You know what an Aggie is? That name has been in the news recently, thanks to presidential candidate, Gov. Rick Perry, who went to Texas A&M. That’s the school where the military unit wore high boots, and probably still do, that were fashionable in George Washington’s day. It is also the school that adopted the theme from the film “Patton” as a sort of football fight song.
Now, in Texas, everybody knows what the term “Aggie” means, even though, like God, it is a difficult thing for anyone, poet or farmer, to wrap words around. It is a matter of pride, like the Fighting Irish, and you know it when you see it. Texans just know, and the other people who know, but are equally incapable of defining, are military people who have met Aggies. We did, at Fort Sill, Okla., and besides Aggies we met guys from a dozen other schools, varying in fame and style from Princeton to RPI to Iowa State. But this is not about Aggies. Let’s change speed.
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Then came the rain, at three o’clock in the morning, the time that Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton man, called the dark night of the soul, and military memories came back, first, like the rain, a gentle patter on the roof, and then a more insistent downpour of names and places, such as Benning and Meade and Lee and Campbell and Indiantown Gap. And then, in a reverse chronology, Fort Sill, where the Aggies, and much more, came to mind in the soothing confusion of a summer storm.
Anybody in the army, or any service, has met people from military schools. They put out a lot of officers. You were always meeting Aggies or VMI people. In general, we did not admire them. They took learning to shoot guns far too seriously. They should have been at Little Round Top. They were the people who got up at 4 a.m. to get ready for a 7 a.m. inspection, clanking around in the bathroom and bounding down hallways, waking up the rest of us slobs in the process. But there were always exceptions, like Harry. He was from Ennis, Texas. He was an Aggie, and from a town that was probably named after Ennis, in Ireland. Towns get named after each other, like Philadelphia, where the Iggles play, named after a town in Mississippi.
Harry was a casual guy, friendly with a pleasing drawl, who did not take himself or the army too seriously. And over the years the name Texas A&M, and the theme from "Patton," brings his memory to mind. We may have stayed in touch briefly, but like most such long distance friendships, they become memories. We all know that feeling. I wonder whatever happened to…? Any man who hasn’t tried to look up an old high school love ain’t really trying. Women are not much better.
Harry’s name comes up today as the first among many, when you realized, stupid as it sounds, that a guy from Texas is little different from a dude from Philadelphia. The military neutralizes the arrogance of neighborhoods, and the examples of that truth line up like soldiers on parade. Tom from Montgomery, an Auburn man, who grew up on the same street as Zelda Fitzgerald (his parents knew her); W.C. from North Carolina State, who said he’d resign his commission before he would get somebody else’s dumb ass killed; Hugo from Iowa State, who dated a pretty girl from Dallas; Pete from Iron Mountain, Mich., a Michigan State product. They were from all over the country, dispelling the notion that big city guys from the northeast were in some way culturally superior. The southern and Midwestern boys took people as they came. It seemed that the closer you were to the center of our country, the more open minded you were.
But then there were Princeton guys, and that was another shattered misconception. You expected them to be rich and elite. Some were rich, but as a group, they were just like the rest of us. There was Bert from a western Pennsylvania town that his family allegedly owned, but you would never know it from his modest, almost shy demeanor. And Birch, with a Philadelphia name that was known to all from that area. And Tom, forget where he came from, but we had great fun writing a satirical skit for the party ending our training.
And there was another Tom, from Gulfport, Miss., who married a beautiful girl from Alabama. I am not sure about his school, but it was probably Alabama. Her family was from Tuscaloosa. One night at a party at the O Club, a black officer (actually he was beige, like our President) and his wife sat down at a table. A guy from Auburn, one of the very few arrogant men we met from the south, and his wife promptly got up and moved to another table. Tom and his wife saw that, and quickly rose and took the empty seats beside the black couple. One way or the other, and it was the army reserve that got us in the magazine business, our military experience lasted 12 years, but that night at Fort Sill was the classiest move we saw.
