Cranking out bias

　

　

The first time I saw my grandma cranking her telephone, which was mounted on the kitchen wall, and then talking to an invisible operator I knew something amazing was going on. That was in the early part of the year, before 1929 became shorthand for panic on Wall Street. The manufacture of hand-cranked magnetos had a high-profit future, except that all of a sudden neither phones nor Fords needed cranks.

When my grandpa lathered up, fortunes could be made in selling straight razors and razor strops. My first cold earned me a mustard plaster on my chest and a raw onion in the room to attract the germs. It efficacy was established when the onion eventually turned dark with, presumably, dead germs. Mustard plasters and leeches and other medical favorites had short commercial lives.

At school every student desk had a built-in inkwell, and nothing was brighter than the blue ink business. Wooden pencils were sharpened away by the millions, and millions more had to be made.

When I landed my first newspaper job in 1942 every desk had a paste pot and typewriters were purely mechanical, responding to the force of fingers, not electricity. Building a future on the sale of typewriter ribbons almost guaranteed lifetime success.

But there’s more than matchbooks and amateur night at the movies to shrug off. I was about 14, already a Lincoln enthusiast, when I visited a segregated black school in the South. The principal showed me textbooks which had been discarded by white schools, giving me a teenage attitude that led eventually into life membership in NAACP.

Some writers today, like temporarily lapsed liberals, ridicule white men with the mindless fervor of crackpots.

Certainly they are not referring to the white Supreme Court justices who gave judicial certainty to civil rights, or to the white journalists who kept the issues alive, or the Union soldiers dying in the Civil War to clear the way for the emancipation proclamation. They cannot be referring to the white church members, legislators, teachers and artists who are committed to racial justice.

The tools of communication, justice and education are reinvented and rebuilt almost constantly. We can use the tools without cranking them in rebuilt bias.

　

What were the generals thinking?

          Generals are in the news. David Petraeus, who resigned as CIA chief, and John Allen, who denies any inappropriate behavior, confirm the plain fact that emails are not private. The military heroes stimulate our thinking as we ask, What were they thinking?

          God is Mind, many priests and philosophers affirm. God is Mind, not Brain. People need brains (and feet and fingers and the bodies to which those things are attached). God doesn’t. Mind is reliable. The brain isn’t, even though it provides a place for the human mind.

          We approach God, Mind, Father, Spirit, Mother, the only way we can, through prayers and other thoughts. We don’t always recognize Mind’s answers. We pray for good health, and don’t notice that God has already given us the wholeness of loving friends and families.  
          Sometimes we make deals. I was invited to dinner at the home of a physician, his wife and their teenage children. The wife’s knife and fork stayed in place, because she ate nothing. Years before she had promised God that if one of her children survived a frightening condition she would deny herself the pleasure of sharing dinners with her family for the rest of her life. The deal concept is familiar to students at exam time.

          The mom who gave up dining with her family kept her promise, but many deals with the Almighty evaporate in the mist of resolutions, diets and exercise plans.

          Christians have offered a trillion promises to forgive others the way they want God to forgive them. It is right there in the heart of the most famous of prayers: Our Father who art in heaven…forgive us…as we forgive.

          Having lived a long time, and having offended many, I have a substantial stake in the way humans think about forgiveness.

          Accounts I hear are not reassuring. Forgiveness is scorned in families, where you might think it would have its greatest strength. Think of the moms whose unresolved anger leads them to keep their offspring away from grandparents who love them. Think of the brothers who have not spoken to each other for a decade. Such folks have immersed themselves in icy mindlessness, mocking God and committing perjury each time they mumble the Lord’s Prayer.

          Forgiveness is an enabler of reform. Cheaters, stealers, liars, gossipers, killers, persecutors and predators challenge religious believers especially to show them ways to reform and renewal. Forgiveness of offensive behavior does not erase it, but it does encourage rewriting it.

 

 

  

Billy Graham didn't need to advertise

 

 

            Billy Graham’s decision to buy full-page ads supporting the Republican candidate for president stirred  interest in the role of religion in partisan politics. The ads ran in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Chicago Tribune and other newspapers shortly before the election of November 6, 2012—one day before the famed evangelist’s 94th birthday.

            The ads backed Mitt Romney in his soon-to-fail campaign to replace Barack Obama as president. This coincided with the removal of Mormonism’s identity as a “cult” in a web site of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn.

