#431 – Dick Bernard: Ed Asner as FDR

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Early this week my wife heard on public radio that Ed Asner, co-star of the Mary Tyler Moore show, would be doing a one-man show the evening of September 9. She was interested in going and for me that was a non-controversial recommendation. I went down to get tickets in person, and by that time, on Wednesday, the only seats left, except a few with obstructed vision, were in the very last row of the top balcony of the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.
Friday night, in that last row, high above the stage, we saw a phenomenal nearly two-hour show, where Ed Asner replayed 24 years of Roosevelt’s career, from Polio in 1921 through his last trip and death in Warm Springs GA in April, 1945. There is no replay of the show, at least in the Twin Cities. It was a single performance. At the beginning of the performance the announcer said that an interview is archived on Minnesota Public Radio. The entire fascinating interview – nearly an hour – is accessible here.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is much too large a character for this blog space, as well as for a one hour forty minute program of excerpts performed by Asner. But if you hear Ed Asner as FDR is coming to your town, make it a point to attend.
Roosevelt was viewed as a “Traitor to his Class“, one of the book titles on sale at the theater.
Neither was he universally adored by the people whose future he worked to preserve. People then, like people today, often do not have a long view of their own best interests and are easily exploited. As a family historian, I can tell stories about my own relatives, who were of the farming and labor class. They all had their own reasons….
Roosevelt suffered under all of the differences of opinions and constraints that hem in all U.S. Presidents in what is at one and the same time the most powerful and the most problematic position in the world.
He was attacked and obstructed by his opposition.
He demonstrated, however, how a President does help set a national tone, whether with or without party support.
Twenty-four hours earlier we had watched President Obama speaking to a frankly hostile Congress about crucial issues facing the United States now.
As I sat watching Mr. Asner speak from and around the very simple set dominated by a Presidential desk in the Oval Office, I thought about President Obama, the current occupant of the oval office.
Mr. Roosevelt was patrician, perhaps even considered above the job of President, and most particularly traitorous to some in his upper class kin, as the book title suggests.
Mr. Obama, on the other hand, comes from the opposite pole in our society: the first African-American President, and one who basically grew up in a single-parent family.
I noticed, when Mr. Obama was talking to Congress (and particularly the nation) he was firm but not dramatic, as Roosevelt might have been.
I believe that President Obama’s somewhat nuanced address was intentional and necessary to fit the circumstances of this time in our history. We are not post-racial. We may never be post-racial….
Oh, if the presidency was as easy as we all would like to pretend.
Thankfully there are people like President Roosevelt and President Obama who stepped up to the plate to serve.
UPDATE Sep 11, 2011:
After writing this post I happened upon a two hour History Channel special on the death of Osama bin Laden in May, 2011. It was a fascinating two hours. Distilled to its essence, President Obama’s advisors gave odds of maybe 40 to 50% that bin Laden was the mysterious man in the compound at Abbottabad. All decisions ultimately were the Presidents. Had something gone wrong, or the quarry been other than bin Laden, it would have been the Presidents fault (as President Carter accepted full responsibility for the disastrous attempt to free the hostages in Teheran in 1979). On the other hand, success does not necessarily bring kudos. Second-guessing what was done, and how, or taking credit for the success are also common. Politics is never completely clear and above board.

#430 – Dick Bernard: 9-11-01 to 9-11-11. Have we learned anything these last ten years?

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UPDATE September 12, 2011: There have been a large number of comments on this post. They are in a separate post for September 11, 2011, here. Additional comments will be added to this post, as received.
September 9, 2011
Dear Family and Friends:
One of the indelible memories of my life came on my 60th birthday, May 4, 2000. We spent the entire day at the horrific Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland. Entering one of the first buildings with the awful artifacts of the final solution – hair, shoes, suitcases… – was a sign with this quotation:
“Those who
cannot remember the past,
are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana
We Americans – every one of us – have created what became the ten years after 9-11. We are well advised to remember Santayana’s admonition as our future begins with President Obama’s address to Congress a few hours ago.
Everyone has their own perspective.
Here’s how I remember the last ten years, and how I hope we work for a better future.
*
Here are two snapshots I took of the as-yet incomplete twin towers of the World Trade Center 39 years ago, in late June, 1972. (click to enlarge). (The Statue of Liberty photos later in this post were taken the same day.) This was my first and to date only visit to New York City. I remember the day vividly.

Twin Towers nearing completion late June, 1972 (see construction equipment on top of one of the towers)


New York City skyline from ferry enroute to Statue of Liberty late June, 1972


I also remember vividly 9-11-01: The death toll that day was approximately 3,000. Each of those people died tragically and needlessly. This doesn’t make them unusual. Thousands of others die tragically and needlessly every day, everywhere. How we have elected to hang onto the circumstances of the death of these 3000, and what it has done to us as a nation, is what makes this ten year commemoration unusual. (See NOTE FROM MADELINE SIMON at the end of this post).
The ten years since 9-11-01 are ten years we should all also remember vividly:
– We’ve been in two wars, now ten years old, with no end in sight;
the price of 9-11 has been dreadful;
over 100,000 dead in Iraq, 25,000 in Afghanistan; – hundreds of thousands of people displaced; plenty of anger against the United States by these people;
– over 6,000 U.S. dead in these wars;
– Over 3 trillion of our dollars ($3,000,000,000,000) spent, not counting huge and certain future costs even if the wars were to stop today;
– incalculable ruin to our national reputation – a reservoir of ill-will which will not be forgotten.
And the War continues….
In my opinion it need not have been this way:
Here’s my personal recollection written a few days after 9-11: September 17 and 24, 2001, a letter to family and friends reflecting on 9-11-01. (Entire letter here Post 9-11-01001.)
9-11-01 was my second day on the job as a volunteer on a Habitat for Humanity house in south Minneapolis. A large crew of us from Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis volunteered for one or more days during our two week commitment. Per previous plans, Cathy, my wife, and son-in-law John also joined that crew the week of 9-11. I was there the first week.

