Two Beatles anniversaries of note today: The movie “Yellow Submarine” premiered in London …
… six years before John Lennon was ordered to leave the U.S. within 60 days. (He didn’t.)
Birthdays today start with pianist Vince Guaraldi. Who? The creator of the Charlie Brown theme (correct name: “Linus and Lucy”):
It turns out that there are a lot of people who listen to National Public Radio’s “1A.”
The list of stations that carry all, or some, of “1A,” including the Wisconsin Public Radio Ideas Network, runs from Birmingham, Ala., to Buckhannon, W.Va., the latter famous for …
… and from Concord, N.H., to Coachella, Calif., and from Miami, Fla., to Walla Walla and Yakima, Wash. It’s not on in Alaska or Hawaii, but it is on in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It’s on in states I’ve never been to, including Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas (though I was on the air once in Texarkana, Texas, broadcasting an adult amateur hockey tournament), Virginia and West Virginia, and Washington state and Washington, D.C.
That doesn’t mean that if I flew to Charlotte Amalie and asked random people if they knew me because I was on NPR on WTJX (93.1 FM) back on July 12 that they wouldn’t assume I had gotten too much sun and too much rum. I was on the BBC World Service earlier this year too, so I was theoretically on worldwide, but between the Beeb and NPR I guess I have now spoken to the biggest audience(s) in my entire life this year. As I said before, had I realized the size of the potential audience, I might have been more nervous.
The show can be heard here. It was, as is usually (but not always) the case with public broadcasting, a very civil discussion. As is always the case, there were some things I wished I had said but didn’t, and some points the other two guests made that I didn’t get to respond to, but such is the way of live radio or TV.
Read the Facebook comments on the show, and you will get an interesting look at how others (and some Wisconsinites and ex-Wisconsinites) view Wisconsin. And not favorably. I find it fascinating that there are people who base their opinion about not merely where they live, their state or the U.S., but even the state of their lives on what the government is or isn’t doing and who is or isn’t in office. (This is one reason I believe conservatism, or at least its libertarian side, is vastly superior to all the leftward “isms,” because one facet of the correct way of thinking is that government should never be the be-all and end-all of anyone’s life, even if the right people, however you define that, are in charge.) Similar statements, including some of mine, can be found on 1A’s Twitter feed.
I admit I did not get a chance to read Kauffman’s book. Charlie Sykes did:
What happened in Wisconsin should be a cautionary tale for the Left in the Age of Trump. But as this book makes clear, the Left declines to be cautioned.
According to the publisher, The Fall of Wisconsin gives “the untold story behind the most shocking political upheaval in the country.” But that story has, in fact, been told repeatedly, and author Dan Kaufman adds little to those accounts. Rather than a thoughtful critique of how progressives in a state with such a rich political tradition squandered their historical advantages, what we get is a work of ideological nostalgia, written with political rage goggles. Kaufman yearns for a return to the days of Scandinavian-style social-democratic politics, which he thinks have been defaced and degraded by a deep-pocketed and malign conservative machine.
The Fall of Wisconsin is packed with the sort of stories that progressives tell one another to account for their multiple defeats. It wasn’t anything we did, they reassure themselves; it was big money, the Koch brothers, Citizens United, voter-ID laws, gerrymandering, and a vast conservative infrastructure.
Kaufman paints a dystopian picture in which conservatives such as Governor Scott Walker (very much the villain of the book) “pitted Wisconsin citizens against one another, paving the way for the decimation of laws protecting labor unions, the environment, voting rights, and public education.” The results of those Republican victories, he writes, have been “disastrous” for just about everyone and everything, from the middle class to the environment, children, and small animals.
How awful — except that I live in Wisconsin and I can testify that, contra the title of this book, it has not “fallen.” Actually, it’s quite nice here, especially during our six weeks or so of summer. Despite his depiction of Wisconsin as a reactionary hellhole, the unemployment rate here is 2.9 percent, well below the national average; both the labor force and wages are growing; everyone in poverty is covered under Medicaid; the state has the ninth-best high-school-graduation rate in the country, and school spending is on the rise; and the state’s GDP has grown faster than that of neighboring Minnesota.
