The number one song today in 1965 was this pleasant-sounding, upbeat ditty:
That was on the same day that ABC-TV premiered a cartoon, “The Beatles”:
The number one British song today in 1968:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Sept. 25
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It’s interesting to watch how so many on the left, advocates of a “complete separation of church and state,” applaud wildly whenever House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Catholicism is questioned. It was questioned again by Sinsinawa Dominican Sister Erica Jordan at the CNN “Town Hall Meeting” in August.
George Weigel, writing for First Things, says Ryan’s position on the Church’s social doctrine deserves more than a “gotcha” moment.
Speaker Ryan is a longstanding advocate of decentralizing and (as he puts it) “customizing” social welfare programs. That means abandoning one-size-fits-all attempts to address poverty and looking to the states, where a lot of the creativity in American government resides these days, for approaches that actually empower the poor, because they treat poor people as men and women with potential to be unleashed, not simply as clients to be maintained. Proposals to decentralize social welfare programs and give the states the funds necessary to conduct all sorts of customized efforts to empower the poor—crafted so that each “fits” the vast array of distinct circumstances we find in impoverished America—strike me as a sensible application of the social doctrine’s principle of subsidiarity. That principle, first articulated by Pope Pius XI in 1931, teaches us to leave decision-making at the lowest possible level in society, closest to those most directly affected by the policy in question. Paul Ryan thinks Washington doesn’t have to decide everything; Pius XI would have agreed.
The fact that poverty remains a serious problem in the United States after the federal government has spent $22 trillion dollars on social welfare programs over the past fifty years should have taught us all something about the complex problems of empowering the poor. No one with any sense or experience imagines that he or she has the silver-bullet answer to poverty in all its social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions; I know my friend Speaker Ryan doesn’t think he does. But unlike those who insist on measuring an official’s or a party’s commitment to the poor by inputs rather than outcomes (an approach that tends to instrumentalize the poor and render social welfare policy a cash transaction rather than a human encounter), Paul Ryan and reform conservatives like him are willing to face the fact that there is no direct correlation between magnitude-of-dollar-inputs and success-of-human-outcomes when it comes to anti-poverty programs. Inner-city Catholic schools (the Church in America’s most effective social welfare program) demonstrate that time and again: They spend less than the government schools, and their students learn much more—and not just in quantifiable, standardized-testing terms.
Weigel concludes,
Paul Ryan is no more the reincarnation of Simon Legree than Sister Erica Jordan and her fellow Sinsinawa Dominicans are the reincarnation of Ingrid Bergman/Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary’s. Keeping that in mind would help foster the thoughtful debate that the Speaker, and the country, would welcome.
To be fair, Ingrid Bergman was hardly Sister Mary Benedict, too.
The nuns of Sinsinawa are known for their wonderful bakery which you can order online. We strongly recommend the Sin-a Mound and serving it with coffee. Yes, it’s terribly decadent and lives up to the name.
We also suggest a visit to their beautiful chapel in Sinsinawa, WI. In such a beautiful location in southwestern Wisconsin, we hope the nuns take a prayerful moment to reflect on the role of the Catholic Church in society. In that moment, perhaps they’ll remember which political party is hostile to everything they believe, including: the importance of human life at conception, the mission of Wisconsin’s Catholic schools, the defense of marriage, and even the protection of an individual’s right to practice the Catholic faith against the power of a coercive state.
In that moment of prayer, perhaps they’ll remember that Ryan is not an enemy, and that the Catholic Church is about more than how much is spent on any government program.
(The Sinsinawa cinnamon bread is to die for, by the way, particularly if you make a fried egg sandwich with that bread and your favorite breakfast meat.)
A previous employer of mine (the best employer I’ve had) was run by an order of nuns. Some of the faculty were big fans of Catholic social teaching more so than the church’s positions on, as previously listed, abortion and marriage, and other issues on which the church can be said to be socially conservative. Since I’m not Catholic (and have become a target of some Catholics, as you know), I have to say it’s up to their church as to who they define as Catholic. But it seems to me the Sinsinawa sisters and Ryan should have more in common than not. As a Christian, as I’ve written here before, all the
As a Christian, as I’ve written here before, it seems clear to me all the Christian responsibilities Jesus Christ laid out in the four Gospels are not governmental responsibilities, not societal responsibilities, not even church responsibilities, but individual responsibilities.
