run around them because I knew better and knew it. Learning to pick my fights, and realizing even then I might lose some, was a very long process indeed for me. Winning is not always everything. As the late West Wing actor John Spencer, playing Leo McGarry, White House chief of staff, exhorted staff in an April 26, 2000 episode: “And we’re gonna lose some of these battles. And we might even lose the White House. But we’re not going to be threatened by issues: we’re going to put ’em front and center. We’re gonna raise the level of public debate in this country, and let that be our legacy.”

When I worked as a news editor at Northern News Services in Yellowknife some 20 years ago, an inside joke in the newsroom was that people could “pass away” in the city newspaper, the Yellowknifer, edited by my talented colleague, Janet Smellie, who sat right beside me on the desk, but in my paper, the western edition of News/North, they always died or were “dead at.” While it takes up more headline space in a hard copy print edition, in a world of mainly online journalism, where space is less of a constraint, I can now occasionally live with people “passing away” in a headline or the body of a story. While “dead at” has remarkable concision, I’d be hard pressed to argue that it doesn’t often have a harsh sound at the same time, especially to surviving family and friends. While I haven’t had to balance those type of newspaper considerations since 2014, I do try in my public writing these days to harken back to what St. Francis de Sales, the 16th and 17th century priest, Bishop of Geneva, and Doctor of the Church, who became the patron saint of journalists, counselled on using language with gentleness and charity. Anyone who has read some of my Facebook posts will have no doubt I am something of a work-in-progress on that score.

And while I used to tell new reporters I’d fire them if they ever referred to cocaine as a “narcotic” in a news story they handed in, no matter what the police or other official sources said or described it as, I’d probably be less inclined to wield that stick today. Perhaps. As James Boswell wrote in 1791 in Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

My gratitude has increased with age. Reality can be sobering. I have two first cousins who have lost their husbands so far in 2022. They passed away. In the Knights of Columbus, our fraternal Latin motto is “tempus fugit, memento mori,” which translates in English to “time flies, remember death.” If I’m tempted to think counting a cash drawer at the hotel (regularly) or library (occasionally) is a tedious task, I usually catch myself and think something to the effect of thank God that I am still blessed with the cognitive skills (aided by a pocket calculator) to count the cash. The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died in January at the age of 95, had many useful things to say over many decades of teaching on mindfulness and seemingly ordinary and mundane tasks.

Everyone falls short. Watching the Apostles follow Jesus in Dallas Jenkins’ brilliant series The Chosen, reminds me of that constantly. The struggle is real. This week, it serves to remind me also that it might be time to revisit Matthew’s New Testament retelling of “The Sermon on the Mount” and “The Beatitudes.”

³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
    for they will be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    for they will be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
    for they will be shown mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
    for they will see God.
⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,
    for they will be called children of God.
¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Many, many years ago now, when I was a fourth-year student at Trent University, I was taking a politics and women’s studies gender theory course with Elaine Stavro, who I still consider to be one of the most brilliant professors I ever had the privilege to study with. It was a glorious spring day and we were strolling across the Faryon Bridge on the Nassau Campus, which crosses the Otonabee River, joining the east and west banks. Elaine was good-naturedly teasing me a bit about my Catholicism and sin and guilt. We bantered a bit, and then Elaine turned serious, looked at me and said, “John, the difference that matters is not who believes and who does not believe, but rather who cares and who doesn’t care.”

“Character, courage and redemption. These manifestations of virtue are not the moral preserve of any institution, including the Church. They are manifested by the human heart. And nowhere is that manifestation repeatedly better illustrated than by the influence of Gene Rodenberry in popular culture in Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was about half-way through its seven-season run when Rodenberry, the Southern Baptist-turned humanist, died in 1991,” I wrote Sept. 24, 2018 in a blog past called, “Church of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the moral arc of the universe (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/)

A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the series and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994.

Ensign Sito Jaxa is a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise. Two years earlier while in Starfleet Academy in 2368, she was a member of Nova Squadron, along with Wesley Crusher. Under the direction of Cadet Nicholas Locarno, Nova Squadron attempted the dangerous Kolvoord Starburst maneuver during a flight exercise – an action that resulted in a collision and death of fellow cadet Joshua Albert. Jaxa and her fellow cadets lied about their flying of the illegal maneuver to a board of inquiry.

Character, courage and redemption.

Now serving on the USS Enterprise, after being handpicked by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Jaxa was to assist a Cardassian defector, Joret Dal, return to Cardassia Prime by posing as a Bajoran prisoner captured as part of a bounty hunt, which would allow Dal to cross the border without difficulty. She would then be returned to Federation space in an escape pod, after Dal reached Cardassian territory.

Jaxa freely volunteered for the mission, and was surgically altered to appear as if Dal had abused her in his custody Dal was shocked that she was so young, but was grateful that she risked her life in order for the mission to succeed. The Enterprise-D waited more than 32 hours for her to return before Picard orders a probe to be launched into Cardassian space, despite being warned that doing so could be considered a treaty violation, but the probe only detected debris 200,000 kilometres inside Cardassian space consistent with that of a destroyed escape pod. Eventually, a Cardassian communique was intercepted indicating that the escape pod was detected and destroyed after escaping.

