On April 3, 2008, a mother I did not know held her newborn daughter for 27 minutes of life in a Virginia hospital.
The newborn, in utero, had developed with a chromosomal disorder called Trisomy 18, or Edwards Syndrome. The mother knew this from amniocentesis. She knew that this tiny girl would have so many defects of essential organs, including the heart, that life expectancy at birth was virtually zero. A late-term abortion would have been understandable. But Cathleen Warner, a Roman Catholic mother of two boys, chose an option she had learned about in her desperate online research. She would go through with a C-section and be with her daughter for whatever time God gave her. It lasted 27 minutes. For Warner, it was the worst, and best, 27 minutes she will ever experience in life, she said.
I don’t weep easily over the radio, but I wept when I heard this story on NPR’s “On Point” today.
The program was about parinatal palliative care, an approach to the birth of babies so physically compromised that they can live for only a day, or hours or minutes.
I first heard about this form of hospice while I was on a Christian retreat in Virginia: Hospice for a dying newborn. The host who owned the retreat farmhouse also supported a parienatal hospice program, she said.
What’s that, I asked.
When she explained it, my instincts as a journalist perked up, having been the kind of writer who loves long-form stories that touch the human heart. Would a family anticipating the deeply private poignancy of this experience ever give a writer permission to document it, even after-the-fact? I never followed up on that idea.
But it came back to me listening to Cathleen Warner tell her story on public radio.
My emotional tears may also have been salted with anger – election-stress anger. The program framed its subject, perinatal hospice, around what former President Donald Trump had been saying. In his debate with President Biden on June 28, Trump said “they” (meaning Democrats, or maybe undocumented migrants) will allow abortions up to the seventh, eighth and ninth months and even after birth. “They will take the life of a child after birth.” He cited an unnamed “former governor of Virginia” on this. Later, debating Vice President Kamala Harris and at a rally, he pumped this up to be “execution after birth,” and now he was citing an unnamed former governor of West Virginia.
It turns out, the former Virginia governor he had probably heard about, through right-wing filters, was Gov. Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurosurgeon who made the mistake of describing in medical terms what happens when a mother goes into labor with a severely deformed nonviable fetus. “The infant would be delivered,” he said in a radio interview in 2019. “The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
Cathleen Warner did not need to have her baby resuscitated nor did she need to have a discussion. Her perinatal hospice experience was what it was supposed to be.
I can only imagine the intensity of that experience.
But I understand something of its spiritual nature and the blessing of having the presence of hospice when a child dies. My wife and I also lost a daughter, who also had a chromosomal defect. She lived a rich life, longer than her doctors or statistics thought possible.
Around that April in 2008 when Cathleen Warner was in a Virginia hospital with tiny Erin Warner resting in her arms, our daughter Sarah, then 17, was getting chemo in a hospital in Atlanta and awaiting a bone-marrow transplant. The transplant was successful, while I was the one to receive her high school diploma that spring in Lexington, Va., where I stayed for my teaching job.
Seven years later, when Sarah was working in New York, a massive seizure revealed a brain tumor. It turned out, the genetic mutation she carried since birth was associated with all three of the cancers she fought, with amazing stubbornness and courage, until she died last December at 33. She was in a mountain house where she wanted to be, surrounded by family and friends and music, under sensitive hospice care.
What struck me most about Cathleen Warner’s story was her understanding of life as a gift, no matter how brief or long. We were gifted with 18 years of Sarah after she was first hospitalized with bone cancer in her right arm. A mother has a special relationship to such a life, and to its mortal end. It is a relationship that a politician can never express, whether their rhetoric is “pro-life” or “pro-reproductive rights.” All I can say about Trump calling perinatal hospice care an execution is this: “Shame! Shame on you and, at this late date, on all of your pious voters!”
In a 1963 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, I read an account by Ralph McGill, who was editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution when I was growing up in Atlanta, of his interview with the distinguished black scholar W.E.B. DuBois in Accra, Ghana. DuBois was 94 at the time, and would die later that year, a disillusioned but dignified exile who had renounced his American citizenship and turned African Communist.
DuBois told McGill of his early days as a sociology professor at Atlanta University in the 1890s. One day in April 1899, DuBois was walking to the Constitution office with a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris, an editor there at the time. But then he saw something in a store-front window that sickened him: the severed fingers of a man who had just been lynched. “I saw those fingers . . . I didn’t go to see Joel Harris and present my letter,” he told McGill. “I never went!”