We don’t know what happened to those men, and the few wifes we met, but we were, in a strange sense, a band of brothers, distant but the same. Which has nothing to do with Aggies. But maybe, on a rainy night, it does.
The great governor of Florida, and many of his ardent supporters, are for getting rid of regulations that retard growth. He is also against wasting tax dollars on things such as Tri-Rail, and is lukewarm about continuing to restore the Everglades, which was screwed up years ago by politicians who wanted to promote growth in the state.
The only kind of regulations people in Tallahassee seem to like are those favoring gun uncontrol, such as penalizing medical professionals who ask crazy or suicidal people if they have a gun in their house.
And so we see in the news that progress to clean up of the Everglades may stall. So what? Government should stay out of the water business. If we run out of water, people can always buy it in bottles. And as for today’s report of dangerous levels of lead in Dania’s drinking water, there would have been no report if there were no testing of water, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s requirement to report that in 30 days. Without that report nobody would know the difference, unless people died. And if that happened they could move. There are still good deals out there.
Also in today’s news, traffic in South Florida is not only the worst in the state, but we are actually tied for 15th in the whole country. The papers say people spend a huge part of their lives tied up in traffic jams. So what? People in Los Angeles spend their entire lives doing the same thing. And who comes up with these statistics, anyway? The papers cite a study by the Texas Transportation Institute. That may not be a government agency, but we still don’t need it making people anxious.
If we didn’t read how bad traffic is nobody would know the difference. And we all know what causes traffic jams. Government builds too many roads. And has two many rules. If government got off our backs and we could drive anywhere we wanted without traffic lights, stop signs, speed limits and lanes dividing traffic into two parts – one lane going one way and the other lane the other way – traffic would move a lot more smoothly. And we wouldn’t need state troopers writing tickets. Only undertakers.
And we wouldn’t have pressure to improve mass transit, and put Tri-Rail on the Florida East Coast track where it could actually relieve congestion.
It isn’t just Florida. As this is being written, the Internet is carrying Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s refusal to support a measure to improve federal safety standards for oil and gas pipelines, even though a pipeline rupture occurred last week in his own state.
You have to like a guy who keeps government off our backs, and our pipelines. Look at the good side. Maybe the whole state of Kentucky will blow up and that will mean one less patsy on UF’s schedule.
Many police officers have not earned Ph.D.s and it is therefore understandable that they do not understand the purpose of stop signs. There is a difference between the purpose and the effect of stop signs. The effect is to compel people to come to a complete stop behind the white line, if visible, wherever a stop sign, if visible, appears at an intersection.
But the purpose behind that effect is to keep drivers from smashing into other cars, speeding bicycles, joggers or people walking small dogs in the dark. In other words, slow down traffic by forcing it to come to a complete stop every few blocks, thereby discouraging people from driving 50 miles an hour in a 25-mph speed zone.
This is in protest to an obvious police crackdown in some Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods on people who do not come to a complete stop at stop signs that should never be there in the first place. It is particularly noticeable in the Victoria Park section where several sober people with excellent driving records have been stopped for not quite stopping at intersections where the only reason for stop signs is to slow cars down.
Now Victoria Park, and other Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods, have many intersections where the cross streets are offset, meaning they take a little jog as they meet the busier street. The effect is that a driver can’t see what is coming in both directions, so he or she literally has to roll through the intersection. This is especially true at many corners where foliage prevents drivers, notably those is sports cars or other low vehicles, from seeing in both directions until they are partially into the intersection. One of the recent police stops was made because although the driver came to a complete stop, she did not stop behind the white line. That is absurd nitpicking because foliage and parked cars at that intersection prevents drivers from seeing anything on the cross street from behind the white line.
There are other stop signs on streets where the intersection is a “T.” One street ends. In a sane society there would be no stop sign needed because a car can’t go speeding through an intersection where the street ends. It must slow to make a turn. The only purpose of stop signs at such intersections is to slow cars, by making them stop. There are several such situations around Holiday Park. One might argue that the stop signs are justified to protect pedestrians, especially kids, entering and leaving the park, but that would only apply during certain busy hours, such as soccer Saturday mornings.