But I can certainly understand why the author and his allies on the left are rending their garments over what has happened here. Few states have flipped more decisively from blue to red, and the transformation of the state’s politics from progressivism to conservative dominance has been traumatic and disorienting.
Kaufman takes great pains to retell the story of Wisconsin’s progressive glory days and its role in pioneering progressive legislation. Wisconsin was the first state to enact an unemployment-
insurance program, the first to grant collective-bargaining rights to municipal employees, and one of the first to enact a progressive income tax. “Indeed,” he recalls, “much of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the Social Security Act, was drafted by Wisconsinites loyal to what is called the Wisconsin Idea.”But his history is truncated and selective, more a morality play than an attempt to chronicle the state’s idiosyncratic political history. Kaufman’s narrative sees Wisconsin locked in a decades-long battle over the question posed by its iconic former governor “Fighting” Bob La Follette: “Who shall rule — wealth or man?” In Kaufman’s telling, progressive Wisconsin Republicanism extended through the 1960s. The turning point, he writes, was the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which removed many limits on campaign spending. From that point on, writes Kaufman, “Wisconsin’s politics started becoming more like the politics of other states.”
This fits into his preferred narrative of wealth versus people, but the result is that he glosses over quite a bit of history, including the career of Wisconsin’s red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy. Similarly, former governor Tommy Thompson, who was elected to four terms and compiled an impressive reformist record, barely rates a mention. Nor does he spend much time analyzing the rise of Walker, suggesting at one point that he “attracted little notice during his time in the state assembly,” when in fact he was a ubiquitous presence in the local media. Kaufman devotes only a single paragraph to Walker’s improbable election as county executive in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee County after a pension scandal that implicated both the unions and local Democratic politicians.
And he has little to say about Walker’s deeply unpopular Democratic predecessor, Jim Doyle, except to blame the bad economy for “forcing” Doyle to ram through massive tax hikes in the midst of the financial crisis after repeatedly promising not to do so.
But Kaufman does have a great deal to say about the reactionary forces that conspired to “decimate” Wisconsin. Much of his book is devoted to documenting the “vast infrastructure conservatives [have] created over the past forty-five years,” including groups such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity. At the center of that conspiracy in Wisconsin sat the Bradley Foundation, which “distributes tens of millions of dollars in grants to think tanks, litigation centers, opposition research firms and other organizations promoting a spectrum of conservative causes such as Voter ID laws, school vouchers, the curtailing of safety net programs, and anti-union measures like right-to-work laws.” (Full disclosure: My wife formerly worked at the Bradley Foundation as director of community programs.)
Kaufman is especially troubled by the network of conservative think tanks clustered around the State Policy Network and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which allowed conservatives to share ideas and model legislation with legislators around the country. Kaufman struggles to portray the policy initiatives as sinister, highlighting, for example, the group’s support for a “Special Needs Scholarship Program Act,” which gave children with disabilities scholarships to attend schools of their choice. He quotes one Wisconsin legislator describing the ALEC-backed legislation that created education-savings accounts as “the death of public education.” You get the idea.
Not surprisingly, much of Kaufman’s account centers on the battles over Act 10, Walker’s proposal to limit the collective-bargaining powers of public employees. His account of the mass protests is nothing if not romantic, quoting speculation that the mass protests were a sign that Wisconsin was becoming the “Tunisia of collective bargaining rights” (a reference to the Arab Spring, which was then breaking out in the Middle East).
In his telling, the protesters were passionate, idealistic, and not at all to blame for their failure or subsequent electoral defeats. Reading Kaufman’s book, one would have no idea that in fact the protests backfired by alienating voters across the state.