            When Billy Graham gave me  couple of hours for a depth interview in 1965 he radiated the assurance of an evangelist sharing the power of the cross of Christ. We talked in his suite at the Royal Hawaiian in Waikiki, where he was preparing for a week-long Honolulu Crusade. He had recently drawn 2 million New Yorkers to his Crusade in Madison Square Garden.

            In those long-ago times he ran a mile and a half every day, played golf, swam at every opportunity. Now he’s at his long-time home at Montreat, near Asheville, N.C., at a cool elevation of 4,000 feet. He was born in Charlotte, N.C., on Nov. 7, 1918, and lived on a small farm. His parents called him Billy-Frank, but at school he chose to be known as Billy Graham.

            He has been a widely-circulated newspaper columnist, world-famous author and preacher, confidant of presidents and a noted figure on television. He didn’t need to run those ads.

 

A black Lincoln in the White House?

 

          It was a few years ago when I wrote a column about a newcomer on the national scene. The column ran in The Orlando Sentinel. Years have passed, and it all came true. The face is the same, sort of, but some of the pixels have rearranged themselves. Read on:

 By A. E. P. Wall

Special to the Sentinel

           When Barack Obama was a schoolboy in Hawaii, I was managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser, unaware that a major figure of the next century might have been surfing nearby. In the Hawaii I remember, racial identify sometimes required several hyphens (Filipino-Chinese-Hawaiian or Caucasian-Korean-Japanese). The boy with the soul of a Martin Luther King and the heart of an Abraham Lincoln might have been known as Black-Caucasian, the son of a black African father and white American mother.

          Americans are often on the move. The one-time Hawaii resident ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, where he won by a wide margin. Obama now serves alongside the venerable Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii.

          Obama would have qualified for membership in the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Honolulu in the 1950s, when men with names like Ohata, Okada and Okino were welcome participants in annual corned beef and cabbage events.

          Anybody who heard Obama’s address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, his hymn to democracy and the integrity that makes it work, may have wondered whether this man might make it to the White House. It took about 180 years for a Catholic to be elected, and no woman has ever been elected regardless of her race, religion or political party.

          The first African American to be elected president will be Obama or someone very much like him, someone who is proud of his race who wants to lead an interracial nation, a country in which everybody belongs to some kind of minority – the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, the Catholics, Jews, Muslims, even the Cubs fans. He’d have to win enough votes from Americans of European, Hispanic, Asian and other ancestries to get there.

          Spirited words by Sen. Obama, delivered in Springfield, Illinois, at the dedication of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, were recalled by Jeff Zeleny, national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in an article June 26. They received less attention than they merited at the time because, Zeleny reported, the senator had barely finished speaking when the election of a new pope took over the front pages. Here’s some of what Obama said about Lincoln:

          “At a time when image all too often trumps substance, when our politics all too often feeds rather than bridges division, when the prospects of a poor youth rising out of poverty seem of no consequence to the powerful and when we evoke our common God to condemn those who do not think as we do, rather than to seek God’s mercy for our own lack of understanding – at such a time it is helpful to remember this man who was the real thing.”

          The papal election may have grabbed the headlines at that moment, but it stirred memories of Pope John Paul II. His Polish ancestry was a joy to him, and he met with men and women of Polish ancestry wherever he traveled in the world – but he was not the pope of the Poles. He was everybody’s pope. Obama can be everybody’s president.

          When I was a first-grader, 75 years ago, my hero was Lincoln. The first book I bought with the first half-dollar I earned was about Lincoln.

          When I see Sen. Obama on my TV screen I see a bit of Lincoln. That’s before the beard, of course.

 

 

 

 

Whose storm is it?

          Take a look at the folks coming out of church when the service is over. There may be lots of smiles. There may be frowns. There may be blank faces.

          Not all of those people on their knees were feeling the wonder of God from their posture of worship, surrender and subservience.

          Many embrace religion because they want God’s mercy. Their compulsion is to feel the comfort of God’s love and to pass it on. Their gossip is benign. They keep the promise they make in the Lord’s Prayer to forgive others precisely the way they want God to forgive them.

          You’ll find these people disputing the death penalty as an intrusion into the realm of the giver of life. You’ll find them favoring good schools and good health. They embrace police and military as incorruptible instruments of peace. They see Congress and the courts, city halls and the White House as agencies to make the common good honest and efficient.