The explanation for the strict enforcement is obviously traceable to a strong civic association, and Victoria Park has one of the strongest, which protests to the police about speeding cars on residential streets. Thus all the speed bumps in addition to stop signs. Now that’s exactly the point. If reducing speed is the objective, why not use the police time to do exactly that – use radar guns or other technology to crack down on those who flagrantly, and dangerously, roar down 25-mph streets, or go 60 in 35-mph zones, as they do all the time on Las Olas and Broward Boulevard. Do what police now do in school zones, where surveillance is strict and fines severe.
But if the present mode must continue, we should add the word “almost” above STOP, and the police should be guided by observing if a driver is careful and vigilant at intersections, rather than nitpicking if a car slows to a mile or two an hour and only proceeds when the course is clear.
It began with David Bressler, Esq. who represented us in Philadelphia when we made the deal to come to Florida to invest in what was then Pictorial Life, the magazine now known as Gold Coast. We obviously would soon need a Florida lawyer. Dave had contact with an Orlando attorney, who, oddly enough, had been a classmate of my partner, Gaeton Fonzi, at the University of Pennsylvania. But the Orlando attorney felt he was too far from Fort Lauderdale to represent us. He suggested a Fort Lauderdale lawyer named Elliott Barnett.
Now I had relatives named McCloskey, and Don McClosky did not look terribly Irish, and I had never seen that spelling of the name. I soon learned, because he joked about it, that his Jewish grandfather had come from eastern Europe with a name like Mikalofski, or something like that, and the Irish clerk at Ellis Island could not understand his accent and finally said, “You look like an Irish man to me," and wrote McClosky on the immigration papers.
I was also soon to learn that Elliott Barnett, who was from Columbia Law School and had impeccable academic credentials, had founded a law firm with Si Ruden in 1959 after he was turned down by an old line Fort Lauderdale firm when they learned he was Jewish. It was a prejudice common in the community at the time, one that Barnett would help demolish. Don McClosky joined the firm soon after and by the time we met them, both men were well on their way to becoming legal stars.
During the early 1970s Elliott Barnett and Don McClosky exploded the religious barrier that had confronted both a decade earlier. Barnett became a leader in the arts community, helping establish the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale, and leading the Downtown Development Authority through a legal minefield after a number of properties had been illegally condemned. Don McClosky, at the same time, was making a name as a premier land use lawyer, at a time when Broward County was growing in every direction. He also got press, some of it in our magazine, for, while pushing 50, playing basketball with a group of high-powered attorneys. Their small law firm was growing fast to become one of the largest in Florida, moving several times to increasingly prestigious offices and spreading throughout the state. At one point it had more than 150 lawyers.
There was a major difference between the men, and that was personal. Don McClosky was married for 59 years to the same woman, Judy, with whom he often traveled and 20 years ago survived a plane crash off Chile. Elliott Barnett had four wives, which can cause economic pressures, and those pressures led to a tragic ending. In the 1990s, when his reputation could not have been more glowing, he was accused of embezzling from his firm, which those who had known him for years could not fathom. I always wanted to believe that it was not as bad as the papers made it seem. His health had broken and he died in disrepute. The firm people had always called Ruden, Barnett, etc. became Ruden, McClosky, etc.
Don McClosky, on the other hand, lived more than another decade of fulfilling years until his death last week. He was increasingly regarded as one of the best in his business, a friend to many, including this magazine, and his obituaries were filled with accolades from those who regarded him as land-use expert, friend, mentor, devoted husband, father and competitive basketball player.
Two brilliant careers, launched almost together, both born in a certain adversity, and ending as differently as if the men had never known each other.