Early polling suggested that support for Walker’s reform was soft, at best. But public opinion began to turn as the protests escalated. Demonstrators occupied and trashed the state capitol and marched on Walker’s family home in Wauwatosa, where his elderly parents lived. Others, dressed as zombies, disrupted a ceremony to honor participants in the Special Olympics. Death threats and obscene letters became commonplace, and the language of Walker’s critics was especially toxic. During one of the protests in Madison in 2011, a video captured one demonstrator repeatedly shouting the F-word at a 14-year-old girl who was speaking at a pro-Walker rally. On the floor of the state assembly a Democratic state representative turned to a female Republican colleague and shouted, “You are f***ing dead!” A progressive talk-show host mocked the state’s female lieutenant governor for having colon cancer and suggested she had gotten elected only because she had performed oral sex on talk-show hosts.
Readers won’t find any of that in Kaufman’s sanitized account and, as a result, will probably have a hard time understanding why Walker went on to be reelected twice while the GOP strengthened its hold on the legislature.
But perhaps the most revealing aspect of The Fall of Wisconsin is Kaufman’s choice of Randy Bryce as the hero. Often known as the “Iron Stache,” Bryce is an ironworker and union activist who has become something of a media/Hollywood/progressive celebrity for launching a bid to unseat U.S. House speaker Paul Ryan before Ryan announced his retirement. As it happens, even though Bryce is locally known as something of an Internet troll, perennial losing candidate, and deadbeat, Kaufman has been touting the Stache for years, including a long article featuring him in The New York Times Magazine in 2015. Even on the left, there have been growing misgivings about Bryce, for example a piece in Vice titled: “Democrats Bet Big on ‘Iron Stache.’ They May Have Made a Mistake.”
The article noted that “Bryce is perhaps more politically vulnerable than his liberal fans realize,” citing a series of failed previous campaigns and a tangled personal backstory that includes unpaid debts and multiple arrests, including a DUI. Despite that, he loaned his failed state-senate campaign $5,000 and, according to the New York Times, bought Twitter followers in 2015. He’s been dogged by reports about his offensive tweets (“If you look up the word succubus, you’ll see Ivanka Trump”) and was caught claiming nonexistent endorsements.
But Dan Kaufman has seen the future, and it is more social democracy and more Stache. “The support for Bryce,” Kaufman enthuses, “was a sign of a broader awakening.”
Perhaps not.
Two points I made more than once on the show. Coming into the 2010 election Wisconsin had a Democratic governor, Democratic-controlled Legislature, and only one Republican statewide official. All of that exactly reversed in the 2010 election, the GOP has controlled the governor’s, attorney general’s and state treasurer’s offices and, except for a few months around Recallarama, both houses of the state Legislature. Voters have four chances — the 2012 recall election and the 2012, 2014 and 2016 elections — to change that, and they have declined to do so.
Kaufman and others on his side will blame gerrymandering (which helped Walker how?), the Evil Koch Brothers, other big campaign money (which is the fault of excessive government power, which means excessive stakes in elections and the absolute need to do whatever it takes to win) or whatever boogeyman the left likes. The fact is that a majority of Wisconsin voters to this point have approved of what Walker and Republicans have done in Wisconsin, and a majority of Wisconsin voters to this point have not felt the need to restore power to Democrats. Like it or not, that is reality. And trying to shame voters for their incorrect (in the leftward opinion) views or past votes isn’t likely to make them vote correctly (in the leftward opinion) in the next election(s).
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
One way to make enemies in a small-town school district, it turns out, is to start sniffing around its finances.
Christa Reinert was hardly welcomed when she joined the Mercer School Board in 2016. She’d run, at least partly, in protest after two girls basketball coaches — one a sitting School Board member at the time — allowed players to watch the sexploitation flick “Fifty Shades of Grey” on a road trip.
But things got worse, she says, when she started asking questions:
Why, for example, were board members approving staff contracts they’d never seen?
Why was the district administrator’s salary higher than his contract stipulated?
And why had the community recreation fund in this tiny Northwoods district — with 151 students in a single K-12 school — ballooned in the years after the administrator’s arrival from about $3,000 a year to more than $200,000 on average over the last seven years.
District Administrator Erik Torkelson and School Board members — one of them his mother-in-law — were openly hostile, she said. Torkelson directed his staff to stop providing her documents without an open records request and payment upfront.
So Reinert took her concerns to the state Department of Public Instruction.