And then with remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge:

“To all Starfleet personnel, this is the Captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8).”

Gratitude is defined as, “Readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness; thankfulness.”

Similar to appreciation, gratitude occurs when we affirm the goodness we’ve received in life, says Robert Emmons, a leading expert on gratitude, in his Greater Good essay, “Why Gratitude is Good.” To better understand gratitude, you might also well look at 12-Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA). Gratitude is a major component of 12-Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or Narcotics Anonymous (NA). The 12th step states:

“Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to [alcoholics/addicts], and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

The entire 12-step movement, which now totals more than 100 self-help fellowships, can be traced back to two men originally from Vermont, Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician.

The birth of Alcoholics Anonymous is dated from their meeting and Smith’s last bottle of beer on June 10, 1935. They would be affectionately known ever after as Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the co-founders of AA.

Wilson had been influenced by Ebby Thacher – or Ebby T. in the preferred anonymous parlance of 12-step programs – a friend from boarding school, who paid Wilson a visit in November 1934, while Thacher was a member of the Oxford Group, popular on college campuses in the 1920s, and founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister.

The first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, known almost universally by its informal title as simply the Big Book, was published on April 10, 1939. There were 4,730 books printed, with red cloth binding, wide columns, thick paper (which was why it was called the Big Book in the first place), and a red, yellow, black and white dust jacket, which came to be known as the “circus cover.”

Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA as it is also known, has long had an impact on the larger culture and its perhaps most famous slogan, “one day at a time,” long ago entered the public vocabulary as a sentiment to remind people feeling overwhelmed by events to pause for a moment, step back and see their lives in the present moment, not the past or future, which  has made the concept of the current 24 hours – and in a crisis sometimes even smaller units of time – a cornerstone of AA.

Wilson’s spiritual advisor and “sponsor” for almost 20 years from November 1940 until his death in April 1960 was a Jesuit priest, Father Ed Dowling, from St. Louis.

Dowling was born in St. Louis on Sept. 1, 1898. He attended the Baden Public and the Holy Name Parochial School and went on to St. Louis University High School. In 1918, he served as a private in the First World War. In 1919, he began working as a reporter on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Later that same year, Dowling entered the Order at Florissant and followed the regular course subsequently for philosophy at St. Louis University.

Dowling was a member of the American Newspaper Guild and served as a delegate for the St. Louis local at Guild conventions in Toronto and San Francisco. He was a friend of Heywood Broun, the noted New York columnist, Guild founder and legendary union activist, and helped, along with then Father Fulton J. Sheen, to convert Broun from agnosticism to Catholicism seven months before his death in 1939.

When he decided to become a priest, Dowling reportedly told his newspaper colleagues he was entering the seminary –  the very next morning –  at an all-night café frequented by Globe-Democrat reporters.

While it’s impossible to overstate the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous and related 12-step programs on addictions treatment and recovery, it’s not the only model in a reality where relapse is the norm.

Two steps forward, one step backwards and perhaps a step sideways is the reality of addiction.

Bill Wilson himself  was a surprisingly freethinker on a lot of this, refusing often to get bogged down in the semantics. AA worked for him, so he worked his program with a live-and-let live attitude.

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Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

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The shorthand on Marcia Carroll’s life: From the White House of LBJ to the Precambrian Art Centre

Marcia Carroll was to my mind a Thompson “original.” Now that’s a bit different than perhaps a Thompson “pioneer” as Marcia didn’t live in Thompson quite from the beginning, marked by those halcyon days that closed out the late 1950s, although she did live here a long time. Marcia was original more in the sense of the unique personal back story she brought with her to Thompson, Manitoba, and the equally unique contributions she made for more than 25 years to minor hockey, through the sponsorship, with her husband, Dave, of the Carroll Aeros Atom “B” minor hockey team, where she incredibly knit or crocheted scarves for all the team’s players for years, and the arts in the North through her unfailing encouragement and patronage of Northern artists – be they indigenous, Métis or white.

So when I read of Marcia Carroll’s Sept. 27 passing at Thompson General Hospital in a 137-word Oct. 9 online obituary in the Thompson Citizen, I thought there might be a few more words to say beyond that about the woman who was my next-door business neighbour for the first five years I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, from 2007 to 2012.  Our office was at 141 Commercial Place, while Marcia’s Precambrian Art Centre was adjacent at the same address, occupying space she rented from our corporate owner. Being Marcia’s landlord meant newspaper staff were dispatched on occasion over to her premises, summoned by her to perform some landlord-like task, such as changing commercial grade fluorescent lighting tubes, a task that often fell between 2007 and 2009 to lanky production newspaper page designer Garrett Wiwcharuk (now a colleague at UCN), who was sometimes ably assisted by the paper’s production manager, Ryan Lynds. I suspect now editor Ian Graham and myself may also have been pressed into service the odd time as well.

Marcia owned and operated Precambrian Art Centre for 18 years. But it was her husband, Dave, I actually first heard about from Steve Ashton, our former Thompson MLA, who I had just met on a tour of the then newly-upgraded Canada Safeway in July 2007. Marcia and Dave have two grown sons, Matthew and Morgan, as well as grandchildren Carter and Jerzie.