It’s a famous scene in DuBois’s life, possibly a turning point as his literary and academic gifts became increasingly edged with resentment, with distrust of white society and a marathon determination to fight. This was four years after Booker T. Washington had famously held up his hands in a historic speech in Piedmont Park (as the Cotton States Exposition site would become), spreading his fingers apart as a metaphor for social segregation (which he conceded as a peace offering to the white South) on the metaphorical hand of “mutual progress.” DuBois respected Washington, but hated that “Atlanta Compromise.”
The fingers DuBois saw in the shop window were souvenirs of a lynching outside Newnan, in Coweta County. The case of Sam Hose, a black farmhand who had killed his white boss with an ax, had already received a great deal of coverage from the Constitution before Hose was lynched in broad daylight on April 23, 1899, before a crowd of perhaps as many as 2,000 jubilant citizens. The reason DuBois was going to see Joel Chandler Harris was to complain about the incendiary coverage the newspaper gave to the 10-day manhunt. The Constitution had offered a $500 reward, and published a description of the crime by the victim’s brother-in-law.
Fifteen years ago, I reviewed a research paper that a student wrote about the Constitution’s role in the Sam Hose case. “The South’s Standard Newspaper,” a century before I worked there in the 1990s, had adopted the style of sensational crime coverage so popular in the New York World and New York Journal. So the newspaper published the brother-in-law’s description of Sam Hose splitting his victim’s skull “to his eyes,” then knocking one of the children “six or eight feet,” dashing another, a baby, to the floor, and finally raping the wife “literally within arm-reach of where the brains were oozing from her husband’s head.”
The brother-in-law was not present, and was not a trustworthy reporter. However, a muckraking black reporter named Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose investigations of lynching around the South at this time proved to be highly credible, led a report on the case based on interviews of witnesses and other available evidence. The report, Lynch Law in Georgia, claimed that Sam Hose never entered the family’s home or touched the wife or children, but killed his boss, Alfred Cranford, in self-defense during an argument in which Cranford threatened him with a pistol. When he was finally captured and brought by train from Griffin, a terrified Sam Hose told a Constitution reporter the same version of events that Wells-Barnett would later publish. When the mob brought Hose before the wife’s mother, who asked him why he killed her son-in-law, he told her the same thing.
The excited throng offered to lynch the man right there in the older woman’s presence. She declined the offer. So they hauled him off to a clearing just north of Newnan, where he was chained to a pine sapling, stripped, and divested of several pieces of anatomy that were passed among the euphoric citizenry. A circle of firewood and this victim of Georgia’s extra-legal justice system were then doused with kerosene and lit a-fire. Hose’s only words during this final torture, according to the Constitution: “Oh my God! Oh, Jesus!”
It’s hard to imagine such community-wide, daylight savagery a mere four generations ago, looking at suburban Coweta County today. This was not some secret Klan activity, or the work of pathetic lowlifes, like the two Mississippi men who got away with Emmet Till’s murder in 1955. This was an entire community, like the town in Shirley Jackson’s gothic short story “The Lottery.”
Who stood up against it? Not the newspapers. Perhaps a case could be made that a few decent souls tried to stop the madness. Governor Allen D. Candler had dispatched the militia to Palmetto to try to prevent the lynching, though he had blamed black criminality as much as white vigilantism for Georgia’s epidemic of lynching. Former Governor William Y. Atkinson, a Newnan resident, had pleaded with the mob, ineffectively, to let the law take its course. These efforts remind me of how Governor John M. Slayton was moved by conscience to commute the execution of Leo Frank in 1915, though he could not stop Frank’s lynching in Cobb County in 1915. Weak leadership without followers. That’s what we had in Georgia in the worst of times.
In the spring of 2014, I took a class of 14 students to New York City for three days to visit magazine offices. This was the first six spring-term courses that became my most popular and successful teaching at W&L, “The Magazine: Past, Present and Future.” (One of the students in that first class went on to become an editor at Garden and Gun.)
One thing I noticed about New York City in those days when the World Trade Center had become a sunken memorial, replaced by a Freedom Tower that would house Conde-Nast magazine offices, was this: New pencil thin skyscrapers had sprung up like dead sunflower stalks. I found out that these were a new kind of residential tower, thin because they didn’t need the multiple elevator shafts that office towers needed. Who had the money to underwrite these buildings and buy the condos within? For one, corrupt oligarchs from post-Soviet Russia, I was told. They needed a safe haven to launder their money, and the best place in the world for that was New York real estate.