DPI issued a finding late last month that the Mercer School District inappropriately spent about $175,000 from its community programs and services account — otherwise known as “Fund 80” — over the 2015-’16 and 2016-’17 school years. Most of that was used to boost wages and benefits for a small group of employees, including Torkelson, without adequate documentation, according to the letter.
DPI also admonished board members for voting on bonuses for administrators, including $11,000 for Torkelson, in closed session.
As a result, the department has issued a “revenue limit adjustment” for an equal amount, meaning the Mercer board will have to slash spending or tap its reserves to balance its 2018-’19 budget. And a second hit could follow if it doesn’t change its practices for the coming school year, according to the state.
“They still have time to demonstrate … that their funds were spent properly. But they did not provide that (documentation) to us,” DPI spokesman Thomas McCarthy said.
Torkelson and board President Noel Brandt have declined repeated requests for interviews over the last week. But Torkelson said in an email to the Journal Sentinel that he and the district’s attorneys “vehemently disagree” with the agency’s findings and will be filing an appeal.
Reinert said she takes no satisfaction in the ruling.
“At this point, it’s going to hurt the kids in the school,” said Reinert, who owns Flambeau Flowage Sports and the adjacent Looney Beans Coffee shops on Highway 51, the main drag through this Iron County town of about 1,400.
“They’re blaming this on me,” she said of Torkelson and his supporters on the board. “But I didn’t take the money. I didn’t pay people over contract. I didn’t approve any of that,” she said. “I was the one questioning it over the last two years, because it sounded exorbitant to me.”
The DPI probe focused on how the tiny school district spent its Fund 80 dollars for recreation including pickleball and community programming over the two years. Torkelson said in a January interview that the district offers a broad array of programming — child care, senior meals, yoga, art and music classes — that have “transformed the culture of our district.”
Critics dismiss it as a handful of sparsely attended classes and a “walking track” through the halls of the school.
The DPI ruling is the latest turn in an ongoing community squabble that appears to have begun with a controversial school referendum in 2013.
Mercer is considered a property-rich school district, one of a number of districts in resort communities around the state where high-end vacation homes skew the property values, effectively reducing their access to state dollars.
Most of its $3.5 million annual budget comes from local taxpayers, who can be sensitive to spikes in their property tax bills. And many revolted when a 2013 referendum, which was expected to raise taxes by $11 per $100,000 in home value, came in at more than 10 times that amount.
Since then, a small group of residents has been raising concerns about the school district at meetings and online. Complaints have run the gamut, from grade inflation and declining ACT scores to Torkelson’s relationship with the School Board and its financial operations.
Of keen interest has been Torkelson’s compensation. Torkelson was paid about $136,000 last year, though his contract was for about $98,000, according to his critics. He said he effectively buys back some of his benefits, including insurance and unused vacation days, but Reinert and others say that should total no more than $114,000.
And things could get heated. In 2014, a local blogger, Richard Thiede, sued the district for suggesting he was tied to a supposed hacking of the district’s email system. Reinert was slapped with a restraining order over the “Fifty Shades” fracas. Late last year, the board voted to consider legal action against anyone, including Reinert, who forwarded an email letter critical of the district.
“People have been intimidated, and there’s been outright vandalism of people critical of the School Board. Metal shards have been put in tires; I had it happen twice,” said Richard Kemplin, a local activist and Reinert ally who records board meetings.
When board critic Paul Juske ran against Kelly Kohegyi, Torkelson’s mother-in-law, vandals “smashed his mailbox, stole his campaign signs, sent out an illegal flyer,” Kemplin said. “The GAB found it violated election laws, but we couldn’t get the DA to prosecute.”
Tensions boiled over at the October 2017 annual meeting when resident Rick Duley tried to discuss what he called the district’s “pathetic” ACT scores. Shouting ensued. Brandt rose from his seat to confront him, and they were separated by Iron County sheriff’s deputies, who’d been called by Torkelson earlier because another resident was “becoming agitated.”
No charges were filed; Iron County District Attorney Matthew Tingstad said nothing in the deputies’ reports rose to the level of a crime.