Habitat Home Stevens Ave S Minneapolis MN Sep 11, 2001


After 9-11 we were overrun with unexpected volunteers coming off the street to help – their way of dealing with grief, I suppose.
This urge to do something positive was a very normal immediate outcome of the shock of 9-11, as it is a normal response after any tragedy.
For many years I have kept a handout from a long-ago workshop I attended which explains the normal human response to crisis very well (click to enlarge). Note: the time period to recovery is described in months, not years:

OUR RESPONSE POST-9-11-01
Rather than normal and positive resolution of grief, and closure, after 9-11-01 we in the U.S. chose to go to war. It was and is a disastrous decision.
We Americans* almost unanimously supported war as a remedy. Afghanistan Oct 7 2001001
One wonders what would have happened had we chosen to respond as Norway did in the wake of their July 22, 2011, terrorist attack.

After 9-11 we were largely kept in the dark about specifics of war plans. Five months after 9-11, a column (2002001) I wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune (published April 20, 2002), does not even mention the word “Iraq”. Iraq was not on my radar screen then, and I was an engaged citizen then.
In April, 2002, the official roll-out of the Iraq War was nearly a year away.
But we now know the Bush administration focus had almost instantly shifted to Iraq after 9-11, even though Iraq, and no Iraqis, were involved in 9-11. We took the deadly fork in the national road which we still live with today.
At the same time we launched this war, we were encouraged to get on with life, to go shopping, and we happily obliged during the decade. Vice-President Richard Cheney famously noted that “deficits don’t matter….” (see 18th para beginning “In his own account…”).
War almost instantly became an opportunity to implement the dreams of the Project for a New American Century. Its principles are worth rereading, as are the names of its signatories. Most of its signatories likely still believe its false premise: America once and forever King of the World. Too many of us still have visions of a permanent American empire. (My opinion: We could not effectively conquer Iraq, a place similar in size and population to California. Our vision of world dominance was false then, and still is. It is rapidly killing us.)
In October, 2002, Congress issued what turned out to be a blank check to wage war on the national credit card. (You can see how the political parties voted on that resolution in 2002 at the preceding link.)
We, the people approved that action; indeed, it can fairly be said that we insisted on war. It was politically very dangerous for a politician to be against this War on “terrorists”. We the people bought the idea of war, and thus we own its consequences.
We’re still at war in Afghanistan, the place we attacked first, 10 years ago. Much of our national debt flows from war, not only unpaid for by any national sacrifice when it happened, but accompanied by huge and continuing tax cuts for everybody; and unfunded, large and politically popular Medicare improvements. To this day, we refuse to pay for that credit card debt of ours. As a nation we are still very deep in denial.
We effectively demand even more tax cuts and to slash our government (our state and national infrastructure) even further, rather than using our still great national wealth to work on reducing our debt. Going broke is a deliberate political strategy of the many current government leaders who follow Grover Norquist, whose anti-tax mantra has long been to starve government “until it can be drowned in the bathtub”. There is no negotiating with such an ideology.
We didn’t know it 9-11-01, but 2001-2011 became a highly radical Republican decade all the way up to the present moment where the avowed and very public aim of the Republican leadership is to make certain that President Obama fails to generate jobs for national recovery. “Give us another chance”, they seem to say. “See him fail.” The same characters in charge will bring the same results as in the past, I say. Watch their real response to the Presidents request last night over the next months to discern their priorities.
The Republican leadership of the last 20 or so years is not cut from the same Republican cloth as my father’s or grandfather’s generation, nor my own. The current Republican leadership bunch worships power and control for its own sake. (For a dozen years my own political “best friend” was a former Republican Governor until he passed away several years ago. He would not be welcome in today’s Republican party.)
Today’s Republican strategy is led by amoral radicals** whose sole interest is permanent majority and raw power, rather than the long-term health of this country.

Ten years after 9-11, we’re still at it even though, for all intents and purposes, our country went bankrupt “going shopping” for everything we desired, getting big tax breaks and unpaid for benefit increases, and making war on credit***.
Now the narrative that I hear from the political radical right about our current national malaise is: “It’s all Obama’s fault, just give us another chance….”
This is insane.
So, what does this all mean? I removed from the title of this post these words: “A squandered decade.” But that is exactly what 2001-2011 has been: a squandered decade. And we continue the waste.
When will we Americans get a grip on reality?
Ten years ago we were caught unawares, and our emotions were easily manipulated and used.
Will the coming ten years be more of the same?
We are still “going shopping”.
Ten years from now, where will we be?
Are we going to continue down the same destructive road which has all but destroyed us; or will we commit to positive change? It is we citizens who will decide the future of our children and the generations to follow.
It is we as individuals who will be determining the answer to that question.

Same former Habitat house in South Minneapolis Sep 11, 2010. It continues to look the same in September, 2011, and to my knowledge remains occupied by the same Somali family for whom it was built ten years ago.