Ashton told me about Dave’s prowess as a butcher and the demand for his products at Carroll Meats at 20 Nelson Road, where he worked with veteran Thompson meat cutter Joan Monuik, who died two years ago at the age of 76.

Dave Carroll was married to Marcia for 50 years. Finding himself in declining health, he sold Carroll Meats, which had been closed for a time, to Kelly Bindle in 2013, and trained the civil engineer, who had no previous experience in the field, about the meat business as part of the sale. Bindle changed the name to Ripple Rock Meat Shop and still works as its proprietor, although dividing his time between Thompson and Winnipeg since April 2016, when he ran for the Tories and defeated Ashton for the local MLA seat.

Marcia one time told former Thompson Citizen general manager, and still occasional “Out & About” columnist Donna Wilson, that she said she always has three rules for her Carroll Aeros Atom “B” minor hockey players: Learn the rules of hockey, learn to enjoy the fun; learn to lose gracefully, because there may be years that they’ll never win a game, and as far as she was concerned, she said she didn’t care, as long as they all had fun.

Marcia worked with many artists showcasing their work and supporting their talents at critical career points. A short list of such artists would include Jasyn Lucas, Gerald Kuehl, Murray McKenzie, Angus Merasty, Jeff Monias, Ron Disbrowe, Alan Chapman, Tom Dubois, Dr. Ron Zdrikluk, Dave Cadwell, Gene McCarthy, David Williams, Leonard Bighetty, Bruce Ecker, Judy Waldner, Anne Snihor, Desmond Raymond, Marijo Ready, Jan Bain, Cathy Therrien and Michael Spence.

As her health declined noticeably seven or eight years ago and she spent more and more time away from work, with the Precambrian Art Centre often closed only to reopen again briefly and irregularly, those artists and friends became increasingly concerned for her wellbeing.

My first conversation with Gerald Kuehl about half a dozen years ago wasn’t primarily about his famed Portraits of the North pencil portraiture, but more about how Marcia had been a big booster of his work. Kuehl didn’t know me at the time, but knew I worked next door to Precambrian, so he telephoned to check on her wellbeing after being unable reach her on the telephone there on several occasions.

Marcia Carroll may have been best known in Thompson for her long and loyal support of both minor hockey players and artists, but she had been a witness to history before her arrival in Thompson.

An American by birth, originally from Greene, New York, northeast of Binghamton, she was living in Toronto and attending university when JFK was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, but later wound up using her machine shorthand and note taking reporting skills to work in the White House of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, best known as LBJ, Kennedy’s vice-president and successor. Very good stenographers using machine shorthand on a specialized chording keyboard stenotype can write American English at speeds up to 375 words per minute. 

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald did it but I believe there was a second shooter based on what I was told by witnesses,” Carroll told the Nickel Belt News in an April 23, 2010 story. “I suppose one will never really know because there’s no way of proving it now.”

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Be it resolved for 2018: Let’s all chill a bit on The Donald

One can’t impose, I suppose, New Year’s resolutions on others, only yourself, which has struck me at times as a pity. Because if I could I would have folks dial back their Donald J. Trump vitriol and chill a bit as he begins the second year of his presidency. Yes, I know, he’s repeatedly called out most of the mainstream media as “Fake News,” which can’t be easy to stomach, especially coming from a serial tweeter whose own “facts” as often as not don’t comport fully, or sometimes even marginally, with the truth.

Tough. Raise the bar and take a higher road.

Two very different but interesting pieces – one a news story, the other an op-ed column – appeared over the last couple of days, reminding how much a reset is needed.

In the case of Darlene Superville’s news story for The Associated Press on Trump being the first president not to host a state dinner his first year in office since “Silent Cal” Calvin Coolidge, who became president on Aug. 3, 1923, but didn’t hold his first state dinner until Oct. 21, 1926 for Queen Marie of Romania, the problem perhaps is one of overemphasis on that interesting but, at least in my view, hardly earth shattering reality, combined with a snarky two-graf lede”: “President Donald Trump couldn’t stop talking about the red carpets, military parades and fancy dinners that were lavished upon him during state visits on his recent tour of Asia,” Superville writes. “‘Magnificent,’ he declared at one point on the trip. But Trump has yet to reciprocate, making him the first president in almost a century to close his first year in office without welcoming a visiting counterpart to the U.S. with similar trappings.”

But then Superville goes on in the very next paragraph and the one after to write: “Trump spoke dismissively of state dinners as a candidate, when he panned President Barack Obama’s decision to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping with a 2015 state visit. Such visits are an important diplomatic tool that includes a showy arrival ceremony and an elaborate dinner at the White House. ‘I would not be throwing (Xi) a dinner,’ Trump said at the time. ‘I would get him a McDonald’s hamburger and say we’ve got to get down to work.’”

So Trump has been on the record for a time now as not being a fan of state dinners. So we should be surprised, shocked or worried that he didn’t hold one in 2017?

Superville, who has covered the White House since 2009, came to Washington after covering the New Jersey Statehouse and the 1993 Whitman-Florio gubernatorial race, and got her start with the AP back in June 1988 in New Jersey.

Her point here is that state dinners are an important diplomatic tool, a point reinforced through sources Anita McBride, “a veteran of three Republican administrations who last served as chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush” and Peter Selfridge, “who served as a liaison between the White House and visiting foreign dignitaries as U.S. chief of protocol from 2014 to January 2017.”