Reinert and Duley, as well as one of the deputies, tried to obtain the district’s video of the meeting, but were not successful.
Months later, then-President Deanna Pierpont told the Journal Sentinel that she had erased it, and that Mercer no longer records its meetings.
“I didn’t like what I saw. … People in the audience were yelling. Students were there. … I just felt that I didn’t want that out on the website.”
Reinert was stunned when she heard, but not entirely surprised.
“Unbelievable. I was afraid they were going to do that,” Reinert said. “It’s illegal. You can’t just get rid of documentation of a public meeting.”
Reinert won’t say she feels vindicated by the DPI letter. But she does think it explains why she wasn’t welcomed by her colleagues on the board.
“They didn’t just dislike me. I got along with everyone at the school until the ‘Fifty Shades,’ ” she said. “They didn’t want me on the board … because I wasn’t complacent. I wasn’t going to go along with the status quo.”
This looks to me like a district administrator who needs to find a different employer, and a school board that needs several members removed from office.
This is a slow day in rock music, save for one particular birthday and one death.
It’s not Tony Jackson of the Searchers …
… or Tom Boggs, drummer for the Box Tops …
Today in 1963, Paul McCartney was fined 17 pounds for speeding. I’d suggest that that may have been the inspiration for his Wings song “Hell on Wheels,” except that the correct title is actually “Helen Wheels,” supposedly a song about his Land Rover:
Imagine having tickets to this concert at the Anaheim Civic Center today in 1967:
Today in 1984, John Lennon released “I’m Stepping Out.” The fact that Lennon stepped out of planet Earth at the hands of assassin Mark David Chapman 3½ years before this song was released was immaterial.
This being Bastille Day, it seems appropriate to bring you some French rock music. (Despite my 2.5 years of middle school and four years of high school French, I understand none of the words.)
Outside of France, today in 1967, the Who opened the U.S. tour of … Herman’s Hermits.
Today in 1986, Paul McCartney released his “Press” album:
Other than Woody Guthrie, who was not a member of the rock or pop music worlds, the only birthday of today is Jos Zoomer, drummer for Vandenberg:
Today in 1984, Philippe Wynne, former member of the Spinners, died of a heart attack while performing in Oakland:
Gary Smith reviews a book:
“I don’t think You’re man enough to take on a car like this.” Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) has just walked into Pete’s Dependable Used Cars somewhere in Idaho. He eyes up a Cameo White ’73 Trans Am with a red “shaker.” “It’s a repo. Three thousand and change,” says Pete. Seconds later, the Trans Am is flying through the western countryside, stolen. Movies made the Trans Am an American legend.
Tom Glatch tells the inside story of the Trans Am’s impact on the culture (and sales) through it’s starring role in several motion pictures and TV shows. Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot drove a Cameo white ’73; John Wayne’s Brewster Green ’73 in McQ; and David Carradine’s red ’73 in Cannonball. 1977 introduced Burt Reynolds drove a black TA “Bullet” in Smokey and the Bandit, along with Hooper. “Ain’t nobody can fly a car like Hooper.” Steve McQueen drove a ’80 TA in Hunter. Steve died four months after the film was released. In the early ’80s David Hasselhoff starred in the TV series Knight Rider that featured KITT, the talking Trans Am. Tom reveals many inside details about the making of the films, how the cars were procured, and what became of them.
The book quotes many designers and engineers who had something to do with the Trans Am. Norm Inouye drew the famous flaming bird graphic based on a sketch by Pontiac Studio Chief Bill Porter. After a flaming initial rejection by Bill Michell, it finally became an option beginning in 1973. Porter recently commented, “I think it may have saved the car. In the mid-seventies, everything was going against the Firebird, and I’ll put he case forward that the Trans Am bird saved it.”
Mitchell’s Pegasus
Enzo Ferrari gave Bill Mitchell a 347 horsepower V-12 from a Ferrari Daytona 365 GT/B4 for his customized Firebird, Pegasus. The motor was a tight fit, and the author states that the firewall was moved back nine inches to accommodate the longer engine. However, you can clearly see that there were no modifications made to the interior or the wheelbase of the Pegasus. The V-12 was shoehorned in by taking up the space occupied by the stock fan and fan shroud.