Statue of Liberty New York City harbor late June, 1972


Joni and Tom Bernard at Statue of Liberty, late June, 1972


NOTE FROM MADELINE SIMON received on August 8 prior to publication of this post, and included with her permission. Madeline is a long-time good friend, very active in Justice and social concerns issues with her Church. I met her through my involvement with the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers. She sent this item to persons she knows:
Last night, I happened to catch part of [PBS] Frontline, titled “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.” [NOTE: this is can be watched online here] Representatives, particularly clergy, from the three major religions all talked about the very real, scary dark side of religious zeal, equally lethal in their respective religions. One, who shared the podium at a 9/11 memorial service with clergy from other religious traditions became the receiver of hate mail from members of his own clergy. They were incensed that he would give any degree of validity to another religion and its followers, and he was asked to resign as a minister of their absolute truth faith.
One woman related that in an interview with Putin, he said that to the 9/11 hijackers, the people in the towers were “just dust.” In the Nazi era, Jews were considered less than human by some supposed Christians; in the U.S. pre-civil rights era, some Christians considered blacks less than human; and some Israeli Jews treat Palestinians similarly. Much evil has been done throughout history in the name of God, and it continues today.
No doubt that the extreme religious right in our country is dangerous, used and exceedingly well-funded by greedy corporate America who demand laissez faire–no government-by-the-people regulation of their excesses, and they should not be allowed to control government at any level. Our government, federal and local, are already dysfunctional, preferring to be insanely destructive rather than lose power in the interest of the common good.
We have much important work to do before the next election, none being so important as reminding the country of our common humanity, the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and our interdependence, on each other and the well-being of our small planet. As Unitarian Universalists and a 501(c)(3) religious organization, we can’t advocate for or against candidates, but issues are fair game!!!
FOOTNOTES:
* – This commentary is written to “we, the people”. We are a society that likes to blame somebody else for our problems. The collective credit or blame lies with everyone of us, so long as we are fortunate enough to have a democracy (that is at risk).
** – “ends justify the means, politics is war, winning is all that matters” seems the dominant ethic. It is amazing, and very discouraging, to see the kind of racist, false and malicious information that is passed along, computer to computer, these days. Media advertising is as bad. It is far worse on the Republican side than on the Democrat. A recently retired 30-year GOP staff member in Washington recently wrote very candidly about this problem. You can read it here.
*** – even considering today’s relatively high unemployment, America is an immensely wealthy nation with far more than sufficient resources to recover from a problem we never should have gotten into. But to do so requires our political will, and the congressional leadership feels the problem is more beneficial to their interests than a solution.
There are many directly related posts, if you wish, beginning with June 27, 2011:
I will write a followup to this post, most likely on Monday, September 12, 2011
June 27, 2011: Killing the President, and many posts in the weeks that followed.
July 23, 2009: International Peace Garden

#428 – Dick Bernard: A Mutiny aboard the Ship of State

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I hear all sorts of opinions in the course of an average day, from all sorts of people. Part of this is due to being retired, and thus having more varied opportunities. A larger part is a desire to hear, and engage with, more points of view than one gets as a ‘bird of a feather’ in some special interest constituency or other.
While I’m a hopeful optimistic kind of guy, things look hopeless in this country into which I was born, have lived my entire life, and will likely die. It seems that we’re all involved in a collective mutiny on the ship of state; we want what we want; and we’re rapidly killing ourselves in the process.
Just in the last few hours we were at a political fund raiser for a Congressional candidate, a Minnesota Democrat, and a small group of us were in quite a passionate discussion of what will happen in 2012, and why. Before leaving for that fundraiser, came an e-mail from a good friend on the political left, who said about the President: “I think his brand of politics doesn’t inspire confidence. I’m not confident in him. In fact I’m leery and distrust him, but will vote for him because a Republican would be worse.” What he was saying is that President Obama isn’t progressive enough and ‘don’t expect much help from me to help reelect him’. And this friend is moderate as left-wingers go.
I ask folks like my friend, “so, what is the viable alternative?” There is never an answer to this question. The hard word is “viable”.
The strategists for the polar right, the opposite of the progressive left, and the Republican strategists in particular, understand the left-wing animus towards Obama, and expertly manipulate it.
The issue is winning, after all, not our country surviving: “Divide and conquer.”
Early this morning came a New York Times column about a moderate Congressman, long in Congress. It’s excellent and a tiny piece of hope. If you’re not into reading columns, at least consider reading the last three or four paragraphs of this one which convey a little hope. The rest of the column reminded me of our own visit to the U.S. House of Representative gallery Halloween night in 2000.
Politically, we are a very odd and self-destructive bunch as we enter into the political warfare of the next 14 months.
Many of us despise our system. Can it get much worse? It will get worse, unless we collectively get a grip.
It is not unusual to despise a leader, especially one who has to lead warring factions who despise each other.
For 30 years I’ve done family history, and among many others, I’ve recorded the stories about what some influential family members – all of them common folk – thought about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the same time FDR was about the business of saving the country from itself, he was loathed by some of the very people he was helping save, often for emotional and not rational reasons. And my family was likely very typical back in the hard times of the 1930s.
What was the viable alternative then? I submit that the FDR haters wouldn’t have liked the alternative, and our country would not have survived to be what it is today had their loathing become reality….
What is the viable alternative now? If by some awful chance the mutiny succeeds, and we throw the bums out and start over, there will be no captain of the ship, and we passengers on this mutinous craft, along with the misfits who pulled off the mutiny, will collectively sink.
Do we want this? I hope not.

#427 – Dick Bernard: I breathe union

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Labor Day, I was caught in the magnetic pull of the Minnesota State Fair. It was the last day of the great Minnesota get-together, and I went on a whim. It was my second visit in the Fair’s 12-day run. I have rarely if ever missed a Fair in 46 years in Minnesota.
I’m one of those creatures of habit at the Fair. The Education Building is most always the first stop. And the first stop there is the Education Minnesota – state teachers union – location, which has been at the same prominent place for many years. (Until 1998, it was called “MEA” – the Minnesota Education Association booth.) The two state teacher unions merged in 1998, now also part of AFL-CIO, and so it goes.
I worked for NEA affiliate MEA/Education Minnesota for 27 years, and I know the history very well. The state fair booth is very popular – a must stop for many – because of the free calendars it gives away. Labor Day I happened by the location when the line was not too long, and got my picture taken (here it is, this year: EdMinnCalendar2011002.)
There was a time in the early 1980s when MEA was considering giving up the space because it was expensive and of uncertain value. When the free calendar idea was first tried in the late 1990s, that too was a risky financial proposition. But both traditions continue.
Today, I would venture a guess that nobody at Education Minnesota considers dropping either. The space is a positive magnet for thousands of visitors.
These days, of course, “union” is used as an epithet by those who feel labor should not organize.
I spent well over 30 years active in the organized public school teacher movement. Most of that time my employer was called “Association”; at the end of my career, it was called “Union” (there is no operative distinction between the two words, nor in what we did and do, which was to represent the interests of hard-working people who cared deeply about their profession, their occupation.)
What pains me most, now, is that some of the anti-Union, anti-Obama hate mail that comes my way through those disgusting ‘forwards’ comes from people who have directly benefited by the efforts of Unions over the years, including my own. To borrow the words of Diercks Bentley’s popular country-western song: “what are they thinkin’?”