With all the commotion caused by the hurricane that wasn’t, but then became a disastrous storm, an interesting transportation story did not get a lot of notice. As Irene faked at Florida, then veered north to a place in New England history, The Palm Beach Post reported that some talks were going on between the Florida Department of Transportation and the Florida East Coast Railway about the possibility of the railroad taking over Tri-Rail.
The paper reported that it came as a shock to Tri-Rail’s board, which knew nothing of such discussions, and wasn’t very happy about what seemed some kind of sneak attack. An FEC official told us off the record that too much was made of a very preliminary approach to what could be a major transportation development for South Florida.
Whatever. The reality is that, after more than 20 years of a pretty good commuter train on the wrong track, there is serious effort to move Tri-Rail to the FEC tracks and overnight turn a marginally useful commuter service into a very valuable one which would not only serve many more workers but also holds promise of an economic charger for much of Florida’s east coast. The cities from Jacksonville south to Miami owe their locations primarily to the FEC. Its tracks bisect the business districts of every town along the route. The tracks Tri-Rail and Amtrak now use are on the more westerly CSX tracks, which miss the downtowns by just enough to make it an inconvenient commuter railroad.
Illustration: A commuter from Palm Beach County to Fort Lauderdale recently times a morning trip. It took about 32 minutes to travel the 19 miles from Boca Raton to the Tri-Rail station on Broward Blvd. Then it took almost exactly as much time waiting for a connecting bus, then crawling for 17 minutes for just one mile through morning rush hour traffic to the heart of the Fort Lauderdale office district, then another eight-minute walk to his office.
That Tri-Rail is on the wrong track was obvious from its inception. Ironically, it was forced to use the CSX tracks because at the time the FEC wanted no part of a commuter system. It had given up passenger trains in the 1960s and, with a busy freight railroad, wanted nothing that would interfere with their money-making mode. However, the railroad was sold and it has been apparent for several years that the new owner actually wants passenger traffic. Thus, Amtrak has been flirting with the idea of switching its long distance trains to the FEC. On paper that makes sense, for its track is a straight line along Florida’s east coast, whereas the present CSX track veers from Jacksonville to the middle of the state before returning to the coast in West Palm Beach.
The problem is that FEC’s track has many crossings, especially in the cities along its path. To have efficient Amtrak service, or Tri-Rail, that railroad needs extensive improvements. They would include, eventually, either a high bridge over the New River in Fort Lauderdale, or an expensive tunnel. In either case it would eliminate grade crossings that slow traffic on busy downtown streets. Therein lies opportunity, and the FEC certainly realizes it. A fast commuter service, with Amtrak as a bonus, would generate real estate development near every station. Air rights above the tracks would be valuable, just as they are in northern cities which long ago put railroads either up or down to avoid traffic. Long term, the economic benefits to South Florida, and the FEC, could be enormous.
Now, after years of staring at the obvious, it appears the 21st century is on the brink of happening.
Anyone following the news recently has been reminded that the gap between the very rich and the very poor is growing. That’s as it should be. The rich are rich because they are prudent, go to Harvard, buy Wayne’s stock, marry well and have the good sense to inherit money. And never spend a dime.
The poor, not all but a lot of them, should never have been born, from parents who should never have been born, grow up without fathers and have brains like a scrambled egg. I stole that last image from Jimmy Breslin, who would not agree with anything else in the sentence.
Part of the “rich are richer and the poor are poorer” story is the alleged disappearance of the middle class. We are told we have no more middle class. Why? Pondering that great mystery, I go back to roots in Philadelphia where my family was middle class. Maybe even not that good. Maybe lower middle class. We were never utterly broke. We had the most expensive Lionel set in 1950. But my dad did not have a car, was always in hock to a loan company (although I did not know it then) and my mother was one of the first working moms of that era. She took surveys, going around door to door, asking people what they bought – and why. Market research. One Saturday she hired our whole neighborhood to stand in front of Thom McAn shoe stores and count the people coming out with packages. I did that from 9 to 5, at the store near Germantown and Chelten. My buddy Miles went to a store near Broad and Erie, and counted for an hour and then went home and made up the numbers. He was close.