Later, when Libby and I were driving between Lexington and Decatur a lot for my retirement move in July 2022, we stopped for a lunch visit with Linda Watt, a North Fulton High classmate who had gone to Vanderbilt and then into the Foreign Service. (At one point, she was the U.S. Ambassador to Panama.) During the time of lawless capitalism in the post-Soviet carnivale, she was manager of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. She described the corrupt wealth that everybody knew was making billionaires out of dark figures you could see in the restaurants loudly displaying their ephemeral wealth.
It turns out, before Robert Mueller became a byword to MAGA fanatics because of how Trump and AG Bill Barr turned his unread report into a “hoax” and nothing-to-see, he was the FBI director. In 2011, as FBI director, he issued a report on the money that was being invested in those weird residential skyscraper in New York.
He told the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City [Heather Cox Richardson dug this up] that globalization and technology had changed the nature of organized crime. International enterprises, he said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
In retrospect, this seems a little paranoid, laying the groundwork for conspiracy theories and late-model Tom Clancy movies. But I have to wonder. Why crypto-currency – an energy-wasting digital project whose main purpose is to offer get-rich-quick schemes to nimble investors and to hide criminal profits? And why are crypto entrepreneurs now lavishing contributions on Super PACs supporting Trump and Vance? And why are Trump and Vance cozying up to the crypto capitalists (not to mention Trump’s soft spot for Putin’s Russia)?
Sometimes, it’s hard for people to connect the daily stuff of their own lives with Washington D.C. policies or even state-level politics. Military aid for Ukraine doesn’t seem to hamper our day-to-day struggles, but defending Ukraine against Putin’s Russia also seems remote from everyday issues, especially if politicians begin to demagogue against this commitment to our NATO allies. The rise of Axis powers in the 1930s seems long ago, and even the Cold War is easy to forget. The price of eggs seems more relevant, and if that can be blamed on Biden’s “terrible policies,” that’s an easy call.
Inflation has many causes, especially in the after-wash of the pandemic, which gave Americans a lot of free dollars to protect against economic collapse (Trump and Biden were together in this) and worldwide supply chains were choked. Coming out of the sheltering and having more money increased “demand”; meanwhile, supply chain problems crimped “supply.” Serious inflation followed. The Fed, over which Biden has no control, is using its leverage over interest rates to keep a lid on this over-heating economy. That’s all working as it should. But inflation, even as it comes down, is a powerful talking point for Trump and the Republican Party. So is “immigration,” an issue as complex as inflation until Congress has the guts and intelligence for comprehensive immigration reform. Meanwhile we can’t even get piecemeal immigration reform, because Trump sabotaged a bipartisan fix at the border as he cynically understood that this temporary measure would cool down the issue as a political weapon. Without this Congressional fix, Biden used a federal order to clamp down, which reduced illegal crossings dramatically and angered a lot of his supporters.
Trump supporters are ignoring the reduction of illegal crossings. Biden’s temporary and somewhat cynical political fixes didn’t help his standing in the polls. I hope Harris, with the sudden energy and enthusiasm she has unleashed, can show that running on Biden’s record isn’t a liability but an asset. He has been good for labor, and good for clean energy. Biden’s Federal Trade Commission Chair Nina Kahn has been brilliantly successful putting a check on monopolistic corporate power, the essential guardrail of a healthy free enterprise system. Things are working well now, considering the circumstances Biden inherited at the beginning of 2021.
Biden’s best policy successes have been about liberal spending that is in the form of “investment.” Investment is a great way to look at how our own household dollars might be spent. We can spend money three ways: on entertainment, on short-term necessities like groceries and transportation, and on investments that pay off in the future, for ourselves or our descendants. Investments are buying a house, paying the mortgage, improving the house. Other investments: Planning a career with future prospects and a sense of personal “calling”; getting married and keeping in touch with friends and community; service to church or society’s nonprofits; education, at all levels, including support for public education even if your family doesn’t use it yourself. That’s self-interest as an investment.
Many of the benefits of Biden’s policies are beginning to show, but they are hard to see because they are investments. For instance, the CHIPS Act is bringing manufacturing of computer circuitry (the cotton-textile dynamo of the 21st century) back to U.S., for good jobs and more control over supplies. How does this affect my life, right now? I can’t see it. But the freight elevator in our condo building is out of order and we are told to minimize use of the only other elevator, using the stairs when we can. The problem is that a specific microprocessor must be ordered and it won’t come until next week, according to the German company, Thyssenkrup, that manages the elevators. Meanwhile, the refrigerator in the half of the duplex we own is broken, and our tenant there is having to use a half-sized refrigerator we gave her while we wait for the repairman to get the parts he needs. It’s on order. The heater burned out and fried the thermostat. I don’t know, but I assume micro-chips are involved.