The tycoons who are bankrolling the bust government, bust the union gig have to be laughing up a storm. Best that we learn exactly who the enemy really is, and it is NOT the unions.
A shadowy segment of the fat cats is the bunch committed to use the middle class to destroy the Middle Class.
No, I can’t prove that, though the above referenced link is pretty strong evidence of who is bankrolling what these days.
During the recent extremely expensive Wisconsin Recall election across the river from me, one of the most common ads against the Democrat challenger Shelly Moore was her fire-breathing comment “We breathe union“. She was made to appear as a thug when in reality she was a laid off teacher and local teacher union leader. Of course, her comment was only part of what she actually said (Scroll to the last paragraph of the article. The videos are no longer on line.) The anti-Moore ad was not a locally produced Mom and Pop anti-union ad.
So, did Moore say what she was quoted as saying? Yes. Was her quote fairly used? No. It was intended to mislead and to incite anger against Unions.
I applaud Shelly Moore for her comment.
And, yes, I breathe union, and have breathed union since I first became actively involved about 1968.
And we in the body politic had best pay very close attention to who we are listening to and who we are supporting in coming days and months towards election 2012.

#426 – Dick Bernard: Labor Day 2011 and "The Help"

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We went to the film, The Help, Sunday afternoon. It was time very well spent.
There are many reviews: Go to IMDB for many of them and other information about The Help. If you haven’t seen the film, consider taking it in, either in the theater, or by other means.
The Help is about Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, and about relationships, such as they were between Negro domestics and the families they worked for.
Sitting behind us in the Grandview Theater in St. Paul were two women who commented back and forth from time to time.
During the film, one of them said to the other, “that’s the way it was“. She apparently was from 1963 Mississippi, or perhaps even Jackson, the setting for the film. They sat there through the film credits at the end so I saw them as we exited: two older white women, my age.
1963 was a watershed year in the Civil Rights movement, captured best by Martin Luther King Jr in his book “Why We Can’t Wait“, published in early 1964, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This book is an excellent companion for the movie. It is a book I go back to frequently.

Our guest for the movie was Cathy’s long-time friend, “Annette”, who I wrote about in December, 2009.
Back then, 21 months ago, she’d just been fired from her job in a bank for what turned out to be no reason other than the new manager wanted somebody else.
There was no need for a justifiable reason, as those domestics so well knew in 1963.
Annette is Black, single, in her 50s, probably 30-years or more an American citizen, raised in one of those tiny Caribbean resort islands.
Her family was not a family of domestics, but nonetheless knew their place and their roles back home. She is a neat person.
She said she enjoyed the movie, but she was uncharacteristically quiet.
I didn’t know till afterward that she’s unemployed again.
After over a year of unemployment which included knee replacement surgery, she finally found a job at the Twin Cities International Airport. It was a long bus ride, then eight hours on her feet in one of those food concessions in a concourse. It was scarcely above minimum wage. She had hoped to make 12 weeks, but she finally quit the job after only 10 weeks, last Friday. Her legs just couldn’t tolerate the punishment of standing all day.
So, she spends Labor Day joining the ranks of the unemployed again.
Annette won’t be out on any picket lines today or ever. It’s not her nature, and besides she can’t physically do it. She may end up going back to the island where she at least has family, she said.
“Good riddance”, some might say.
Meanwhile, our country lurches into a permanent election season, candidates braying about this or that as they seek office in 2012.
Ours, like increasing numbers of American families, has long-term unemployed among our own members.
Unless there is serious action, there will doubtless be more as the months go on.
Finally, in “The Help”, the domestic workers get mad as hell, unite, and their cultured and genteel overseers get their due.
But The Help is only a movie about a novel.
Rather than expecting today’s unemployed to advocate for themselves, or go out and get a job that doesn’t exist, we need to do the heavy lifting, politically.
In the long run, those without means will exact their revenge: our economy will get weaker and weaker because there is less and less money to spend. None of us will escape.
We don’t need this to happen. It’s in our court.
END NOTE: The film caused me to seek out an old Reader’s Digest article I knew I had saved, written by Mary Hatwood Futrell, daughter of a “domestic”, and then President of the over 2 million member National Education Association. The article is here: FutrellRdrsDigJul1989001
POSTNOTES:
If nothing else, this film should encourage reflection and discussion.
1. My personal knowledge of “Negroes” did not begin until Army days in 1962-63. I grew up in North Dakota before the military bases, and the race-of-choice was “Indians” who were restricted to Reservations and hardly respected. By chance, at the time of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington D.C., I was in an Army division on maneuvers in rural South Carolina. It was there, for the first time, that I saw first hand the separate and unequal division of the races in the south. It was an eye-opening experience to say the very least.
2. The film has also caused me to reflect on growing up in a public school teachers family in the rural midwest in 1940s and 1950s. Succinctly, in those ‘good old days’, teachers were treated with scarce more public respect than the domestics in the film. The significant difference, of course, was that racial animus wasn’t part of the equation. Public School teachers, before collective bargaining, were Public Servants (caps intended) – officially and publicly respected, but dismissed at will. Their travails were very small compared with the plight of the Indians and Negroes, but they were travails nonetheless.