          So much for the merciful, called blessed in a famous sermon.

          Some find religion to be a confirmation of their personal value as guardians of truth and behavior. They see little need to beseech God for mercy in their own exemplary lives, but the world clearly needs wardens, instructors, judges, guards, enforcers of ordinances word by word. The log in one’s own eye expands the gaze, better to see the speck of failure in others.

          These folks are at ease with their religion, protecting its purity and their own with shunning and decrees of excommunication. They remember selected words of scripture, such as “the poor you will always have with you.” So, perhaps, it is unbiblical to try to do anything about that.

          There are those who see the deadly storm called Sandy, imposing death and mayhem from the Caribbean to the coast of New England, as a punishment from the Almighty. Other pray that humankind will try harder to understand nature and how to shield it from human assaults above and below Earth’s surface.

          The religion of Jesus is tough to live. It depends upon the Christian Church to provide worship communities, to preserve and authenticate its scriptures and to tell its story. Yet the Jesus of scripture teaches prayers and practices for all circumstances, with particular caution about the behavior of organized groups. After all, his death was legal.

          After all this time, some who worship in churches are reminded of their spiritual frailty, seeking mercy for themselves and everyone else.

          Some others are reminded of their spiritual security, enjoying reassurance for themselves and punishment for those unlike themselves.

          Some of us lack the purity of definition, and share the flaws of both personalities.

         

When newspapers are just out of reach

 

A souvenir dish preserves an image of the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on March 12, 1959, the birthday of the State of Hawaii. 

 

 

 

I love newspapers the way other addicts love different pursuits in sensuality. I am aroused by front page headlines in 144 point type, especially when they shout in red ink, the kind I used to write.

 

Traveling friends have long brought me gifts from faraway places, crinkly copies of the Jerusalem Post or the Moscow Times, Le Monde or The Scotsman or maybe the Times of India, PM, or Washington Star. At age 12 I had my own subscription to the Manchester Guardian Weekly, printed on lightweight paper for transport from Britain.

 

A year or so ago I decided to go cold turkey. After all, I had managed to stop smoking a couple of decades before that, so I cancelled home delivery of four daily newspapers. The papers were reachable online, something unimagined when I was an 18-year-old police reporter. The switch from home delivery to computer screen was like changing from gourmet meals to a feeding tube, doable if not recommendable.

 

Spring arrived this year with temptations. The New York Times offered weekend delivery, Friday through Sunday, at a special rate. The Chicago Tribune had an even better weekend offer, four days including Sunday, all at a low, low cost. There were other offers, like the aroma of whiskey in the nostrils of a 12-stepper taking  step number 1, from the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Southtown. These were offers nobody with black ink in the veins could refuse. I signed up for all four.

 

It was a summer of slow breakfasts and the accumulation of facts useful for a Jeopardy watcher, a summer of newsprint stacks on flat surfaces all over my home. My companion, OPCA/MSA, has let me gather the newspapers early in the morning by opening my garage door, gently steering my rollator while using a gripper mounted on a cane, like a hockey stick with a claw at the end, to pick up each paper and plunk it into the rollator basket.

 

This is no longer working very well and it won’t work at all when Chicagoland’s season becomes more Chicagolike, with snow, ice and maybe a White Christmas. Once more I’m cancelling all the newspaper deliveries, and thanking God for computers, and for the gift of evolution that carried us all from quills to Windows.

 

ArthurOchs Sulberger

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, retired publisher of The New York Times, has died at age 86. The one-time Marine Corps corporal won the hearts of countless journalists when he decided, at risk of possible arrest and fines, to publish the Pentagon Papers.

 

I had the good luck to be invited to his office, along with other members of an American Press Institute seminar at Columbia University, for a give-and-take session on journalism’s future.

 

It was the week of my 40th birthday, making me one year older than Mr. Sulzberger. He told of plans to redesign his famous newspaper, creating new sections and changing from eight narrow columns to six wider columns.

 

Times readers would not accept sudden changes, he said. So his 1965 plan was to take about a dozen years of gradual moves. Sure enough, the change was completed in 1976. Home delivery of his newspaper is one of the happy satisfactions of my retirement. God bless him and the institution he guided for more than three decades.