A jazz combo that grew from years of “workshopping” at the Grant Park home of bassist Rick Saylor will perform on Thursday, July 25, in the Fellowship Hall of the First Christian Church of Decatur, 601 W. Ponce de Leon Ave., Decatur.
Saylor, a former tour manager for jazz icons Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, died on Aug. 6, at age 70, after suffering a heart attack. He was the host and mentor of a generation of local jazz musicians who would gather at his house every Thursday evening to play from the jazz canon, Bebop to jazz fusion.
As the steady bass player holding it together, Rick Saylor emphasized that these weekly sessions were for the joy of playing jazz and learning from one another, not to “play out.” Honoring his memory, the other musicians decided to continue the weekly sessions and break Rick’s no-performance rule with a first memorial concert last Dec. 6 at the Decatur church.
The group includes Adam Cole, keyboard; Bo Emerson and Dan McGraw, trumpets; John Willingham, guitar; Jordi Lara, bass, and Billy Bryant, drums; Walter Cumming, trombone, and Doug Cumming, tenor saxophone.
Saylor grew up in the San Francisco Bay area during the halcyon days of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s counterculture. He was immersed in the music of the time working in the famed Village Music store in Mill Valley in the Bay Area and playing bass with local bands. He also began doing sound for the Inn of the Beginning, a music venue that brought nationally and internationally recognized musicians to the area. It was there that he was recruited as a tour and sound manager, managing national and international tours for numerous groups and eventually for jazz icons, including Shorter and Hancock.
In the late ‘80s, he moved to New York to co-produce an award-winning jazz documentary series for Masters of American Music that included series on the history of jazz, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk. He also worked for a talent management agency involved promoting the “new” lions of jazz such as Benny Green, Diana Krall, Joshua Redman and Christian McBride.
The church will open at 7 p.m. for the 7:30 p.m. performance. The concert is free. All are welcome to come and bring someone.
On April 16, I voted in Georgia’s Democratic presidential primary for Joe Biden. It was the only choice at that time for beating Donald Trump. That’s what my vote meant then.
Now, Biden is no longer my choice. He is going to lose to Donald Trump if he is the only choice we Democrats have.
I can’t change my primary vote. I don’t have a choice, and didn’t have a choice then. But Biden can change his mind.
Moses worried about how the Israelites would behave after he was gone. There was so much still to do. They had not yet entered the Promised Land.
I say “he is going to lose” not as a criticism of Biden but as my fixed bewilderment about the multitude of American adults who tell pollsters they prefer Trump. Maybe they’ll change their minds by November. Maybe the polls are wrong. Biden thinks so.
Polled people gave Trump the edge long before the disastrous debate in Atlanta on June 27. Now it looks even better for Trump. He is so giddy about running against Biden, he isn’t thinking at all about how he would run against someone else. Someone wrote that Trump must be praying that Biden doesn’t step aside and let the Democratic Party be more democratic than anything we can imagine. If Trump prayed.
I pray for Biden to step aside. It’s more than I can imagine. A true revival of America. An excitement of mind, body and spirit, sweeping across the nation like sunlight in springtime. A reawakening to who we are. A recognition that Biden has actually been a damn good President, and things have finally turned around for the good, thanks to his wise and cagey successes. We are recovering from Covid-19 and its rampages. He has helped grow and strengthen NATO, an alliance that has held militarized evil in check since 1949. While we suffer in the heat and storms of this summer, we might see what another Democratic candidate could help us see clearer (since Biden, like Moses, gets tongue-tied. Ex. 6:12) – that our giant systems of agriculture, industry, transportation, and utilities are all steadily replacing carbon with clean, green energy. This is for our grandchildren and their grandchildren in the Promised Land. Thank you, Joe Biden.
But Joe Biden isn’t going anywhere. He says there is still so much (for him!) to do.
This is only the beginning of misery for us ordinary Democrats.