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We begin with an odd moment today in 1962: Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, declined an invitation on Presley’s behalf for an appearance before the Royal Family. Declining wasn’t due to conflicting film schedules (the stated reason) or anti-royalism — it was because Parker was an illegal immigrant to the U.S. from the Netherlands (his real name was Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), and he was afraid he wouldn’t be allowed back into the U.S.
Number one in Britain today in 1964:
Number one in Britain …
… and in the U.S. today in 1983:
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On a Monday night at Milwaukee County Stadium 60 years ago, the Milwaukee Braves took on the St. Louis Cardinals in an effort to clinch the National League pennant.
Here, not in a MP3 file, is how Braves announcer Earl Gillespie called the bottom of the 11th inning.
Foreshadowing alert: Here’s the finish (not narrated by Gillespie):
Gillespie and Harry Caray, then the Cardinals’ announcer, both were known to exclaim “Holy Cow!” They probably both said that this night, though for different reasons.
The next afternoon’s Milwaukee Journal reported thusly:
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The number one song today in 1957:
The number one song today in 1967:
Today in 1969, the Northern Star, the Northern Illinois University student newspaper, passed on the rumor that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1966 and been impersonated in public ever since then. A Detroit radio station picked up the rumor, and then McCartney himself had to appear in public to report that, to quote Mark Twain, rumors of his death had been exaggerated.
(Thirty-five years to the day later, in 2004, Slipknot’s Corey Taylor issued a statement denying his death after a Des Moines radio station announced he had died from a drug overdose, then correcting to say Taylor had died in a car crash.)
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I have a busy weekend ahead, announcing a football game tonight and a football game Saturday afternoon, both here.
It is possible that those might be the last two football games I announce, because of this apocalyptic news the Washington Post reports, which of course requires music first:
A few years ago, NASA senior space scientist David Morrison debunked an apocalyptic claim as a hoax.
No, there’s no such thing as a planet called Nibiru, he said. No, it’s not a brown dwarf surrounded by planets, as iterations of the claim suggest. No, it’s not on a collision course toward Earth. And yes, people should “get over it.”
But the claim has been getting renewed attention recently. Added to it is the precise date of the astronomical event leading to Earth’s destruction. And that, according to David Meade, is in six days — Sept. 23, 2017. Unsealed, an evangelical Christian publication, foretells the Rapture in a viral, four-minute YouTube video, complete with special effects and ominous doomsday soundtrack. It’s called “September 23, 2017: You Need to See This.”
Why Sept. 23, 2017?
Meade’s prediction is based largely on verses and numerical codes in the Bible. He has homed in one number: 33.
“Jesus lived for 33 years. The name Elohim, which is the name of God to the Jews, was mentioned 33 times [in the Bible],” Meade told The Washington Post. “It’s a very biblically significant, numerologically significant number. I’m talking astronomy. I’m talking the Bible … and merging the two.”
And Sept. 23 is 33 days since the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse, which Meade believes is an omen.
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Britain’s number one song today in 1964:
Today in 1967, a few days after their first and last appearance on CBS-TV’s “Ed Sullivan Show,” the Doors appeared on the Murray the K show on WPIX-TV in New York:
Today in 1969, ABC-TV premiered “Music Scene” against CBS-TV’s “Gunsmoke” and NBC-TV’s “Laugh-In”:
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Tonight is the night sung in …
It turns out there is a story to the song, reported by National Public Radio:
If you’ve ever been to a wedding reception in the U.S., you know there’s one question that can get a whole family on the dance floor: “Do you remember the 21st night of September?”
Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” even shows up at fictional weddings, as in the opening of the 1997 movie Soul Food. It’s made its way into TV shows, commercials, sporting events and video games. HBO named a movie after the song. In 2008, it played at both the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
The story of the song begins in 1978. Allee Willis was a struggling songwriter in LA — until the night she got a call from Maurice White, the leader of Earth, Wind & Fire. White offered her the chance of a lifetime: to co-write the band’s next album. Willis arrived at the studio the next day hoping it wasn’t some kind of cosmic joke.
“As I open the door, they had just written the intro to ‘September.’ And I just thought, ‘Dear God, let this be what they want me to write!’ Cause it was obviously the happiest-sounding song in the world,” Willis says.
Using a progression composed by Earth, Wind & Fire guitarist Al McKay, White and Willis wrote the song over the course of a month, conjuring images of clear skies and dancing under the stars. Willis says she likes songs that tell stories, and that at a certain point, she feared the lyrics to “September” were starting to sound simplistic. One nonsense phrase bugged her in particular.