We were middle class, and what happened to my middle class is that we became the mildly rich. And we thus disappeared from the statistical radar. Examples: My two brothers were Ph.D.s. Both had college scholarships. I was the dummy of the family. One brother was a consulting civil engineer and teacher at an Ivy League school. He bought stock, and wisely, and back in the 1970s when our company needed help he sent $25,000 overnight. The other brother also taught college – economics – and is not hurting.
These guys are typical of my middle-class friends. In those days the term “millionaire” meant something. Today it means two houses, even in a depressed real-estate market. Looking back, I can think of almost no friend who is not far, far better off than their parents. Almost all could ship you 25K overnight; most, if they had to, could raise $200,000 for an emergency.
One buddy grew up in a row house with five siblings. He became a Ph.D., taught college, and has been retired 10 years. Another row-house product organized a division for a major company. He had two houses, one in suburban Philadelphia, the other on the beach at one of South Jersey’s better addresses. Another friend, whose dad, like mine, sold life insurance, and not too much of it, became publisher of an important trade magazine. He has been retired for years and splits time between a tony north Jersey suburb and Long Beach Island.
These are just the Philly connections. Closer to Florida, I can’t list the number of people who came from ordinary circumstances, from all over the country, people whose family income a generation or so back never exceeded $15,000, and who today could lose that in the morning market and hardly notice it. By Florida standards, they are not super rich, merely comfortable.
They are the former middle class. They have not disappeared. Just moved up in class.
The Carolina morning started beautifully, then it rained, then the sun returned, then it rained, then somewhere there was the sound of a jet invisible above, then the sun came out again and then began to decline after dinner and some distance to the west there was the Iowa Straw Vote and the TV was following the action. What we saw was a person we thought was Tina Fey doing an imitation of Michele Bachmann. It was amazing, how she manages to look like these people and makes you laugh mostly by quoting stuff the women have actually said. “I can see Russia from my house.” Well, a lot of people can do that, depending on what they are smoking.
We were screaming to the wife to come see this hilarious imitation, when, to our surprise, an announcer appeared and we realized that this was not a female impersonator. What made us think so was the style and content of her speech. She was gesturing wildly and God, she was using the word God every other God knows word, like God I love God, you love God, and I love you, I love you all, by God, and God willing and God bless America and I hope that God breaks Rick Perry’s freakin’ legs…
It is, of course, unfortunate that Newsweek’s cover made the woman seem deranged. She is simply playing to what Jimmy Breslin referred to as “a low IQ” audience. Actually, Jimmy referred to low IQ states, which included any state, usually southern, that wasn’t up to his high intellectual standards. In this case, however, it was only a fraction of Iowa people involved and these were pious souls, God fearing by God they are, offended by ungodly conduct and ready to cheer any God-fearing woman.
Some people find linking God and the flag distasteful campaigning, in the spirit of Richard Nixon at his worst. Remember the parody from some 50 years ago: “I’m glad you asked that question. Pat and I were talking about it at home the other night in front of the fire. Pat was knitting a flag; I was reading the Constitution...”
Of course, Nixon was a God-fearing man who would never lie unless he had to. He was in the great spirit of American family values which has marked so many of our distinguished presidents. Rarely has a president questioned the value of having God in his camp. Abraham Lincoln, in the depths of the Civil War, mused that both sides prayed to the same God and he wondered how God could be on both sides at once. But he made up for this blasphemy in his second inaugural. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right…”
Note that Lincoln did not say he loved God, or that God even liked him; rather, like John Templeton, who has his name on a Fort Lauderdale building, praying before financial decisions, he hoped God would send the lights of his better angels to clear our collective minds in a time of turmoil. Other presidents, while not so eloquent as Lincoln, have consistently boosted family values, which is God’s way. President Clinton managed to leave office with a surplus, largely because he valued family values. Harry Truman put a nice spin on religion when he vowed to “give em hell.” Gen. Sherman came on a little stronger – he declared that war is hell, and had little time for preachers. However, he kept his wife at Notre Dame throughout the war and God, who is a big Fighting Irish fan, permitted him to march through Georgia without the devil to pay. And the great John Kennedy proved that spreading love around – a little to a movie star, a little to a mobster’s girl – did not impair his judgment when it came to avoiding nuclear war.