We will not watch TV. It’s too painful. But millions will be watching. The ads for Trump will run clips from the Atlanta debate. They will run clips of Biden wandering away from a line-up of VIPs. TV will show Biden as weak, Trump as strong. Image is everything. As Steve Bannon said in an interview (before going off to federal prison, where like Trotsky he will only become more powerful and mythic), Trump is McLuhanesque. He understands that TV is everything. Written words don’t matter. That’s old media. Language, logic, facts, news, persuasion, laws, the sacred history of the Jews and God’s Providence as handed down in Scripture – none of that matters. Soft, what light from yon window breaks? It is the East and Trump is the sun.
We Democrats voted without some important information about Biden. Millions will be voting for Trump without important information about him, thanks to the insolence of the U.S. Supreme Court, the law’s delay. Americans won’t know whether he is guilty of leading an insurrection against America. That case, aptly named Donald Trump v the United States, has been delayed until after the General Election.
Re: Zoning Board of Appeals variance decisionfor Commerce Drive curve, June 10, 2024
Dear City of Decatur Leaders:
Our city is trying hard to accommodate growth with intelligent urban planning. We see this with the projects for pedestrian and bicycle safety and connectivity found in last year’s Decatur Town Center Plan 2.0. We applaud the Commissioners’ recent updating of the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) to diversify housing through the “missing middle” of duplexes, triplexes and quadraplexes in R-60 single-family zones. With diligent enforcement of the tree ordinance, the City recognizes the need to protect old-growth forest clusters, especially in an era of hotter summers. The city’s pilot projects for affordable and denser housing along busy Commerce Drive has invited public engagement with hearings, charrettes, and education. Historic districts like Ponce de Leon Court and landmarks like the Decatur Cemetery are respected as sites of civic place-making and collective memory.
A private developer in January bought the four adjacent lots at the northeast Commerce Drive curve, next to the cemetery and backing up to Ponce de Leon Court. If the City had known that it was for sale for $178,000, no doubt it would’ve snatched it up. The City paid two-thirds more than that for half as much property at the other end of the block of Commerce, at E. Ponce de Leon Avenue. A nonprofit institute is now working with the city to make that corner a demonstration site for all of the key urban principles Decatur is embracing: pedestrian safety; protecting old-growth trees by keeping living space dense and unified; designing a proper transition to less dense housing, and giving neighbors a voice and space to engage.
Of course a private developer has different interests and can enjoy his property rights. The developer who bought the four lots adjacent to the Decatur Cemetery has gone out of his way to work with the city’s Planning Department and meet with neighbors from the historic street abutting the rear of his property, Ponce de Leon Court. He is dealing with a very challenging piece of property, with complicated problems that prevented the previous owner from finding a buyer for many years (though at a higher price, and before last year’s UDO updates).
The state DOT created the problem in the late 1960s when it built Commerce Drive as a four-lane arterial, squeezing the property on its east side. Three of the lots became too narrow to conform to R-60 zoning and the sidewalk became a frightening walk. For pedestrians, to this day, the sidewalk is a mere stumble away from speeding traffic. Cars around the 90-degree turn have crashed a dozen times in the last five years.
Neighbors are concerned about the danger of this sidewalk. The City has plans to widen and buffer it. The neighbors circulated a petition in favor of making the sidewalk safer. The petition embraced the City’s plans to widen the sidewalk and opposed giving the developer the variance he was requesting for a five-foot setback. The zoning code requires a 30-foot setback. The owner/developer plans to build two quadraplexes, one of them five feet from the sidewalk on Commerce Drive. Building that close to the sidewalk, he claims, will calm traffic. Perhaps so. But it would put those rental units and their residents in harm’s way. It would also make it impossible for the City to widen the sidewalk, unless the state DOT gives up a lane of that busy thoroughfare.
This variance request brought forth community involvement at a very high level. The petition was signed by 72 neighbors and other Decatur residents, including officers of Friends of the Decatur Cemetery and of Downtown Decatur Neighbors. Neighbors testified in an orderly and respectful manner at both hearings before the Zoning Board of Appeals, April 8 and June 10. We have encouraged the developer to seek a zoning change needed to build a single building with more units next to the cemetery, saving a forest cluster, leaving room for a safe sidewalk, and giving him a solid return on his investment. (He said he was interested, but wanted assurance that he could get such a zoning change.) We hired a traffic engineer, who also testified. We have not opposed the developer’s rights, but focused on the one legal criterion that would most oblige the Zoning Board to deny the five-foot variance: it “imperils public safety.”