“The, kind of, go-to phrase that Maurice used in every song he wrote was ‘ba-dee-ya,’ ” she says. “So right from the beginning he was singing, ‘Ba-dee-ya, say, do you remember / Ba-dee-ya, dancing in September.’ And I said, ‘We are going to change ‘ba-dee-ya’ to real words, right?’ ”
Wrong. Willis says that at the final vocal session she got desperate and begged White to rewrite the part.
“And finally, when it was so obvious that he was not going to do it, I just said, ‘What the f- – – does ‘ba-dee-ya’ mean?’ And he essentially said, ‘Who the f- – – cares?’” she says. “I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove.”
I asked Jeffrey Peretz, a professor of music theory at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute, what makes that groove so powerful. He says a lot of it has to do with how the music unfolds. The song’s very structure is an endless cycle that keeps us dancing and wanting more.
“There’s four chords in the chorus that just keep moving forward and never seem to land anywhere — much like the four seasons,” he says. “It’s the end of summer, it’s the beginning of fall, it’s that Indian summertime, it’s the transition from warm to cool.”
The trigger for that yearning feeling, Peretz says, is the opening line. White asks, “Do you remember?” and we supply the memories. It’s a song that can bring all of the generations together, which makes it perfect for family gatherings. The true meaning is up to us — including, Allee Willis says, that strangely specific date.
“We went through all the dates: ‘Do you remember the first, the second, the third, the fourth … ‘ and the one that just felt the best was the 21st,” Willis explains. “I constantly have people coming up to me and they get so excited to know what the significance was. And there is no significance beyond it just sang better than any of the other dates. So … sorry!”
That’s OK, Allee. Maurice was right. It doesn’t matter what it means. When we hear it, it’s September 21st, and we are dancing again with our family, in a song that never really ends.
Well, everything ends, but not for a while …
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As recently as a couple of years ago, the next paragraph, from the (soon-to-be-defunct-because-she’s-retiring-at-the-end-of-September) Joy Cardin Show Facebook page, would not have been possible:
Why did conservatives support Donald Trump in the 2016 Election? Why don’t more conservatives reject his most controversial rhetoric today? What role did conservative media have in electing Trump? We’ll ask former WTMJ talk show host and author Charlie Sykes on Thursday from 8-9am. What questions do you have for him?I posed this to someone with whom I’ve been on WPR before suggesting that this might be a sign of the end times (more on that in this space tomorrow), and he replied:I doubt that. WPR has had YOU on and lived to tell.I will have to listen at 8 a.m. As far as I know I might be the only, or at least the first, person on the planet who appeared on both “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” …
The graphic appeared on a show after Marketplace Magazine ceased to exist. Oops. 
Either because of sticking me at the end or because I was wearing lighter clothing than the others, this photo looks like a bad Photoshop job, where a larger photo of me was grafted to the photo of the other four. 
Upon seeing me dressed like this frequent panelist Mikel Holt said that I had “dressed black.” No reason to take offense, though I wasn’t sure what of my clothing choices (olive?) fit his description. 
I got the tie because of WFRV-TV anchor Tom Zalaski. I saw it and liked it, and sent an email to channel 5 asking where he got the tie. He called back, and I bought the tie. 
This is actually my favorite Charlie Sykes photo. I had to take the boys with me for one show, and they watched off stage, then got to sit on the channel 4 news set. … and Cardin’s show. (As well as the late Wisconsin Public Television show “WeekEnd,” which concluded with a pundit panel, on which I was the non-liberal non-Madisonian.) That’s unfortunate because increasingly liberals and conservatives listen only to views like their own, and don’t take on their ideological opponents, who might force them to question their own views.Sykes, who during his varied print and broadcast career wrote a column for Isthmus, was recently profiled in Isthmus:“Charlie ought to be going out in a wave of glory.”
So wrote fellow conservative Milwaukee radio host Mark Belling on the occasion of Charlie Sykes’ retirement from the airwaves last December. Belling noted that, as of Sykes’ final radio show, Republicans were about to take full control of both the federal and state governments for the first time since the 1950s. That fact should have made this moment the pinnacle of Sykes’ 23-year radio career.
Sykes’ final week of broadcasts on WTMJ-AM included tributes from virtually every Republican political star in Wisconsin. Ron Johnson jokingly blamed Sykes for his ascent to the U.S. Senate. And Gov. Scott Walker gushed, “You have had a tremendous impact … on the conservative movement, not just here in Milwaukee, but across the state.”