Fair enough, although I might have thought state dinners were often useful as diplomatic tools, rather than necessarily essential or important, to draw a bit of a distinction. And as I recall, back on the campaign trail in June 2016, Trump had also said that under the right circumstances he would meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and again forego the state dinner in favour of hamburgers.

So, OK, state dinners may be important diplomatic tools, but it seems an oddly pressed point at the moment when the most dangerous diplomatic crisis in the world is the one that exists between North Korea and the United States, with Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump both cut from a bit of a different cloth from the recent historical norm when it comes to their ideas about what constitutes diplomacy.

State dinner? How about a dish of Realpolitik? Someone send out for some Mickey D’s.

New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni wrote a well-argued column on overreach and hyperbole by Democrats and other liberals, headlined “The End of Trump and the End of Days, “which ran yesterday.  Bruni starts out: “To travel the liberal byways of social media over recent weeks was to learn that Donald Trump was on the precipice of axing Robert Mueller and was likely to use the days just before Christmas, when we were distracted by eggnog and mistletoe, to lower the blade.

“Christmas has come. Christmas has gone. Mueller has not.

“To listen to Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, the tax overhaul that Trump just signed into law is no mere plutocratic folly. It’s “Armageddon” (Pelosi’s actual word). Their opposition is righteous, but how will millions of voters who notice smaller withholdings from their paychecks and more money in their pockets square that seemingly good fortune with such prophecies of doom on a biblical scale?

“Some of these Americans may decide that the prophets aren’t to be trusted – and that the president isn’t quite the pestilence they make him out to be.”

The entire Bruni column is worth a read and can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/opinion/trump-liberals-armageddon.html

I wrote a post for soundingsjohnbarker in July 2016, headlined “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/) in which I argued that “right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.”

A year after Trump’s election, I still think this is largely true. Even his appointment of Neil Gorsuch, as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Antonin Scalia, has not made me, at least as yet, wish the court had been dissolved.

As for other issues in international diplomacy, such as Trump reiterating the moving of the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which became law on Nov. 8, 1995, called for the relocation of the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, no later than May 31, 1999.  For that matter, I seem to recall former Progressive Conservative prime minister Joe Clark committing to moving the Canadian embassy in Israel 20 years before 1999 from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – way back on June 6, 1979, although the Tories were backpedalling on the promise four months later in October 1979.

While the United Nations General Assembly resolution earlier this month to condemn Trump’s decision to move the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, by a vote of 128 countries in favour, nine against, 35 abstentions, including Canada, and 21 countries not participating in the vote, shows the move is far from popular internationally, it is also far from the end of the world as we know it, as the modulated outrage in the Arab world suggests.

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Real News: Manitoba Tories to stop subsidizing air travel for medical escorts, but some on Facebook wonder if that’s ‘fake news’

Way back aeons ago, say around August 2014, when I last wrote in print, the phrase “fake news” hadn’t yet entered the popular lexicon. It’s not that fake news, especially in the form of state-sponsored propaganda, didn’t exist. It did and it had a long history. Octavian famously used a campaign of disinformation to aid his victory over Marc Antony in the final war of the Roman Republic,” noted James Carson, head of search engine optimization and social media at the Telegraph Media Group in London, in a March 16 piece headlined “What is fake news? Its origins and how it grew in 2016,” which appears in the Telegraph online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-origins-grew-2016/

Carson also notes that in the aftermath of Octavian’s final war of the Roman Republic, from 31 BC to 29 BC, also known as Antony’s civil war, Octavian “changed his name to Augustus, and dispatched a flattering and youthful image of himself throughout the Empire, maintaining its use in his old age.”

The British, in particular among the Allies, made good use of propaganda against the Germans during the First World War from 1914 to 1918, demonizing the “Hun” with unsubstantiated false reports of atrocities. Twenty years later in the lead-up to the Second World War, the Nazi party in Germany “used the growing mass media to build a power base and then consolidate power in Germany during the 1930s, using racial stereotyping to encourage discrimination against Jews.” That’s why the name Joseph Goebbels, who served as Reich minister of propaganda, still sends chills down our spine.

It wasn’t until Donald Trump’s first press conference as president-elect on Jan. 11, when he pointed at CNN reporter Jim Acosta, while refusing to listen to his question, saying, “You are fake news!” that the phrase entered the popular lexicon.  Two days after Trump became president, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, added to the lexicon, telling Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, that White House press secretary Sean Spicer had used ‘alternative facts’ in his first statement to the press corps Jan. 21,  when making false claims about the inaugural crowd size. Spicer had baldly told the pants-on-fire lie that Trump drew the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

Lo-and-behold, on Friday, I posted on Facebook links to two media stories, one from May 2, written by Jonathon Naylor, a hometown Flin Flon boy, whom I have known for 10 years, and who has edited the local newspaper, The Reminder even longer, headlined “Patient escort subsidy for airfare to be eliminated” (http://www.thereminder.ca/news/local-news/patient-escort-subsidy-for-airfare-to-be-eliminated-1.17447605), and a similar May 4 story from CBC News Manitoba, headlined “‘Who’s going to help them now?’: Manitoba cutting airfare subsidy for escorts of northern patients” http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/northern-patient-escort-subsidy-1.4100111

Naylor wrote: “The provincial government plans to cancel a subsidy that offers affordable airfare to the escorts of northern Manitoba patients who fly to Winnipeg for medical appointments.