The beat goes on. In many parts of Florida it is almost impossible to get elected unless you praise God and favor carrying assault rifles openly to church. And our legislators in Washington carry on the great tradition of family values, personified by the Palm Beach congressman who loved little boys as well as himself, and after he lost, was replaced by another dude who beat him on a family values plank and proved his sincerity by using his plank with as many families as possible.
Oh my God!!! The wife just turned on Chris Matthews, who stupidly doubts that JFK was murdered by our own government, and he’s ranting about Rick Perry and he just said, swear to God, that Perry is selling the Tea Party “no taxes” line like a religion.
And that’s the God’s truth.
Our family has a long history of anticipating seismic changes in culture and lifestyle, and investing to capitalize on trends. For instance, a long-gone relative studied European politics and when he saw Hitler rise to power in Germany, he predicted that a major war was coming. Another relative deepened the research by realizing that air power would prove decisive in any future war. Thus the family invested heavily in Messerschmitt.
Years later, when the fax machine appeared, a distant cousin decided to figure out a way to fax people. The idea was if documents could be fed into a machine and sent all over the world, why not do the same with people? It would be so much faster and efficient than existing modes of transportation. Consequently we sold all our airline stock and backed his machine. Years of experimentation have not yet borne fruit, but the concept just needs tweaking. The main problem is that when you feed people into the People Fax they flatten out OK, although a little gooey, but it is difficult to puff them up again on the other end.
The project is stalled, but not dead. Often an inspiring idea does not fulfill its projected destiny, but spawns an even more productive idea. Thus with plastic grocery bags, which are losing favor because of environmental concerns, but may have found a niche in making parachutes for toy soldiers.
Another such opportunity looms on the horizon. News reports recently proclaimed that the driverless car is not far down the road. Experts say the technology exists, based on all this GPS stuff that is already helping navigate everything from mega yachts to skateboards. You would just get in your car, turn the ignition, and sit back. The car would drive itself, stopping automatically as other drivers tried to bust red lights, avoiding getting too close to other vehicles, finding a parking spot closest to your chosen terminal at airports, etc.
It is predicted that this technology would reduce accidents by 80 percent, which would be a wonderful thing, and the key to making money on this advancement is figuring out what other businesses would tend to profit or be eliminated when this concept becomes reality. Red light cameras, for instance, hardly in their infancy, might disappear the way buggy whips did when they figured out a way to put steam engines in buggies. Oddly enough, the whip business was not entirely killed. An entrepreneur in New Jersey, who was rumored to be the great uncle and a great aunt, had a lifetime supply of buggy whips. To save his company, he invented harness racing.
Lovely at it seems, driverless cars might create problems, and those problems might lead to creative solutions. Lawyers for drunk drivers are already opposing the idea as unconstitutional, because people could be in driverless cars, tight as a tick, but it would make no difference if they were impaired. Besides, if they let the car drive itself there would be no reason for a cop to pull them over.
But therein may lie lucrative opportunity. It is a given that driverless cars would be safe, obeying the speed limit and not doing stupid things such as crossing lanes on I-95 and texting while drinking coffee. But would people stand for it? We think not. For too many people the thrill of driving like maniacs is all the fun they get in life. They would figure out a way to override the driverless technology, and go racing at 90 miles an hour up U.S. 1 as always. That predictable situation may favor the prepared. With most cars obeying the rules because they have no choice, the bad drivers would be in constant road rage, passing and screaming curses and launching foul gestures at all the driverless fools slowing them down. They would need guns to shoot such fools, and they would need laws to protect them.