Despite the glorious send-off, the 62-year-old Sykes’ political identity was in a state of upheaval. Significant swaths of the once-cohesive Wisconsin conservative juggernaut, a group that he had both led and served for decades, were now ignoring him or, even, actively shunning him.
A bomb named Donald Trump had detonated within the GOP. And Sykes, who had believed for years that Trump would be an absolutely unacceptable leader of his party, was among its casualties.
The ideological and professional stability Sykes enjoyed through his decades on the air were a contrast to his peripatetic earlier life as a student and journalist. Before radio, he had bounced back and forth between liberalism and conservatism, and from publication to publication, working as a reporter, editor and columnist.
No one could have convinced me two years ago that, come 2017, Charlie Sykes and I would be on the same wavelength. But Donald Trump has left me politically homeless, too.
While I was not one of his listeners, Sykes loomed large within the Republican Party of Wisconsin, of which I was an active, but often malcontented, member. My fellow libertarian-leaning activists and I regarded him as an establishment shill, dedicated to the promotion and protection of an ossified party power structure. Belling’s overall assessment of Sykes’ career is positive, but he observes that Sykes “often seemed like a cheerleader rather than a commentator.”
If Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus and Ron Johnson were the party capos, then Sykes was their muscle. “If you went against the grain,” recalls longtime Sykes adversary Michael Murphy of the Republican Liberty Caucus, “Charlie would call you out.”
I also assumed Sykes was, stylistically, a local version of Rush Limbaugh, his shtick exploiting the darker corners of his listeners’ psyches. Though presumptuous, my distant read of Sykes was not entirely off base. Sykes himself has spent a good deal of time lately reassessing his radio career, and acknowledging mistakes he made.
In early October, Sykes’ ninth book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book chronicles the bizarre transformation the conservative movement has undergone since Donald Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015. But it’s also a personal story. The conservative movement has been so central to Sykes’ life, and he so central to it, that the book could hardly not be personal.
While Sykes has come a long way toward making sense of what happened, he is still somewhat bewildered by Trump’s decisive capture of the movement. From Sykes’ perspective, it was a hostile takeover, constituting a “repudiation of the conservative mind.” As Sykes writes in the book, Trump had tapped into “something disturbing that we had ignored and perhaps nurtured — a shift from an emphasis on freedom to authoritarianism and from American ‘exceptionalism’ to nativism.”
When I met with Sykes late this summer, he recalled the strong sense of loss he felt as the conservative movement slid into derangement, and the decision it forced him to make. “If I break with the movement,” he had asked himself, “have I squandered everything that I’ve spent 20 years working on?” Sykes says he understands others’ reluctance to break. “This is who you are, this is your identity, these are your friends. And if you break with them, are you repudiating a real large chunk of your own life?”
Despite the high price, “There was not a single moment when I thought, ‘maybe I should go along.’” Today, he adds, “The infrastructure that I had is completely gone.”
From a distance, Sykes’ decision might not seem so self-sacrificial. He has, since Trump’s election, had multiple op-eds published in The New York Times. He co-hosted Indivisible, a WNYC radio series that explored the early Trump administration’s impact on American life. And, most notably, he is now an official contributor on MSNBC. Would any of these opportunities with big-time media have come his way had he not so publicly and vehemently refused to board the Trump Train?
At the time of his retirement, Sykes told The Cap Times that he had decided to end his radio show over a year earlier. So throughout 2016, as he relentlessly bashed Trump, he knew that he would be scouting for new opportunities.
“Charlie looks out for Charlie,” says the Republican Liberty Caucus’ Murphy. “This latest act is just him hoping to stay relevant, and maybe even go national.” Others, like Isthmus columnist and Urban Milwaukee editor Bruce Murphy, assert that Sykes’ political beliefs have often tracked with career opportunities. The reality, Murphy wrote earlier this year, “is that Charlie Sykes has been changing his views, over and over, throughout his life, and has always been rewarded for it.”
Quel horreur! Enlightened self-interest! It’s like Sykes is a capitalist or something! (Murphy doesn’t sound bitter or anything, does he?)Sykes seems dumbfounded by accusations that his steadfast opposition to Trump is driven by expediency. While people with whom he was closely associated — like Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus — moved into positions of great influence, Sykes’ uncompromising stance against Trump kept him out in the cold. “An opportunist goes with the power, not into exile.”Sykes does appreciate the “strange new respect” he is getting from corners of the media world that used to dismiss him. But he is still quick to criticize the “liberal media,” arguing that their shabby treatment of conservatives fueled the rise of the right-wing propaganda machine. Conservative news-seekers, he writes, “were drawn to safe places, but also pushed.”