“The Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) currently allows patients and their escorts to purchase commercial flight tickets for $75 each, far below the standard price.

“While eligible patients will continue to have this option, the province plans to remove the subsidy for escorts at a date yet to be announced.

“Manitoba Health spokeswoman Amy McGuinness said the move is important for financial reasons.

“‘This ensures that costs are being managed for medically necessary trips,’ she said, adding the change is estimated to save about $1 million a year.

“Escorts, she said, ‘will need to travel by land, or to purchase a regular ticket with the air carrier.’ A one-way plane ticket from Flin Flon to Winnipeg costs up to $859 without the subsidy.

“McGuinness could not confirm when the change will be implemented, saying the health department will work with the Northern Health Region to confirm timelines.”

Amy McGuinness is press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister Progressive Conservative government.

While I may not much like some of the news delivered by her and her Tory bosses, including this news of the cancellation of a subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back  to Winnipeg for medical appointments, I would never have dreamed McGuinness was offering up “fake news” or “alternative facts” here.

Just because I find something in the news I definitely don’t like and find most unpalatable, such as the cancellation of the medical escort subsidy, doesn’t make it “fake news,” whether I post it on Facebook or elsewhere on social media, or not.

Back in the day, when I edited the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here for seven or so years, I was never accused, even by another name, of faking the news or linking to fake news stories online.

What I was accused of sometimes was running too many real but inconvenient “bad news” stories, especially actual crime and crime-related statistical stories on how Thompson finds itself for crime, along with some OmniTRAX rail stories on freight train delays, derailments and plans (now scrapped) to ship oil-by-rail across Northern Manitoba from The Pas in the southwest to Churchill and Hudson Bay in the northeast.

The timing was bad, to say the least. The oil-by-rail to Churchill plan, unveiled in Thompson on Aug, 15, 2013, met a firestorm of public opposition, ranging from local citizens, members of First Nations aboriginal communities along the Bayline between Gillam and Churchill, with whistle stops in places like Bird, Sundance Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill, opposition fueled in part no doubt by the tragedy only 5½ weeks earlier at Lac-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships where a runaway Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) freight train carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale gas formation in North Dakota in 72 CTC-111A tanker cars derailed in downtown Lac-Mégantic on July 6, 2013. Forty-seven people died as a result of the fiery explosion that followed the derailment.

While many of the comments were spot-on in reacting to the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP), several others wondered on my timeline if this had been confirmed by the government or was it just media speculation?

Either some of my well-meaning Facebook friends perhaps needs to read links a little more thoroughly before commenting, or Amy McGuinness, press secretary to cabinet for the Pallister government, needs to raise her profile a little more when quoted in news stories. Perhaps something like AMY MCGUINNESS, PRESS SECRETARY TO CABINET FOR THE PALLISTER GOVERNMENT, said today. I suspect, although I could be wrong, part of it is that some of my Facebook friends, especially ones with Tory leanings (yes, I do have friends like that) were a bit blindsided by the news of the province cancelling the subsidy under the Northern Patient Transportation Program (NPTP) that offers affordable airfare to the medical escorts of Northern Manitoba patients flying to Winnipeg and back for medical appointments, and couldn’t quite believe what they were reading at first. They didn’t want to believe it was true.

The topper, however, was the one Facebook friend from here in Thompson, who managed to post the comment “Fake news” with zero elaboration twice on a single thread (well done, Ron). But he also “liked” the story (I think), although it’s always hard to know exactly what that means on Facebook. Now Ron, speaking earlier of Huns, I consider to be somewhere just to the right of Attila the Hun. But here’s the thing about small Northern towns. You know people personally. And I like Ron in person. While we don’t run into each other in real life so much, we do on occasion and we have great chats about the State of Thompson, as it were.

But I must confess after readings Ron’s somewhat cryptic “fake news” allegation, I went for a little troll on his Facebook page, to see what he was reading, listening to and watching these days. A few days ago, on April 28, Ron shared on his Facebook timeline the Metaspoon story, “Ship Went Missing In The Bermuda Triangle. But Then It Shows Back Up 90 Years Later” http://www.metaspoon.com/ship-bermuda-triangle?so=pgshM&cat=shock&fb=17036M1mwr3565a0&utm_source=17036M1mwr3565a0

It’s a great story. And one that appeals to me having written soundingsjohnbarker posts such as “Invisible ships: Romulan Star Empire Birds-of-Prey and the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard’s USS Eldridge” on Nov. 25, 2015 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/invisible-ships-romulan-star-empire-birds-of-prey-and-the-philadelphia-naval-shipyards-uss-eldridge/) and last Oct. 23, “Can meteorology use science to unmask the long-cloaked air and sea secrets of the Bermuda Triangle?” https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/10/23/can-meteorology-use-science-to-unmask-the-long-cloaked-air-and-sea-secrets-of-the-bermuda-triangle/

Ron’s Metaspoon story goes like this. The SS Cotopaxi, a tramp steamer that disappeared in December 1925, was discovered by the Cuban Coast Guard 90 years after it vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. The story originated in the World News Daily Report, which on May 18, 2015 published an article reporting that the Cuban Coast Guard had intercepted the SS Cotopaxi that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle while en route to Havana in 1925. The story originated with the Weekly News Daily Report and has been widely picked up by “news” aggregators such as Metaspoon.