1989 Turbo Trans Am
As an added bonus the author devotes several pages to the development of the 1989 Turbo Trans Am, the fastest four-seat American car of the 1980s. Pontiac built two Trans Ams in 1986 with the Buick Turbo 3.8-liter engine. But for the engine package to fit, the passenger-side fame rail was modified to make room for the exhaust downpipe. Production was not feasible, because the car would have to be re-certified at great expense to meet government crash standards. Using the standard Trans Am transmissions was also a certification issue.
The PAS team was brought in to see if production would be possible by other means. Bill Owen of Buick, the primary engineer behind the Turbo V-6 engine, came up with the idea of using the cylinder heads from the front-wheel-drive 3300 V-6 to narrow the width of the engine and make room for the transmission bracket so that the entire Grand National engine/transmission package would fit, along with the different heads. With this, the first production-ready Turbo Trans Am was born. Lloyd Reuss, executive vice president for GM’s passenger car group at the time, drove the gray-on-gray prototype and decided he wanted it to be the 30th Anniversary Trans Am.
Pretty interesting stuff. There are a lot of similar insights in the book.
By the way, in the gallery there is a shot of five ’77 TAs and a GMC motorhome that was part of the Trans Am Territory promotion. It is included in Michael Lamm’s great book, The Fabulous Firebird. One day at GM Design they picked out several TAs in the parking lot for the shot. The yellow TA was my car.
The Trans Am was named for a racing series of the same name, which included such pony cars as the Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger and AMC Javelin, each of which was limited to a 5-liter V-8 engine.
We owned very mild versions of two of these. Our first new second car was a brown 1973 Javelin with the 304 V-8 and automatic. It was the first car I, uh, legally drove. It had bucket seats and console, which was cool. It did not have power brakes, which one could get used to; it also didn’t have a parking brake indicator light, which led to a few interesting moments when one tried to drive without releasing the parking brake. It was fun to sit in the front seats of that car, but not so much in the back.
Twelve years later, my mother got a red 1985 Camaro, because her oldest son kept using the 1975 Caprice, about which I have previously written. The Camaro had the 2.8 liter V-6 and automatic. It was an unusually reliable car for a GM product of the day; the only problem I recall with it was that the shifter knob kept coming apart until a recall. The problem that fit in the category of Feature, Not Bug was that that Camaro was so low that I had to put my hand on the ground first to get out.
Between Javelin and Camaro ownership, the motorheads at my middle school (none of whom of course could legally drive) there was an ongoing argument about the Trans Am and the Corvette. The late ’70s C3 had the L-48 350 V-8 engine standard, with the L-82 350 V-8, with 40 more horsepower, optional. The standard Trans Am had a 400 V-8 with the same horsepower as the L-48, with the “T/A 6.6” V-8 adding 20 more horsepower.
Both cars are an example of 1970s taste, such as it was:
You could logically guess that I pined for the Corvette. I was a subscriber to Motor Trend magazine (motto: Every Car’s Great!), and when it reviewed the ’77 I pored over every word, including the red bubble on top of the antenna for the AM/FM/CB radio. (Don’t ask me how I remember that, good buddy.)
The reason the Trans Am became so popular in the late ’70s wasn’t just “Smokey and the Bandit” (starring ’70s icon Burt Reynolds), but because there were few other choices for a hot car. (“Hot” as in high performance, such as it was in the day, not “hot” for stolen.) Besides the Corvette (which was more expensive and lacked any back seat, as opposed to pony cars’ Back Seat in Name Only) … well, AMC killed the Javelin, and Chrysler killed the Plymouth Barracuda and Dodge Challenger. Chevy killed the Camaro Z-28 in 1975, only to bring it back in late 1977 after noticing Trans Am sales. Ford’s Mustang II was based on the Pinto, and without a V-8 until 1975, one year before Ford introduced the Cobra II package powered by a 140-horsepower V-8.