At some point, conservative talk radio hosts discovered that traditional news sources make perfect foils. So the talkers pounced, and kept pouncing, until, Sykes writes, “We had succeeded in convincing our audiences to ignore and discount any information whatsoever from the mainstream media.” He regrets that this strategy of delegitimization served to “destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information.”
Sykes devotes a substantial section of How the Right Lost Its Mind to the ascendance of “Alt-Reality” propaganda, how it nurtured “Post-Truth” politics, and its role in Trump’s electoral triumph.
It’s a chilling read. A sizable chunk of the American electorate is astonishingly susceptible to fabrications, even patently absurd ones. In Sykes telling, things got so weird during last year’s campaign that a cottage industry of fake fake news sprung up. Pranksters began fashioning reports just to test the limits of credulity. One tweeted out a contrived Clinton Foundation expense report that showed payees like ‘Sharia Law Center’ and ‘Bill Ayers,’ to see if the Twitterverse would bite. (Spoiler alert: the pranksters were unable to detect any limit to credulity.)
President Trump has, in a stroke of propaganda genius, co-opted the term “fake news,” applying it to legitimate media outlets that he considers unfriendly. In our conversation, Sykes noted that for each of his op-eds, The New York Times assigned a fact-checker. When he hears the president call the Times a “fake news joke,” he remembers the extreme rigor the paper has subjected his work to.
Toward the end of his book, Sykes urges fellow conservatives to “confront the conservative media that boosted and enabled Trumpism and created a toxic alternative reality bubble.” I asked him what non-conservatives might do to help. Because false beliefs are protected by extremely stubborn psychological barriers, Sykes thinks only “still-trusted conservative voices” have the power to stop the madness. “The right’s going to have to clean up its own house.” He laments that, as of now, “We’re not seeing a lot of that.”
I find it silly that Sykes is now being called a non-conservative for daring to criticize Trump (as did, by the way, every major conservative talk-show host in this state before the Wisconsin Republican primary, which is a major reason why Trump lost the GOP primary) and his hard-core supporters, or for appearing on public radio or TV or MSNBC. He’s been quoted frequently on this blog, and other than his non-support of Trump I challenge you to find non-conservative positions he’s taken, beyond possibly support for the taxpayer-funded Miller Park. Sykes has been one of the biggest supporters of Gov. Scott Walker from Walker’s days as Milwaukee County executive. Sykes led on-air support for Act 10. Sykes was a target at the biggest act of attempted censorship of political speech in this state, the Milwaukee County John Doe investigation. Sykes spoke at at least one county Republican Party Lincoln–Reagan Day dinner, which I know because I was there.
Regular readers know the first and foremost answer to Cardin’s question is that if the alternative choice was Hillary Clinton, virtually any Republican would have voted for Trump. (I’m not a Republican, so I didn’t.) As it turned out, a lot of independents in swing states must have voted for Trump as well, because, again, he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton demonstrates daily that if the November choice was Hillary or Trump, Trump was the better choice.
Having said that, it’s clear that Trump is a situational conservative, in that sense the Republicans’ answer to Bill Clinton. Trump, author of The Art of the Deal, deals with whoever (he thinks) is in charge. So he cozies up to Sen. Charles Schumer (D–New York) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–California) on “Dreamers,” which is as Republican a thing to do as donating money to Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaigns. If Republicans lose control of Congress in the 2018 election, the resemblance between Trump and Republicans will disappear.
The answer to Cardin’s second question is answered in part because Trump has done conservative things (Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, undoing Obama regulations and executive orders, Monday’s United Nations speech), and in part by one of her Facebook commenters …
Why do we continue to ask the same question, and not accept the only answer? The answer is that every single Trump supporter is some combination of ignorant, intellectually incapable, morally bankrupt and hateful. It’s simply not possible to be a decent human being and support Donald Trump.
That Madison jackass demonstrates that liberals love every kind of diversity except diversity of opinion. Every time Trump supporters get criticized for supporting Trump, particularly when they’re accused of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc. (by the definition of the accuser), they support Trump more. Liberals are either too stupid or too hate-filled to grasp that.
As for Cardin’s third question … that’s in large part what Sykes’ book is about.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 