This would be wonderful for the gun business, especially in Florida where the legislature favors laws that punish municipalities and their officials who enact laws controlling guns and doctors who ask crazy people if they own guns. This legislature would surely understand the need to protect maniacs who fire AK-47s at the drivers of driverless cars, especially if they feel threatened by sane people.
But we better move fast and get this driverless car on the road. There’s little likelihood of it happening soon, but you never know when sanity could return to Tallahassee.
We sometimes wonder if people know why they vote for the people they vote for. But during the recent debt crisis debate, we wondered even more wonderfully if people who get elected to go to Washington know why they got elected.
The phrase “doing what the people back home sent me here to do” was repeated so many times in the last few weeks we wanted to scream at the TV, “How do you know what the people back home think?”
Case in point, starting at the top. President Obama got elected in 2008 when he made eloquent speeches talking up “change.” But did he understand what the people who voted for him understood him to mean by that vague inspiration? Especially when so many people who never voted before voted for him, and when black voters appeared at the polls in record numbers and voted overwhelmingly for him. Were they voting for change in the color of the man at the top, to be part of a historic social event, or were they voting to change the health care and insurance systems and promise everything to everybody and not worry about paying for it?
It reminded one of the 1960 election when an Irish-Catholic ran on a platform that he wasn’t satisfied that the Russians had beaten us into space and we needed to catch up in an arms race with those who would wish us harm. Did people ask if that arms gap claim were true (it turns out it wasn’t) or did they vote for JFK because he was an Irish-Catholic who had a gifted speech writer? We worked the polls that day, and our precinct in Philadelphia, which had a large Catholic population, the faithful voted early and often. Something like 75 percent voted for the Irish-Catholic. Astute observers did not think the arms gap carried the day.
Back to the future. President Obama clearly thought his victory was a mandate for change. But change to what? Did it occur to him that many of his constituents wanted change back to the past, before 9/11, before the housing bubble when real estate only went up, when everybody had a job, before the Wall Street scares, before media images of young soliders coming home with cold, jarring metal rods where their legs used to be?
If it did not, then last year’s election should have. In that mid-term contest, as usually happens, the opposition party made a comeback, partly because that is the way of politics, but also because many of those those first-time voters who supported him in 2008 did not turn out. Maybe they were disappointed that their idea of change, which actually meant better times, had not been realized. Or maybe they just didn’t bother to vote.
Whatever, the result was a bunch of new people in Congress, and we suspect the cycle repeated itself. The Tea Party winners thought they had been sent to Washington with a mandate to change government. But did those who voted for them know what kind of change they wanted? Maybe they just were against expanding entitlements, or giving jobs to illegal immigrants. But did they want the kind of mania that obsessed the country for the last few months, with possible long-term consequences for the economy that could hurt everybody? Did they want to stop their social security checks, kill Medicare, drive their stock portfolios down, deny soldiers pay, deny Depends for grandma?
Some may have wanted all these things, but probably most only wanted to rein in big government, at least fake at balancing the budget, get people working again, ban red light cameras, fly the Confederate flag on Memorial Day. The danger is that you don’t always get what you thought you voted for, if you knew in the first place.
Bottom line: Get rid of the word “mandate.” Unless you speak of Mandate the Magician. And even he was not tricky enough for these political times.
The Decline and Possible Fall of the Rupert Murdoch British Empire may seem unbelievable to some. How could a leading newspaper commit the acts it did, hacking people’s messages, bribing law enforcement at the highest level, at the same time becoming so influential that the most powerful people in the country treated its owner as uncrowned royalty? People knew this was going on. Why no complaints for so long? Did the newspaper staffers who did these things believe they had the sanction of their employer?
Well, by way of understanding, if not explanation, it isn’t the first time. You may chalk it up to corporate culture, for want of a better term. We were reminded of this last month, when going through old files at Philadelphia Magazine, where we started out in the magazine business and in the process played a bit role in the invention of city/regional magazines. Such magazines are everywhere today, but this was not the case in the 1960s when Philadelphia showed the rest of the country what a fringe media could do for a city. A book is under way on the subject, and Philadelphia Magazine is a big part of the story.