The ultimate Trans Am is the Special Edition T/A, available in black with gold bird thing on the hood or gold with black thing on the hood. According to this site, the correct combination — the T/A 6.6, 4-speed manual and T-tops — was chosen by 2,699 buyers.
The writer’s name is Orkin. Haris Orkin.
I was a skinny, bookish, bespectacled, and insecure 12-year-old living in the suburbs of Chicago when I first realized what I wanted to be when I grew up: Alexander Mundy in It Takes a Thief, James West in The Wild, Wild West, and James Bond. Those men had no fear. They were confident in any situation and were comfortable in their own skin. Not me. I lived a life of perpetual embarrassment. Of course, now I know that’s how most 12-year-olds feel. At the time, all I knew was I wanted to be someone else.
The first Bond movie I saw was In Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond was engaged to be married to Teresa (Tracy) Draco, played by Diana Rigg. I was a huge “Avengers”‘ fan back then. (I’m talking about the English “Avengers,” not the Marvel “Avengers,” though I was an avid comic book reader as well.)
Who wouldn’t want to be engaged to Diana Rigg in 1969? She was beautiful and smart and effortlessly cool. Bond was heartbroken when (spoiler alert) Diana Rigg died. At least he avoided getting married. It was clear even to my 12-year-old self that no one wanted a married Bond—a Bond who had to change nappies and help with the dishes. They killed off his fiancé so Bond could continue to be a lady killer. This is probably just as well. Bond would have made a terrible husband and a worse father. The first time his kid spilled a Cherry Slurpee on the supple leather of his Aston Martin, Bond would have launched his tiny ass into the stratosphere with his ejector seat.
There’s no denying that being Bond has its perks. You visit all kinds of exotic places and drive unbelievable cars. You have a license to kill and because you do, you can take what you want and do what you want and no one stands in your way. Men fear you and women fall all over you. Best of all, you get to make a difference. You get to save the world.
There’s also a pretty significant downside. After all, no one really cares that much about Bond, and Bond doesn’t really care all that much about anyone else. That makes for a pretty lonely life. That’s not the worst of it. Bond isn’t willing to open himself up to love. He’s kind of an emotional coward. He isn’t willing to care deeply about someone. He’s too afraid of getting his heart broken, too afraid of experiencing loss.
Fathers face that kind of fear every day. We worry about our kids. We worry about them physically and psychologically. We worry about their futures. To me, the idea of losing a child is far more frightening than having a supervillain like Auric Goldfinger barbecue my scrotum with an industrial laser.
In the original Magnificent Seven, Charles Bronson played a gunfighter who comes to a Mexican village with six other gunmen to protect the town. He’s admired by three little Mexican boys who follow him everywhere. They worship him for his bravery and aspire to be just like him. They think their fathers are cowards in comparison. Bronson paddles their asses and gives them a speech that has always stayed with me:
Don’t you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally, it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery.
Am I sorry I didn’t become an international super spy? Would I have enjoyed jetting around the world, dispatching super villains and romancing women with names like Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead? Probably. Then again, when I was in junior high, I was painfully shy around girls. I was awkward, tongue-tied, and insecure. Not exactly James Bond material. By the time I hit college, I started capitalizing on the strengths I did have. Like my honesty, my empathy, and my self-deprecating humor. Besides, if I had become James Bond, I wouldn’t have had time to coach my son’s soccer team or teach him how to ride a bike. I wouldn’t have had time to take him hiking or watch “Looney Tunes” or play video games with him. I would have missed everything.
My son saw me for who I was: a combination of contradictory traits. I was klutzy and confident, bold and bashful, and I made fun of my own awkwardness. Humor was my secret weapon. He watched and learned, and had none of my bashfulness when it came to the opposite sex. He had a lot of friends who happened to be girls. He saw them as equals. He had no expectations, so he didn’t make things weird. He was honest about his feelings and didn’t play any macho games. He was a good person and girls could see that. And he was funny. That’s probably why he had a girlfriend from the time he was 12.
Maybe you don’t need a license to kill to be a hero, after all. Maybe there’s more than one way to save the world. Maybe it’s more important to be a good parent. Maybe it’s more important to raise a child with confidence and kindness.