The Zoning Board of Appeals hearing on June 10 dismayed us. We felt our entire argument for public safety was undermined when Chairman KC Boyce said before any could speak that the Board would not consider issues of “trees or traffic.” The Board’s discussion at the end seemed a slapdash attempt to solve the developer’s setback problems and then, capitulation. Board members gave no rebuttal on the city’s vision of widening the sidewalk; it was merely ignored. Dismissed almost as cavalierly was the Planning Department’s recommendation for a safer front variance of 10-feet. Board members asked the developer and his architect if they could live with a 10-foot setback. Both said no because it would mean the loss of more trees.
So the Board voted to approve the five-foot setback 3-1. Chairman Boyce voted no, but didn’t explain why. The video on the website is entirely silent, due to “audio issues.”
How did this process get off course?
The Zoning Board made its decision based on narrow legal criteria. Was the shallowness of the lots the developer’s fault? No, it was the state DOT’s fault. (Did he buy the property at a bargain-basement price because of the shallowness, and was he aware that he couldn’t built without a favorable variance? Yes, and yes, but the law protects all of that.) In most requests for a variance, such a narrow question is proper. But for this iconic gateway to downtown Decatur, deeply wooded, squeezed between a historic district and historic cemetery, and suffering an unusually dangerous sidewalk configuration, approval needed to be far more contextual. Yes, the developer has rights, but there’s a larger public good that those rights exist within. Why did the Board not table the process to allow further inquiry? Why didn’t more experienced planning and policy representatives (if not the good citizenship of so many residents) play a weightier role?
The answer cannot be that there are more permitting processes the developer has to go through that will ensure a quality project. Tree protection, storm water ordinances, and other permitting reviews do not provide for the larger context.
What is needed for this unique property is a zoning change, not a narrowly considered variance. Such a zoning change should be part of a broadly cooperative (and creative) public process that solves the developer’s problems on this property with the urbanist thinking of Decatur today and gives the new owner his rights and return on investment.
See below for one proposed alternative – a conservation development supported by many residents and neighbors of the Ponce de Leon Court Historic District that would preserve the owner’s investment, preserve the pocket forests, upgrade the dangerous sidewalk to be a safe non-car pathway, allow minimal parking, and create an appropriate transition between the existing single-family homes and higher density development. Even after getting approval of his variance, the owner/developer said he was willing to continue working with neighbors. We appreciate how open he has been in working with us, and we welcome a cooperative process going forward.
Respectfully,
Douglas Cumming
co-owner, 164 Ponce de Leon Court, Decatur, Ga., 30030
There’s this memory I have, but it couldn’t have been mine because this is before I was born. It’s 1946, thereabouts. The memory is of a college campus high in the Cumberlands of Tennessee, misty Gothic buildings, professors in loose academic gowns. An undergraduate history major has just finished reading Robert Penn Warren’s new novel, “All the King’s Men.”
He walks across the quiet campus after midnight with the novel’s last phrase in his head, “. . .out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.” He is re-entering his own Time, but with his imagination on fire, like the red-hot glow of heat shields when a spacecraft re-enters the earth’s atmosphere.
This is not me, but my father, Joe Cumming, who must’ve implanted that memory in me. Whether he told me about it or it came to me by the unscientific mystery of epigenetics, I have lived a life that feels supported by my father’s liberal-arts education.
I followed in his footsteps, by dumb luck and privilege, without a map. He was a journalist, the Southern bureau chief for Newsweek magazine from 1961 to 1979. Then he earned a master’s degree from Emory University and enjoyed a second career with ten years of teaching at West Georgia College in Carrollton, Georgia.
Me? I was a newspaper reporter for twenty-five years, after a liberal arts college education. In 2002, I got a Ph.D. in mass communication and taught undergraduate courses for the next twenty years.
Now, I realize, I do have a map. It’s one that Daddy created to help his journalism students understand the connections – the goddam relevance – of history and news. He called it a Time Map.
His Time Map was the ultimate learning tool, a picture in your head that lays the foundation for more learning. A lot more. It was a mental scaffolding, a framework built out of Three Centuries, Four Wars, Six Presidents and various inventions, all dolled up in visual imagery. Think of three football fields, the 50-yard line marked off in each as 1750, 1850 and 1950. Now, rough in those Four Wars, Six Presidents and so on. Daddy loved the theater, so he also drew these Three Centuries as proscenium stages, with curtains opened on colorful costumes, personalities and cultural icons.
Woven through this time grid, like golden threads, were Four Big Ideas.