#425 – Dick Bernard: Wrapping up the weeks news

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Our evening news of choice is CBS with Scott Pelley. Like most folks, perhaps, my viewing is rather casual, not intense. In 30 minutes, there is perhaps 20 minutes of actual “news” and this is broken down into a number of segments. The rest is advertising, which a cynic might say is the only real reason for news programs these days….
But Friday nights program had several segments which drew my attention and seemed directly related and troubling indicators of the disease affecting our country at this point in history. You can watch the entire program at the link in this paragraph.
There was a piece about the U.S. economy at a still dead place: 9 % unemployment; actual rate 16% if you factor in those who’ve given up. This is tied, of course, to President Obama and how it will affect his reelection plans.
Another segment was a small business owner who wasn’t hiring because he wasn’t sure of the future stability of our economy. After all, you can’t hire people just for the sake of hiring them. This has been a repetitive ‘talking point’ about why business won’t step up to the plate in this crisis. Subtext: the business of business is to make money, not save the country.
Worker productivity is way up – 50% higher if I recall correctly; business is awash in cash, accompanied by the same hand-wringing as that of the small business owner.
And a segment about the 17 large financial institutions that are being sued by the government for their complicity in the real estate fraud that was a large factor in nearly bringing our economy down three years ago this month. Of course, they are “innocent until proven guilty”, but their crime is not petty theft, but billions upon billions of dollars which taxpayers have had to cover.
Will justice be done?
When push comes right down to shove, the only one made to wear the hair shirt is President Obama. This is the hardly invisible background noise in all of this. If only he would do this, that or the other, all would be better; as if all of the obstruction and inaction and, yes, fraud, of the political and economic players make no difference in the equation.
It is totally absurd. We sit idly by and take it.
Somewhere towards the end of this news program, came some seconds of coverage of the conflict in Libya, in the process of regime change.
There was a 30 second segment at some port facility in Libya where huge cubes of new Libyan cash had been off-loaded fresh from the printing presses in Britain, the place where Libyan money is apparently minted. It can be seen at roughly 17:20 – 17:50 in the CBS news program referred to.
The reporter Barry Peterson was commenting on this money: it is there to “go into peoples pockets…they get the money, the spend the money, the economy perks up, everybody’s going to feel a little bit better“. His remarks are worth watching.
What a novel idea. Put money into people’s hands – not Qadaffi’s – so that the economy can recover….
Why are we so reluctant to try something like this in the United States, during this time of struggle?

There are, of course, easy answers to this: recovery, people back at work, will make it more likely that President Obama will be reelected. To his enemies, the decision makers in Congress, and the captains of Big Business and Industry as well (which he previously had saved), priority one is getting him out of office. The greater the human cost for American workers and their families, the better for those who want to replace him.
As Labor Day approaches, we remain by far the wealthiest nation in the world.
We are squandering our riches, and we will all end up as big losers.
UPDATE Sep. 4: Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune has a worth-reading column by Johnathan Alter. It is here.

#423 – Dick Bernard: Talking war (and peace)

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Monday was Senior Citizen day at the Minnesota State Fair and I made my way over to fulfill my annual ritual, now stretching back to the mid-1960s when I first arrived in the Twin Cities.
This year found me less engaged than in the past – no particular reason. Maybe next year I won’t be back. But…next year there will be that deep-fried cheese curd gene that will kick in, and I’ll be back for my annual fix. One basket of those critters is a great plenty. Thankfully, they haven’t raised the price, which means they’ve reduced the portion size. At my age I don’t need even a single small basket. But so it goes.
One of my ritual stops is at the Leinie Lodge Band Shell, and when I stopped there on Monday, the 34th Infantry (Red Bull) Division Band was about to conclude its gig before a full house, and they were just about to begin a medley of the anthems of the various branches of military service. The announcer asked that vets of those branches rise to be recognized when their anthem was played. First, a few Marines; then Navy; then Air Force; then Coast Guard; then my branch, the Army. Lots of folks stood up, mostly men, mostly old. It was a rather stirring and emotional time, recognizing the vets, one of which was me. (click on photo to enlarge)

Vets rising to be recognized at the State Fair August 29, 2011


I walked towards the exit to the encore: John Phillips Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever”.
On the bus back to the east ‘burbs, I struck up a conversation with an old guy who’s an Army vet, WWII. “Pacific or European Theater?”, I asked. “Pacific”, he responded. His unit had spent two weeks in Japan immediately after the Atom bombs had fallen in August, 1945. “Terrible there”, he said, and that was about it. I told him about Uncle Frank and the Arizona at Pearl Harbor, and about a whole family of military veterans, including me.
Today, President Obama was at the national American Legion Convention in Minneapolis. I’m a peace advocate who’s a long-time member of the American Legion. Stubbornness I guess. I also am a strong supporter of President Obama, doing all he can in a dismal political environment.
So it goes in the “land of the free and the home of the brave”. It’s hard to deny that “War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning” as so well articulated by Christopher Hedges in his book of the same name (the link is to a talk he gave at the University of California Santa Barbara a few years ago).
Peace hardly has a place at the table in the national conversation even though it has always been an underground topic of the human conversation. I just completed reading an outstanding book which was not about war and peace, but an amazing amount of conversation in this autobiographical love story* of photographer Alfred Stieglitz and artist Georgia O’Keefe was about feelings about World War I, the war raging when they met. But these were private conversations. The public conversation then was reverencing War and Soldiers and Right and Might in that spectacularly misnamed “war to end all wars”.
Indeed, there is hardly any place for public conversation about the virtues of peace. I have found that peace people, while representing the dominant feeling of people yearning peace, are marginalized and isolated. If your ethic is peace, it is impossible to intellectually engage with someone whose investment is in war.
I am part of a group seeking a monument to Peace in the city of War Monuments, Washington D.C. It is very slow going…though in the end, it will either be Peace or Perpetual War and Death.
Why not Peace? I have a theory.