Yale Law School Prof. Akhil Reed Amar:
The nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be the next Supreme Court justice is President Trump’s finest hour, his classiest move. Last week the president promised to select “someone with impeccable credentials, great intellect, unbiased judgment, and deep reverence for the laws and Constitution of the United States.” In picking Judge Kavanaugh, he has done just that.
In 2016, I strongly supported Hillary Clinton for president as well as President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland. But today, with the exception of the current justices and Judge Garland, it is hard to name anyone with judicial credentials as strong as those of Judge Kavanaugh. He sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the most influential circuit court) and commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers and jurists.
Judge Kavanaugh, who is 53, has already helped decide hundreds of cases concerning a broad range of difficult issues. Good appellate judges faithfully follow the Supreme Court; great ones influence and help steer it. Several of Judge Kavanaugh’s most important ideas and arguments — such as his powerful defense of presidential authority to oversee federal bureaucrats and his skepticism about newfangled attacks on the property rights of criminal defendants — have found their way into Supreme Court opinions.
Except for Judge Garland, no one has sent more of his law clerks to clerk for the justices of the Supreme Court than Judge Kavanaugh has. And his clerks have clerked for justices across the ideological spectrum.
Most judges are not scholars or even serious readers of scholarship. Judge Kavanaugh, by contrast, has taught courses at leading law schools and published notable law review articles. More important, he is an avid consumer of legal scholarship. He reads and learns. And he reads scholars from across the political spectrum. (Disclosure: I was one of Judge Kavanaugh’s professors when he was a student at Yale Law School.)
This studiousness is especially important for a jurist like Judge Kavanaugh, who prioritizes the Constitution’s original meaning. A judge who seeks merely to follow precedent can simply read previous judicial opinions. But an “originalist” judge — who also cares about what the Constitution meant when its words were ratified in 1788 or when amendments were enacted — cannot do all the historical and conceptual legwork on his or her own.
Judge Kavanaugh seems to appreciate this fact, whereas Justice Antonin Scalia, a fellow originalist, did not read enough history and was especially weak on the history of the Reconstruction amendments and the 20th-century amendments.
A great judge also admits and learns from past mistakes. Here, too, Judge Kavanaugh has already shown flashes of greatness, admirably confessing that some of the views he held 20 years ago as a young lawyer — including his crabbed understandings of the presidency when he was working for the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr — were erroneous.
Although Democrats are still fuming about Judge Garland’s failed nomination, the hard truth is that they control neither the presidency nor the Senate; they have limited options. Still, they could try to sour the hearings by attacking Judge Kavanaugh and looking to complicate the proceedings whenever possible.
This would be a mistake. Judge Kavanaugh is, again, a superb nominee. So I propose that the Democrats offer the following compromise: Each Senate Democrat will pledge either to vote yes for Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation — or, if voting no, to first publicly name at least two clearly better candidates whom a Republican president might realistically have nominated instead (not an easy task). In exchange for this act of good will, Democrats will insist that Judge Kavanaugh answer all fair questions at his confirmation hearing.
Fair questions would include inquiries not just about Judge Kavanaugh’s past writings and activities but also about how he believes various past notable judicial cases (such as Roe v. Wade) should have been decided — and even about what his current legal views are on any issue, general or specific.
Everyone would have to understand that in honestly answering, Judge Kavanaugh would not be making a pledge — a pledge would be a violation of judicial independence. In the future, he would of course be free to change his mind if confronted with new arguments or new facts, or even if he merely comes to see a matter differently with the weight of judgment on his shoulders. But honest discussions of one’s current legal views are entirely proper, and without them confirmation hearings are largely pointless.
The compromise I’m proposing would depart from recent confirmation practice. But the current confirmation process is badly broken, alternating between rubber stamps and witch hunts. My proposal would enable each constitutional actor to once again play its proper constitutional role: The Senate could become a venue for serious constitutional conversation, and the nominee could demonstrate his or her consummate legal skill. And equally important: Judge Kavanaugh could be confirmed with the ninetysomething Senate votes he deserves, rather than the fiftysomething votes he is likely to get.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 