“The Cuban authorities spotted the ship for the first time on May 16, near a restricted military zone, west of Havana. They made many unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the crew, and finally mobilized three patrol boats to intercept it,” the Weekly News Daily Report says.

Problem is, Ron, while there was indeed a real SS Cotopaxi, which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in December 1925, it unfortunately did not reappear to the Cubans on May 16, 2015. Or at any other time. World News Daily Report is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. It routinely publishes clickbait hoax articles. All “news” articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fictitious. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are based on real people, but still based almost entirely in fiction.

Fake news, Ron. Didn’t happen.

Another Facebook friend posted on my timeline: “Media is a tricky business to navigate . I’ve learned that the hard way when it comes to being misquoted or have had things taken out of context (not by you personally ). I’m grateful for journalists that look into all sides and facts before stating an opinion.”

Perhaps so. In the old days we used to talk about things like a story having a “ring of truth” or whether it passed the “smell test.”

Today, I might point to something like, Deception Detection for News: Three Types of Fakes by Victoria L. Rubin, Yimin Chen and Niall J. Conroy, which appeared last year in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The abstract can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010083/pdf

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Right/Left: Pat Buchanan and Thomas Frank ponder the Dog Days of August’s fizzling Populism this American Summer

I had kind of forgotten about 77-year-old Pat Buchanan, who in some ways was America’s resident right-wing politico kook before 70-year-old Donald Trump, running unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1992 and 1996 primaries. He also ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election. And then I came across this opinion piece by him last week headlined, “Yes, the system is rigged: Pat Buchanan to establishment overlords: ‘When do we have our American Spring?’ (http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/yes-the-system-is-rigged/) in WND (formerly WorldNetDaily), a far-right website founded by publisher Joseph Farah in 1997, as a project of his Western Center for Journalism.

Then I remembered some of the things that Buchanan was saying about immigration 20 and 24 years ago, during the two-term Reign of Clinton I, eerily presaged what Trump is saying today. But truth be told, Pat Buchanan, a Roman Catholic co-religionist who graduated from Georgetown University, is a very bright guy. That’s what makes him different than Donald Trump, and arguably, if he had arrived for his presidential quests in a different, later political season – like right now for instance – even more dangerous than Trump. Buchanan is and was an ideological hard-liner who wouldn’t have to go the dictionary to look up the meaning of the word ideological.

Buchanan was an original host on CNN’s Crossfire. In his early 20s, he was assistant editorial page editor of the old St. Louis Globe-Democrat and was a White House advisor and speechwriter in Richard Nixon’s White House from 1969 through 1974.

In fact, Pat Buchanan, in this article, which if you can overlook the fact for just a minute he’s pumping and stumping for Trump, makes some valid points about the political establishment and “system.” Writes Buchanan: “If 2016 taught us anything, it is that if the establishment’s hegemony is imperiled, it will come together in ferocious solidarity – for the preservation of their perks, privileges and power.” Yes, Buchanan even uses the H-word “hegemony,” which I don’t recall hearing coming from the mouth – or pen – of a right-wing Republican before. That’s a word I’d associate more with neo-Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci.

But I’d suggest the core of Buchanan’s argument is not so very different than the one Thomas Frank, the political analyst and founder of The Baffler, who defies easy political labelling, made Aug. 13 in The Guardian in an opinion piece headlined, “With Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton” (https://www.theguardian.com/…/trump-clinton-election-chance…). Frank writes, “Today it looks as though his [New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s] elites are taking matters well in hand. ‘Jobs’ don’t really matter now in this election, nor does the debacle of ‘globalization,’ nor does anything else, really. Thanks to this imbecile Trump, all such issues have been momentarily swept off the table while Americans come together around Clinton, the wife of the man who envisaged the Davos dream in the first place … the political process bears a striking resemblance to dynastic succession.”

Meanwhile, back at WND, Pat Buchanan’s near-ending the piece with the John F. Kennedy quote, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” was a particularly deft touch.

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The twilight freedom of John W. Hinckley Jr.

John W. Hinckley Jr. is soon going home on “convalescent leave” to Williamsburg, Virginia to live with his 90-year-old mother.

The process for his release is set to begin as early as next Friday.

Hinckley is now 61-years-old and “suffering from arthritis, high blood pressure, and various other physical ailments like many men his age,” noted U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, who sits on the bench of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington D.C., in his 103-page opinion memorialized as an accompanying federal court order July 27.

While Hinckley suffers from some routine age-related physical ailments, Friedman found he has long been in “full and sustained remission” and no longer suffers in a dangerously demonstrable way from the mental illness that led to him shooting then President Ronald Reagan in March 1981, and the following year saw him found not guilty by reason of insanity, making him the most famous patient in the United States, innocent of criminality but still so dangerous in the eyes of the judicial system he had to be detained for the last 35 years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. His release process, with reporting and myriad other conditions attached, could begin as early as Aug. 5, the judge determined.