Recently, as anyone watches the news is aware, there has been an overthrow of the Qadaffi government in Libya. There has not been, to my knowledge, a single American life lost in that war.
There are many pieces of conversation about whether that War is right or wrong, but I have particularly noticed the position, delivered through Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain, that the Libya campaign has been a “failure” for President Obama and the United States. No one says this out loud, but I think the reason such a war is deemed to be a failure is that there were no deaths to, in a perverse way, celebrate our fallen American heroes and stir up patriotism.
A foolish theory? I think not. To each their own opinion.
Talk Peace.
* – My Faraway One, edited by Sarah Greenough

#422 – Dick Bernard: Walking Woodbury Days with U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar

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I walked with U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar in the annual Woodbury Days parade yesterday. While I didn’t count, it seemed there were perhaps 30 of us, along with the Senator and her daughter, on the approximately two mile walk. Cathy, my wife, walked as well, as did Amy’s daughter. (click on photos to enlarge)

Woodbury Day parade August 28, 2011


Over the years I’ve walked in a goodly number of community parades, supporting one political candidate or another. It is the very least I can do: to give support.
Whoever you see in a parade is working, no question about that. Amy and her daughter had been at the State Fair before the Woodbury gig, and went back there afterwards. We love to hate our politicians, but when they need to somehow touch base with, in Amy’s case, 5 million constituents, campaigning is also very hard work.
This year, unlike any of the others, I wondered how the folks along the route would respond.
We are, after all, in a time of hostility towards “government”, particularly “Washington” kind of government, even more particularly “Congress”, of which Amy Klobuchar is one of 535 sitting members. I see blood-vessel exploding rants against “them” frequently, as if they aren’t selected by “us”. One does begin to wonder if the community, local or greater, is full of these out-of-sorts flame-throwing folks.
Home afterwards, checking e-mails, was yet another anti-Congress e-mail – this the one which essentially suggests that our country should be run by volunteers who get paid the minimum wage and serve only one term…. Amy Klobuchar is one of “them”, of course.
Another was this, more positive little poem, though (it seemed) pointed at our entire body politic, including the politicians:
“What’s this proclivity
For increased incivility?
Is this what evolution picks?
If so, the genome needs a fix.”
But as we walked our route on a pleasant Woodbury day, yesterday, there was no sign that I saw or heard that suggested that the crowd watching was at all surly; rather it was respectful and, in fact, interested.
We tended to get a bit behind, solely because Senator Klobuchar was doing what good politicians do: engaging with people on both sides of the street.

Amy Klobuchar at Woodbury Days Parade August 28, 2011


I sensed a respectful audience for this public servant doing a necessary ritual for politicians in this country yesterday. Doubtless there were people along that route who don’t like the Senator, perhaps some who went back to their computer, as I have, but to raise one complaint or other about her and/or her colleagues. Governing a deliberately politically polarized country is not easy.
But the America I saw along this one parade route in Woodbury yesterday was a respectful and welcoming one.
It was my privilege to be along in support.

Amy Klobuchar and her daughter at the end of the Woodbury Parade Route August 28, 2011

#420 – Dick Bernard: Speaking as a Liberal

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Directly related posts: here and here.
Yesterday’s news has President Obama going on vacation for a few days. Of course, presidential vacation is not a vacation at all. But this does not prevent the Congressional critics, themselves on a one month vacation, from saying the President should be back in the White House creating jobs – the same accomplishment they are actively seeking to prevent. Helping the President get more jobs is not politically good for the opposition. And so the deadly games go on.
My favorite blogger wrote today about the Presidents vacation, and that President Obama’s selected vacation reading was the book “Nixonland” by Rick Pearlstein. (My vacation choice was Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” I recommend it very highly.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about this label “liberal”, which I am proud to affix to myself. To many, it is a cursed word, along with other swear words like “union”, and on and on. In fact, years ago, Newt Gingrich had a famous list of words. They were (and still are) very helpful for his disciples to use as they seek and achieve high office.
They are also destructive to a functioning society, as we are seeing every day.
So, what is a ‘liberal’ as compared to the polar opposite ‘other’? (I use ‘other’, because in my own experience, most liberals are conservative people*.)
All I have is personal experience, and with that there’s a story.
Three years ago I was on a bus tour exploring matters French-Canadian in northern North Dakota. We stopped at a now-empty Catholic Church in tiny Olga, ND, and our leader, Dr. Virgil Benoit of the University of North Dakota, talked powerfully to us about intercultural relationships, specifically Native Americans and French-Canadians.
On the long bus ride to Belcourt in the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, I was sitting across from Dr. Benoit, and at one point I asked him where his compassion came from. He related a specific experience at a Minnesota Indian Reservation, where, as a young PhD, a tribal elder spoke to him about priorities and social concerns. It made an indelible impression on him.
But then he turned the tables on me. “And what about you?”, he said.
I was taken aback, and struggled for an answer.
It really didn’t occur to me till later.
For me, the epiphany came in 1963-65 when my young wife and I struggled through two years of hell until she died of kidney disease in July, 1965 (she was buried on the very day the Medicare Act was signed by President Johnson). We were kids, then, and had no medical insurance. Stuff like this wasn’t supposed to happen to someone in their early 20s. I was on the brink of bankruptcy when North Dakota Public Welfare stepped forward and paid the bulk of the unpaid medical bills…and they had to stretch their rules to do that. (click on photos to enlarge)

Dick, Tom, Barbara Bernard about August, 1964, Valley City ND


The community which is government saved my and my sons future in hard times. I’ve never forgotten this; I never will. It could happen to anyone.
That, and other experiences, have made me ‘liberal’, and if that’s not okay, so be it.
In my observations over many years, it seems that there is some kind of a continuum that defines the difference between people like me, and those in the camp of the individualist, government be damned bunch.
Like all continuums, there are infinite gradations between one extreme and the other.
On one extreme are the communalists who argue that everything should be for the good of all. The Communists tried this, and it has never worked quite as the theory proposed. I suppose the Shakers were another variety; and the Amish a contemporary version.
On the other extreme, though, more akin to our most radical right wing types, is an even worse problem: in the extreme, all that matters is the individual. Theirs is a dog-eat-dog world and the strong survive, and the weak don’t. Get what you can while you can. Make the rules for the loser others. “Winner takes all”.
I’m off on the communalist side of this continuum, but far away from the extreme left that I describe.
There has always been this continuum, but the difference in the last 20 or 30 years has been the casting of one side as good, and the other evil. The side that considers my side to be evil has had the upper hand, and it is not healthy for them, for us, or for society at large. But it has been a winning formula for them, and only we can make them change their focus.
Then there’s the even more troubling “winning formula” of making a judgement of the whole, by a non-negotiable demand to resolve a part (i.e. unrestricted gun rights; an immediate end to the war in Afghanistan, and on, and on, and on.) Thinking larger is too hard, so we think small, or not at all. We just judge.
Where are you on these matters? At least think this through privately.
I’m proud to be “liberal”, and I think that, like a bird, there is a need for two ‘wings’, but wings that work together.