With a highly visual Time Map, your brain was ready to build a lifetime of knowledge and information that fit together. It was not rote memorization, but a map, neatly unfolding over a lifetime. Coherence would be joyously made out of the scraps coming at you in college history classrooms, movies, books, the latest technology, daily news, politics, work and, whizzing by you, life itself.
Daddy developed and field-tested his Time Map for twenty years, with college students, high school students, fourth graders, “Continuing Education” adults, friends and family members. He taught it for free, no grades and no credit. He sent it off to newspapers and to retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. He tried repeatedly to give it away to the Education Establishment, which repeatedly rebuffed it. His Time Map died.
But I find myself coming back to it these days, especially the Four Big Ideas.
Democracy
Free Press
Checks and Balances
Free Enterprise
Understand these ideas historically, in their Eighteenth Century incubation and three centuries of evolution, and you will be less bored with your job, if you have one. You will grasp the news in the undertow of its true meaning. Understand these ideas historically, and we might grope our way out of the tribal identities that are dividing us and driving us crazy. Driving me crazy, anyway.
***
Democracy? It’s not just the word for something Democrats say they’re worried about losing. Hell, Trump folks think they are the ones supporting democracy by holding on to a voluntary movement of Real People under his powerful sway, questioning no-excuses pandemic-era mail-in voting and hating the rule of elite “experts.” In the Time Map framework, Democracy has deep roots in ancient Greece and is incarnate in the writings of John Locke and Jefferson’s Declaration, the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” and have equal rights. It’s a Big Idea, breaking the shell of the word “men” to mean “human beings,” as history hatched better ways of living together. But how are human beings equal, with such inequality all around? It’s only under the law, such as it is – equal on a jury, in the dock and with a voting ballot.
But voting isn’t equal under the Electoral College system, you say. True, and that brings us to Checks and Balances. It’s common today to say those “checks and balances” were about giving Southern slave states a check on the growing industrial population of free-labor states, and this is true. But as a concept from the 18th century, checks-and-balances was not a compromise but a scientific principle. Montesquieu (1689-1755, with about 10 names in his full aristocratic French title, like Lafayette’s) wrote about the spirit of the law as if it were a philosopher’s version of the clockwork universe of Sir Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler. He also argued for religious tolerance as if it were a law of history and natural philosophy. The Founding Fathers drew on Montesquieu in writing the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and Daddy had this 18th century background in his head when he would teach a news story about a conflict on the Supreme Court or in Congress. The Time Map made that connection between history’s personalities, today’s news, and you and me.
Free Press? The First Amendment, marked in 1791 on the Time Map, tells Congress to “make no law abridging the freedom . . .of the press.” “The press,” at that time, was a marvelous machine that had not changed much since it was designed by Johannes Gutenberg around three hundred and fifty years earlier. The printing press, with movable type, had such power to change the Western world, the English Crown limited who could operate one. Royal licensing extended to the American colonies. Benjamin Franklin’s brother James flouted that and was jailed. Another colonial editor made the royal governor of New York look bad by printing the truth about him, which landed the fellow in jail. He was freed by a jury that defied the law of “seditious libel.” That’s the background to freedom of the “press” – a word that in the 20th century came to mean members of a respectable estate called journalists. Daddy was a journalist who would trace ideas of freedom and truth back to the poet John Milton and his famous defense of an unlicensed press. In 1644, Milton said: Let Truth and Falsehood grapple in a fair contest. “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour! These days, Falsehood seems to win quite a few of those encounters. These days, a free “press” is indiscriminately identified as “the media,” and attacked from all sides, from the Left, the Right and from your average non-news-reader.
Free enterprise? Capitalism is blamed for a lot of ills today, and rightly so. Its theory of individual freedom can be blind to the common good and to the damage that perpetual growth inflicts on the earth by over-extracting resources. But the theory behind free enterprise is another one of those 18th Century Big Ideas that needs to be understood in its place on the Time Map. Conveniently, Adam Smith’s classic on the theory, The Wealth of Nations, was published in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence.
As Adam Smith described it – and recommended it – free enterprise was an “invisible hand” that benefited everybody when each individual was free to pursue selfish interests. I know, it sounds disastrous, and immoral. But it assumed each individual had “moral sentiments,” which was the subject of an earlier book by the good Scotsman, Mr. Smith. Free enterprise also benefited from what’s called the “division of labor.” If I specialize in what I’m good at and enjoy, and you do your specialized job, then, instead of my spending a year trying to manufacture a pin to sew my own clothes, everybody can buy pins and clothes. Rather than my gain being your loss (the jungle of zero-sum competition), the division of labor gave the world an unparalleled abundance, after centuries of hoarding by the strong and scarcity for the rest of us. Capitalism harnessed the great human energy of greed, domesticating it into the profit motive, and created the best life that average people have ever known.