That magazine goes way back, almost 100 years now, as a chamber of commerce publication that nobody read. That changed, however, in the 1960s, when the editor and publisher realized that a publication directed to a small business audience had the potential to grow into a new media form that in some ways was more influential than the local newspapers. It was so influential that today some people give the magazine credit for driving out of the city a man who at the time was one of the most powerful figures in the newspaper world. He was Walter Annenberg, whose name today is recognized as a major figure in education philanthropy. That is a worthy distinction, but quite different from Annenberg's reputation as a newspaper publisher.
In that time he owned two of Philadelphia’s three daily papers, along with magazines including Seventeen and TV Guide. Like Rupert Murdoch, he was an intense competitor. Like Rupert Murdoch, he was feared and befriended by the most powerful people in his city. He could also be petty and vicious. He was known to have people he did not like airbrushed out of photos, even when they posed with the president of the United States. He all but boycotted the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team in its early years. His Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story with a headline reading that a candidate for governor had denied being in a mental institution – even though no one had said he was.
In that culture an enterprising and long-term Inquirer reporter named Harry Karafin saw opportunity. Karafin was known as Walter Annenberg’s hatchet man. When Annenberg wanted to get somebody, Harry Karafin was his hit man. Karafin figured out a way to live well on a newspaper reporter’s salary. And that was to write stories in The Inquirer suggesting that an investigation of some business was under way, then send a crony into the business and suggest public relations might be in order. Over several years Karafin got himself on the payroll of a number of businesses. Among his victims was the largest bank in that part of Pennsylvania, which paid his PR company more than $60,000 over five years. Serious money in those days. People paid off because they assumed that if Harry Karafin were on a story, Walter Annenberg was behind it. In fairness, nobody in Philadelphia thought Annenberg knew what Karafin was up to. But anyone close to the newspaper business knew that Karafin could never operate as he did if a sense of ethics came down from the top.
A lot of people in Philadelphia thought Karafin was a bad actor, but nobody did anything about it. The leading rival newspaper, the stodgy (and long defunct) Evening Bulletin, did not want a feud with Walter Annenberg. Then along came Philadelphia Magazine. Gaeton Fonzi, later a founding partner in Gold Coast magazine, and the author of an iconic book on the Kennedy assassination, quietly tracked Karafin for several years. Fonzi noticed that stories about corruption that he worked on were also rumored to be investigated by Karafin, but nothing appeared in the Inquirer. Fonzi sensed that Karafin was on the take, using the threat of investigations to blackmail businesses.
As Philadelphia Magazine grew in stature, so did the nerve of its management, which permitted Fonz and another Philadelphia Magazine writer, Greg Walter, to work full time on the Karafin story for months. When the story broke, it created a sensation. The whole town was buzzing, but The Philadelphia Inquirer remained silent. Silent, until the story began appearing in the national media, including Time Magazine. Then The Inquirer ran a big story, not mentioning Philadelphia Magazine, suggesting it had uncovered the corruption within its own organization. Karafin was fired, convicted of blackmail and extortion, and died in jail. After that, Philadelphia Magazine grew rapidly. It became a must read for anyone who gave a damn about their city.
Fonzi then went on to write a two-part magazine series, which became a book, on Walter Annenberg and the way he ran his publishing business, explaining how the Karafin scandal was only possible in the culture Annenberg created. It was devastating stuff and within months Annenberg sold his papers to Knight Ridder. Today people who hear the incredible Karafin story wonder how it could have happened at The Philadelphia Inquirer, which won numerous Pulitizer Prizes in the years after Knight Ridder took over. They need to be reminded that it was before that fine organization came to Philadelphia, when Walter Annenberg ruled in fear.
Not too different from the Rupert Murdoch story.
