The View from Right Field

Where Did All This Partisanship Come From?

I will assume most people will not say that it started with Donald Trump.  He certainly is bad, partisanship-wise,¹ but it didn’t start with him.  Some people might go back to Joe McCarthy or Richard Nixon,² but I’m thinking of something more recent.  Republicans might point to Ted Kennedy’s attacks on Robert Bork in 1986, when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court.³  Democrats might point to attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s (the “vast right-wing conspiracy”).  And so on.  But I am going to suggest something else.

Sometimes it is hard to remember how you felt about a particular event at the time because things that happened afterwards color your recollection of how you felt then.  Even reading contemporaneous news articles about something in the past will sometimes surprise you because you know what has happened since and the article doesn’t. 

52 Years Ago I Met a Future President

Actually, it was 52 years ago yesterday, July 10, 1968.  Here is a picture of me, a lot of other people, and Richard Nixon. 

I was one of a group of Young Republicans helping at a Nixon fundraiser.  After the picture, I shook President Nixon’s hand and said, “Thank you.”  He said, “No, thank you (for helping).”  A great man.  I am so happy I got to meet him.

Flying the Flag on the Fourth

The first thing I did when I got up on the Fourth was to get out the ladder and put up the flag.  We aren’t home on the Fourth of July very often, but this year we were.  (Surprise!)  And I figured it would be an important year to make sure the flag was up.  I was right.

There didn’t seem to be as many flags as I remembered in years when we have been home (or on Memorial Days, etc.), which I sort of expected.  A couple of people on my wife’s high school class Facebook group said they weren’t flying the flag this year because, well, you know.  Which was a viewpoint I expected and which was the reason I put ours up first thing Saturday morning.

Kent State at 50 – Three Days Late

With Covid-19 being all the news all the time, other things get missed.  The 50th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University on May 4 was one of them, at least for me.

I was a senior at Eastern Illinois University in 1970.  When President Nixon gave his speech on the Cambodian incursion on April 30, 1970, it seemed reasonable to me.  Protestors said he was expanding the war.  I figured that, since the North Vietnamese were already in Cambodia, attacking South Vietnam from bases there, you couldn’t say we were expanding the war into Cambodia.  The war came to Cambodia when the North Vietnamese moved in.

#Coronavirus Travel Bans and Keeping the United States a Single Noun

I agree with Steve Chapman in today’s Chicago Tribune (“The right to travel within the US should not be a casualty of the coronavirus”) that the travel bans some governors are trying to impose on residents of other states are wrong – and almost certainly illegal [see Update below].  Before the Civil War, United States was a plural noun, as in “the United States are.”  The Civil War and Abraham Lincoln made the United States into a single noun, as in “the United States is.” 

In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln called on all of us “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”  That is what we need to do today.  We must not let Covid-19, and our reaction to it, turn back the clock.  We are in this as a country, and by helping each other, we can get through it as a country.
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UPDATE (4/5/20 10:10 am): My comment about these travel bans being "almost certainly illegal" was wrong.  Per Eugene Volokh, who knows what he is talking about, they "are likely to be upheld."  Sorry for getting it wrong.

We Didn’t Ask Our Parents About World War II – Or Our Grandparents About the Spanish Flu

As our parents in the Greatest Generation have died, we have berated ourselves for not asking them what it was like during World War II.  Not just our fathers, who went to war, but also our mothers, who stayed at home.¹ 

But as coronavirus/Covid-19 spreads, I am feeling another missed opportunity:  Not only did we fail to ask our parents about what it was like during World War II, we didn’t ask our grandparents or great-grandparents what it was like during World War I² and the Spanish Flu.   The Spanish Flu is estimated to have killed 50 million people around the world from January 1918 to December 1920, including 675,000 in the United States.  The former was double the number of deaths in World War I.  The latter was more than five times the number of deaths the United States suffered in the war. 

Hong Kong: Freedom’s Light Still Shines

Three weeks ago, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, people were wondering what went wrong.  Democracy is on the decline in eastern Europe and elsewhere, while nasty populism is rising all over the world, including the United States.

But then, when things seem dark, a tiny ray of light shines, a delicate little flower blooms.  In 1977, it was Vaclav Havel and Charter ’77 in Communist East Europe.  In the 1970s, it was Spain, Portugal and Greece leaving dictatorships behind and becoming free.  Next were Taiwan and South Korea.  In 1994, it was Nelson Mandela in the South Africa of apartheid.

“For Laws and Lech, Basil and Borders Opened – Thanks!” – Joan Beck’s 1989 Thanksgiving Column

As I mentioned back in 2009 (and 2010 and 2011), each year at Thanksgiving, Joan Beck, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune (among other things), would write a special column of Thanks.  This year being the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I thought it appropriate to reprint her column from Thanksgiving, 1989:

“As we gather together to count the Lord’s blessings, 368 years after the first Thanksgiving Day, we are grateful, O God, for perestroika if it works and glasnost if it’s real, for the liberating breaches in the Berlin Wall and the integrated beaches in South Africa, for summits and summers and sunrises and symphonies and for the innate yearning to be free that no regime can trample forever.

Scaredy-Cat Protestors – And the Role of the Press

With the Donald Trump impeachment hearings on the TV and all over the news, there is plenty of time to do other things.  But let me talk about something possibly related to the news on the impeachment of President Trump: the media and who to believe.  There was a brouhaha over the weekend at the student-run Daily Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois.  The editorial staff at the paper ran an editorial apologizing for the harm they supposedly caused when the paper ran/tweeted photos of people protesting a speech by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  Apparently, some of the people in these photos felt they were harmed by the publication of the photos.  On Sunday, the paper apologized, saying in part:

“We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize for and address the mistakes that we made that night – along with how we plan to move forward.”

The Fall of the Berlin Wall: 30 Years On. #BerlinWall30

This Saturday is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Readers of this blog will know that I have written about the Wall a lot.  You can find what I wrote on the 20th and 25th anniversaries of the fall of the Wall by clicking on “Berlin” in the list of Categories in the right margin.  The 25th anniversary, which we were lucky enough to be in Berlin for, was especially great.  But things seem to have changed since then.

Events are going the wrong direction in parts of eastern Europe and eastern Germany.  Viktor Orban is solidifying control in Hungary.  Law and Justice recently won re-election in Poland.  And in eastern Germany, the AfD increased its vote in state elections.  The populism that has come to the West is also increasing in eastern Europe.