But it went off the rails. Or rather, monopolized the rails (and steel and oil) and made consumers pay whatever was asked. The beauty of Daddy’s Time Map is that, as Gertrude Stein said of history, “it takes time.” Things change. The muckrakers and Teddy Roosevelt broke up the trusts, taxed the Robber Barons, and made the income tax “progressive” by graduating tax rates upward for high incomes. Government regulations shut down quack medicines and made meat safe. Utilities got protected as “natural monopolies.” When I covered the “energy” beat for a New England newspaper in the 1980s, I watched the partial deregulation of airlines, Ma Bell, cable TV and energy, as government adapted to new technology and consumer demands. Those were mostly bipartisan fixes, in those days.
***
January 6, 2021, changed everything. The New York Times described the day this way: “Militiamen showed up proudly bearing the emblems of their groups – American flags with the stars replaced by the Roman numeral III, patches that read ‘Oath Keepers.’ Alt-right types wore Pepe the Frog masks, and QAnon adherents could be seen in T-shirts urging people to ‘Trust the Plan.’ White supremacists brought their variant of the Crusader cross.”
Daddy had died two months earlier in a pleasant life-care facility, where he had lived among his books and journal scrawls ever since Mama died four years before that. He didn’t contract Covid, but the isolation of its social distancing finally did him in.
It was remarkable – frightening, really – how close we came to losing those Four Big Ideas at that moment in history. Georgia was at the center. Remember? The day before the Capitol riot, January 5, in my native state of Georgia, we had two – Two! – runoff elections for U.S. Senators, and Democrats won both. This gave the newly elected President, Joe Biden, the bare majority he needed in both the House and Senate to get much of his agenda passed over the next two years. (Look now at all the new “green” jobs Georgia has in manufacturing. Thank you, Democrats!)
Meanwhile, the loser of Nov. 3, 2020, President Donald Trump, needed only a few legitimate doubts to support his wild and insistent claims that he had actually won in the few states where close votes swung the election to Biden, including Georgia. Amazingly – a miracle from above? – no legitimate doubts were found, despite 62 lawsuits Trump filed questioning the votes in those swing states. Conservative Republican officials, back then, stood up for the rule of law and the Constitution, even when they might have felt bullied by Trump. For example, Judge Bobby Lee Christine, a Trump appointee briefly serving as Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia to replace the one fired by Trump, found no voter fraud. Just think: What if he had gone along with Trump and “found” something? In those few days when Democracy, Checks and Balances and all the rest bore the strain of an “unprecedented” President, the thread held.
But miracles like that cannot hold beyond their day. You can’t build booths on the hill of a transfiguration. People forget. Politicians change with the polls.
***
A simplistic framework of American history seemed a hopeless project, especially one as liberal and democratic as Daddy’s. He would laugh at the irony of Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump trying to kidnap a liberal, self-correcting Enlightenment story and turn it into an un-evolved, Bible-blessed, right-wing American history. But Daddy was not a real historian. He was a liberal journalist. Journalism was not quite a real profession, like medicine or the law, and not quite a real academic discipline. It was an American improvisation, like jazz. Journalism was applied liberal arts, without certification.
Government was neither the solution nor “the problem,” as Reagan called it. It was part of a great human story, if you had the map to follow it. It was a story of old injustices being faced, protested, and imperfectly reduced. It was one problem after another, grindingly fixed under an ever-changing order still called democracy, with checks and balances and so on. On balance, Daddy and I both believed, America was a self-correcting system that bent slowly, like the arc of the universe, toward justice. If you know where you came from, you can see the improvement, and what the next real problems are.
It’s 2024. Daddy’s dead, and I can’t find anybody who believes all that anymore. I read the news every morning, and it still makes sense to me. I understand why many are discouraged and depressed. But I keep the faith.
“It is sad to squint the eyes into the future years of people who separate learning from life,” Joe Cumming wrote in one of his biweekly columns on the book page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1983. “Students who persist in this will become dangerously bored and boring when the fluff of youth wears off. Such a dumb doom is unnecessary. Once the flame of learning catches it can, in time, become a firestorm.”