Dick Bernard at the White House, January 16, 1980


UPDATE: Saturday, August 20: I often describe myself as an Eisenhower kid: Dwight Eisenhower was President during virtually my entire high school and college years. I graduated from college less than a year after he left the presidency in January, 1961; and weeks after John Kennedy was elected to succeed him (I was too young to vote – 21 was voting age then).
Yes, I liked Ike, and still do. More than a few liberals I know do too. He was a moderate conservative. He’d be thrown out of todays Republican party.
My favorite blogger (see first paragraph above), was born in those days (1947), and remembers them in today’s column here. They are a little different than they are usually portrayed in those acidic “forwards” I get.

Sitting in Vice President Walter Mondale's chair, the west wing of the White House, January 16, 1980


* – I have long thought that this true conservatism of ‘liberals’ (prudence, careful in use of money) is one reason why big business doesn’t want liberals in control of government. Government waste, after all, is very good for business, not bad. It may not be good for the community that is our country, but it is great for profit.
UPDATE August 21: A good friend commented on this post, yesterday.
Bob Schmitz: I too can pin point a number of epiphany moments that led me to embrace the label liberal and now Green Party values. A recent incident confirmed my beliefs. Last summer I was in Wishek, N.D. for a wedding. Wishek votes Republican. As I was walking down the street in a residential area of the city I could not help but admire this pleasant town, but I became most impressed with the finished look to the streets with their curb and gutters, and sidewalks throughout. As I got to the end of a block after having made this observation, I looked down at an inscription on the sidewalk. It said, “WPA – 1937” [Works Progress Administration], the year of my birth. I was very much a product of the depression and my family never really recovered until the late 50s or during the golden era of our economic revival from the 30s. It is to bad that revival came as a result of military Keynesianism [WWII]. When on his death bed a few years ago my 90 year old Dad started talking politics with us. He recalled the idle men sitting on the benches in downtown Arcadia, Iowa during the 30s, and spoke of FDR with such fondness. He started to cry when he talked about Roosevelt trying to help them and how some of these public works projects started under Roosevelt gave them work and restored some dignity. My grandfather lost his farm due to the depression but recovered with WWII, which put everyone to work, including my three uncles who participated in the war. They came back and all could buy a home through the GI bill. My wife’s brothers were able to become engineers, and wealthy, by attending the school of engineering at the U of M under the GI bill. Without the GI bill they would not have been able to attend college. They by the way are Republicans. I still recall the “bums” coming to our door as a small child and before the war cranked-up. These bums were traversing the country on the old Lincoln Highway looking for work and food. Mom would make them a sandwich or let them have something from the garden in return for raking some leaves or doing a small odd job, and we didn’t have a “pot nor window” [old saying about being poor – “not a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of”] .
I want to recommend a book: “There Is Power In A Union: The Epic Story Of Labor In America” by Philip Dray. This is a wonderful history of labor and reminds us that we are still fighting the same old battles. Right now I am reading about the Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1910, a horrifying tragedy which should be memorialized, just to keep the public reminded of the consequences of Adam Smith’s free-market economics when applied in an industrial age.
Dick’s response: There were, of course, ordinary people in the depression who hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt too. I know this included some of my relatives. The same kinds of reasons some despise liberals today.
Here is one of my Depression era stories (I was born in 1940). This story is set in rural Berlin ND, about 60 miles east of Wishek on Hwy 13.
Later, another from Bob: I know there were those who disagreed about FDR. There were great discussions in my family about politics and I do recall them talking about the plutocrats or small town business people who did not want to help the derelicts and cursed FDR. My maternal grandparent did ok but retained sympathy for those who did not, and seemed willing to chip in to help the neighbor who ran onto bad times. I believe he was a closet atheist as he resisted attempts by the local Methodist minister to get him into church. Grandpa Liechti, a Swiss, said his religion consisted in doing onto others as he wished them do onto him, and that’s all he needed to know. He simply threw a biblical quote back at them and left it there. My Dad’s parents were devout Catholics but also had a strong social conscience which I think came from their life’s experience. Grandpa Schmitz was an orphan dumped with a farm family who essentially used him, which was the social welfare system of that time. I recall vividly that Mom and Dad voted for Henry Wallace in 1948, the Progressive Party candidate. He was from Iowa and the former Sec of Ag. and I believe a Vice-President under Roosevelt. Dewey was supposed to have the election locked up but Truman upset him with a very narrow victory. Mom and Dad were told that they wasted their vote. I don’t think so.
Sometime I could go on about the mental health movement in which I had the good fortune to participate. I am referring to the successful effort to empty the old state hospitals at the end of the 50s and into the 60s. The current Republicans seem to want a movement back to those days. In those bygone days the Republicans of that time saw the merit in ending the old state hospital system and participated in that effort. Elmer Andersen was one of them.
As I read history the current trends seem less scary and are nothing new, but there is no guarantee that they could not morph into full blown fascism.

#419 – Dick Bernard: Going below the surface in political hate e-mails. And, by the way, it is the Congress, specifically the House of Representatives, that authorizes the expenditures…and the debt. And mostly, it's been Republican. And "we, the people" elect every one of these representatives every two years.