In his ruling last Wednesday, Friedman found that Hinckley has received the maximum in-patient benefit possible at the federal psychiatric hospital and that he is ready to be returned to the community in his 60s to live out his remaining years.

The hospital opened in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane and was the first federally-operated psychiatric hospital in the United States. During the Civil War, wounded soldiers treated there were reluctant to admit that they were in an insane asylum, and said they were at St. Elizabeths, the colonial name of the land where the hospital is located. Congress officially changed the hospital’s name to St. Elizabeths in 1916. Other famous – or infamous patients depending on one’s perspective perhaps – confined to St. Elizabeths include Ezra Pound, the expatriate American poet who made radio broadcasts from Rapallo, Italy between 1941 and 1945 on behalf of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italian regime during the Second World War. Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths in 1946 and remained there until 1958, when a treason charge against him was dismissed.

John W. Hinckley Jr. is a name that will likely always be a name that conjures up historical flashbulb photographic memories for the vast majority of Americans outside of St. Elizabeths Hospital who have not seen him in press photos since his trial ended in June 1982 and he was 27 years old, although he has been rarely photographed in public since then, including in Virginia on an unsupervised visit with family in April 2014.

But to most Americans, he is still the 25-year-old John Warnock Hinckley Jr.  photographed in the famous UPI picture riding in the backseat of a police car after his arraignment in U.S. District Court on March 31, 1981 – the day after he shot President Reagan.

Hinckley was armed with a .22-caliber pistol loaded with six exploding “Devastator” bullets when he opened fire on March 30, 1981.  All survived the attack, but several were seriously wounded, including the president.

Hinckley shot Reagan in the driveway outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C. at 2:27 p.m. from just 10 feet away after the president had addressed the Building and Construction Workers Union of the AFL-CIO. U.S. Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy turned into the line of fire and took a bullet for the president, while another Secret Service Agent, Jerry Parr, roughly shoved Reagan into the presidential limousine, and then, as the Lincoln roared back toward the White House – per protocol – with driver Drew Unrue not knowing the president had been wounded, Parr, however, noticed Reagan was having difficulty breathing and bright frothy blood was coming from his mouth, ordered Unrue to turn the limousine around and race to George Washington Hospital, with its trauma centre, instead. Doctors said later Parr’s snap judgment call to detour to George Washington Hospital instead of continuing on to the White House, as planned, saved the president’s life.

Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officer Thomas Delahanty was wounded in the neck by the second of Hinckley’s bullets and suffered permanent nerve damage to his left arm.

But the most gravely injured was White House press secretary James Brady, who suffered a catastrophic brain injury, shot at point-blank range to the left-center of his forehead, the bullet passing through both hemispheres of his brain. ABC began airing footage at 2:42 p.m.  ABC, CBS and NBC all erroneously reported that Brady had died. Partially paralyzed, Brady did die many years later at the age of 73 on Aug. 4, 2014. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia ruled Brady’s death to be caused by homicide as a result of the 1981 shooting, but authorities opted not to prosecute Hinckley further as the result of the finding.

In his July 27 opinion, in response to the federal government’s move to continue Hinckley’s detention at St. Elizabeths, Friedman wrote, “In 1981, John W. Hinckley, Jr. was a profoundly troubled 25-year-old young man suffering from active and acute and major depression. His mental condition had gradually worsened over the preceding years – beginning as early as 1976 – ultimately resulting in a deep obsession with the actress Jodie Foster and the film Taxi Driver.

“Mr. Hinckley began to identify with the main character in the film, Travis Bickle, who unsuccessfully plots to assassinate a presidential candidate in order to win the affections of a young woman.”

Friedman goes onto say that Hinckley “has been under the care of St. Elizabeths Hospital for over three decades. Since 1983, when he last attempted suicide, he has displayed no signs of active mental illness, exhibited no violent behavior, shown no interest in weapons, and demonstrated no suicidal ideation. The government and the hospital both agree that Mr. Hinckley’s primary diagnoses of psychotic disorder not otherwise specified and major depression have been in full and sustained remission for well over 20 years, perhaps more than 27 years. In addition, since 2006, Mr. Hinckley has successfully completed over 80 unsupervised visits with his family in Williamsburg, Virginia.”

During those visits to Williamsburg, Hinckley stops in at Retro Daddio, a local music store, about once a month, where owner Jen Thurman told the Associated Press she is on a first name basis with him and a photo on the wall of a young Jodie Foster seems to go unnoticed. “I’m alone in the store frequently with him, and he’s never creeped me out,” Thurman told the AP.

Hinckley also joins his mother for Sunday services at the Williamsburg United Methodist Church when he’s visiting, and volunteers at the local Unitarian Church.

In arguing for Hinckley’s continued detention at St. Elizabeths, the United States government found itself grasping at some thin reeds, pointing out that when he was released on a work furlough in 2011 he twice told his supervisors he intended to go to the movies, when in fact he went instead to a Barnes & Noble bookstore. OK. Those were stupid lies, especially given Hinckley will be closely and rightly watched by the United States Secret Service whenever he is free for the rest of his life. Criminally responsible or not, that’s part of the price you can expect to pay for shooting a president. Last year, during a release, he deviated from his approved itinerary and visited a musician friend, instead of a photographer. He admitted to the lie. So, yes, 35 years have not cured Hinckley to the point he’s perfect and honest in every way. That would be a state of character few of the always sane could claim. But is he a danger? Is his continued detention in the public interest?