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Directly Related post here; other related posts, here and here.
Yesterday, a valued relative of mine sent me one of those ubiquitous anti-Obama forwards. This one was full of dismal statistics about America suggesting that every problem was all Obama’s fault. I replied: “So what does this prove…? Is Obama THE government?” He responded: “Let’s say the situation was reversed and these same figures happened under George Bush and you sent me the same e-mail and I replied, “So what does this prove, Dick? Is Bush THE government?” I responded “But I didn’t send you the same e-mail…”
I included a few more sentences that probably won’t convince my correspondent (who claims he’s “independent”). So it goes. (Point of fact: in most of the Bush years, THE government: House, Senate and Presidency, was Republican.)
Out of curiosity, I checked my e-file against what I’ve received from this man. He’d sent me 20 of these kinds of forwards, the first on July 3. All of them had been forwarded to him by someone else, probably a friend.
In the same period I had sent one “political’ item to family members, written by myself, and clearly labeled POLITICAL in the Subject line. In that one I was commenting on Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann, then-candidates in Iowa whose records I know far too well – she’s my Congresswoman, and he was MN Governor.
My relative has been invited to read this post, and if he does, he may be surprised at how many of those things he’s sent on. Collectively, they support what I posted earlier here on June 27, 2011. He’s a foot-soldier enlisted to kill President Obama. He probably won’t like to hear that, but it’s true.
I’m one of what I believe is a small group of people who actually like getting this hate-mail circulating against the Government, Liberals, Democrats and Obama. It ‘comes in all shapes and sizes’, is sometimes subtle, sometimes very direct, but always, always, it aims to stimulate the base emotions of fear, loathing and anger, with no interest or concern about accuracy of fact. If the objective is to make the reader hate Government and all it represents, Democrats or Obama, it is not necessary to explain the piece. One just needs to get blood boiling with rage. Facts don’t matter at all. The intention is a mob mentality, mostly in people in my senior citizen age group. It is disgusting, but it is effective.
It reminds me of one particularly unfortunate situation I was proximate to a few years ago. The Middle School age daughter of good friends of ours was targeted by some of her female classmates with incessant hate e-mails. The parents and (I believe) the school administration did all they could do to stop this terror campaign, but nothing worked. Ultimately, the family sold their home and moved to a new town and their daughter had an opportunity to start over and be the honor student that she could be. (She’s now in University).
The gang of teen girls ‘won’, I guess…but what did they really ‘win’? Same question for the producers and distributors of the hate mail.
Last week, from two people in Illinois and Arizona who have no way of knowing each other, came identical copies of one of these hate-mails which was especially interesting. It was interesting in that, while its targets were people like me, it was most accurately and appropriately describing the current Republican and Tea Party Congress, especially the U.S. House of Representatives. For those with an interest, I’m reprinting most of the e-mail below, with annotations.
If you aren’t interested in detail, at least note this accurate quote from the particular e-mail (which proclaims itself to be “completely neutral”): “The Constitution [of the United States], which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes…House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.”
Note also, that in the e-mail there is not a single suggestion about who it is that selects those members of the House of Representatives – it is we, the electorate in those 435 Congressional districts around the U.S. They are Us. Your vote (or non-vote) can have dire consequences. WE are totally responsible for the mess in Washington.
Note, (and consider printing out), the single sheet that shows the general composition of the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate and Presidency since 1977. It is here: Congress 1977-2011001 I prepared this sheet for my own information in April, 2009, (with update for 2011-13 today) less than three months after President Obama was inaugurated. I prepared it because already then, the President was being accused of being a failure as President. The campaign has been incessant since then.
The e-mail from which the above quote has been extracted follows in total, with my additional comments bold-faced and in [brackets]. Most of what Reese writes about I, as a liberal, could easily agree with, regardless of what party is in power.
Minor word changes that do not seem to reflect Reese’s meaning are not noted here.
The analysis of the e-mail, at least the portion supposedly written by Charley Reese can be found here.
THE SUPPOSED CHARLEY REESE COMMENTS
“Be sure to read the Tax List at the end” [not included, as it has nothing to do with Charlie Reese]
This is about as clear and easy to understand as it can be. The article below is completely neutral, neither anti-republican or democrat [agree]. Charlie Reese, a retired reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, has hit the nail directly on the head, defining clearly who it is that in the final analysis must assume responsibility for the judgments made that impact each one of us every day. Its a short but good read. Worth the time. Worth remembering! [No idea who wrote this preamble, typical of such forwards]
545 vs. 300,000,000 People
by Charlie Reese
[Much of the column printed below is word-for-word from a 1985 version which did not appear in the Orlando Sentinel. There was a similar column in the 1995 Orlando Sentinel, but with differing wording. Reese did write both. In 1985 the Congress was Democrat and the President Republican. In 1995 and again in 2011, the Congress was Republican and the President Democrat.]

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?
Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?
You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The President does.
You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.
You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.
You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.
You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve bank does.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
[In his 1995 version, Reese said this, which was left out of the 2011 forward: I exclude the vice president because constitutionally he has no power except to preside over the Senate and to vote only in the case of a tie.] I excluded [excused]the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913 Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.
[in 1985 version but not in 2011: Don’t you see the con game that is played on the people by the politicians? ] Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.
What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.
The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. [In the forward, but not in 1985 column: Who is the speaker of the House now? He is the leader of the majority party. he and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.]
[ditto It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 who stand convicted — by resent facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.]
[ditto If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.]
[ditto If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.]
[ditto If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan…]
[ditto If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.]
[ditto There are no insoluble government problems.]
[ditto Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.]
Those 545 people, and they alone are responsible.
[in 2011, not in 1985:They, and they alone, have the power.]
They and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided they have the gumptin to manage their own employees…
[in 2011, not in 1985: We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!]
The rest of the 2011 forward, fully half of the document, has nothing at all to do with the real or alleged Charley Reese column so is not reprinted here.