Case like Hinckley’s are extremely difficult. In 1981, he may not have committed a crime because he was insane at the time, but it is beyond doubt he committed a terrible deed by any objective standard, legally responsible for his actions or not. But what now? Is his continued detention justified simply because of his notoriety if nothing else? Of course not. John Hinckley Jr. was a mentally ill man. If indeed that mental illness is now in long, full and sustained remission, as Judge Friedman found, it is time to send the 35-year patient home, as unpopular with the public as that may prove to be.

That and only that is how the ends of justice are served.

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Strike & Spare: Canadians uniquely have 5-pin bowling but Americans have a 10-pin bowling alley in the White House

Nick DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes upstairs at his North Centre Mall on Station Road in Thompson, offering both five-pin and 10-pin bowling, opened in March 1999 and celebrated its 16th anniversary March 19.

My first trip to Nick’s NC Crossroad Lanes – at least to bowl – was for some five-pin bowling a few weeks before that on Feb. 28 when my friend Paul Boge, the Winnipeg writer and filmmaker was in town for the weekend as guest speaker for Pastor Ted Goossen’s annual Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship Family Enrichment weekend, and a Saturday afternoon outing to the bowling alley was on the agenda. My curiosity got the best of me in wondering if Boge is as good a bowler as he is speaker and Christian apologist. He is.

DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes has been the only game in town when it comes to bowling since May 2010 when the last strikes were thrown at Thompson Lanes on Churchill Drive, which opened in 1965 and was operated by the Stuart family for 40 of its 45 years in existence.

Before my end of February five-pin outing at NC Crossroad Lanes with my friends from Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship, I think my most recent bowling outing had been back in Kingston, Ontario when I was a grad student at Queen’s University in the mid-1990s.

Five-pin bowling, for my American readers, is a Canadian thing, invented by Tommy Ryan in Toronto in 1909. Original pin count (values) are established as (from left to right) “4-2-1-3-5.” The first five-pin bowling league was formed at Ryan’s Toronto Bowling Club the following year in 1910. While there are  some five-pin bowling alleys in the United States and in Europe, the vast majority of five-pin bowling alleys and leagues are found in Canada.

Ryan ran his own pool hall in Toronto prior to inventing the sport of five-pin bowling. Ryan came up with the idea of five-pin bowling after many of his clients complained that the balls in 10-pin bowling were too heavy. As a result, he produced a version of bowling with a new scoring system, lighter balls, and rubber rings around the pins.

The first five-pin bowling organization was the Canadian Bowling Association (CBA) formed in Toronto in 1927, which followed a year later in 1928 with its first Official 5 Pin Rule Book printed by the CBA. In 1952, the pin count was revised to (from left to right) 2-3-5-3-2 (as it is currently). The highest possible score that can be attained in five-pin bowling is 450. This can be accomplished by achieving a strike in the first nine frames and then achieving three more strikes in the tenth (final) frame. In five-pin bowling, three strikes in a row is a total of 45 points (in the first frame in which the streak began). When multiplied by 10, the final point total would be 450.

The Canadian Five-Pin Bowler’s Association now determines the rules and rule changes in five-pin bowling, while the Bowling Proprietors Association of Canada (BPAC) represents the interest of bowling alley owners.

When a player uses all three of their throws to knock down all of the pins, it is known as a “full set.” Three consecutive strikes is known as a “turkey”; three consecutive strikes in the tenth frame is called a “Strike Out,” while hitting both three pins (in your first two throws) is called a “Howie.”

Each week nearly one million Canadians go bowling and five-pin bowling was voted the fourth-greatest Canadian invention of all time on the CBC Television series Greatest Canadian Inventions.

The United States had 4,061 bowling centers in 2012, down 25 percent from 1998, the earliest year for which the U.S. Census collected consistent data, Bloomberg Business reported last July. By contrast, the United States added 2,000 bowling alleys between the end of the Second World War and 1958, when the American Society of Planning Officials reported in May 1958 that “the bowling alley is fast becoming one of the most important – if not the most important – local center of participant sport and recreation.”

While Canadians may have the claim on five-pin bowling, Americans can point to the unique distinction of having a bowling alley – albeit 10-pin – right in the White House in Washington. In fact, it turned 68 last Saturday, as President Harry S. Truman officially opened it on April 25, 1947.

Fellow Missourians funded the construction of the bowling alley on the ground floor of the West Wing in honour of the president. They had intended to open the alley as part of Truman’s 63rd birthday celebration on May 8, 1947, but construction was completed ahead of schedule. Truman’s favourite pastime was poker and although he had not bowled since he was a teenager, A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes, “he gamely hoisted the first ball, knocking down 7 out of 10 pins. One of the pins is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution.”

Truman allowed staff to start a league but presidential bowling was moved to the Old Executive Office Building in 1955 to make way for a mimeograph room. But in 1969, President Richard Nixon, an avid bowler, had a new one-lane alley built, which was paid for by friends, in an underground workspace area below the driveway leading to the North Portico.

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