Today in 1964, one day after the Rolling Stones recorded their “12×5” album in Chicago, Chicago police broke up their news conference. (Perhaps foreshadowing four years later when the Democratic Party came to town?)
The Stones could look back at that and laugh two years later when “Paint It Black” hit number one:
One year later, David Bowie released “Space Oddity” …
… on the same day that this reached number one in Great Britain:
Gregory Rodriguez of something called Zocalo Public Square:
Newspapers are in trouble. Not just because of the Internet and advertising and subscriptions. But because, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, only 28 percent of Americans think that journalists contribute a lot to society’s well being.
That’s pretty bad considering that journalists like to think of themselves as guardians of democracy. In other business enterprises, such public disdain would be a cause for alarm. But newspapers are different. Criticize journalistic professionalism, and you’re likely to hear a thing or two about the importance of the First Amendment, or my favorite catch-all self-justification: If people are unhappy with us, “we must be doing something right!” Really? Is that the only reason people might be unhappy with you?
Like most Americans, I understand the need for journalists as watchdogs. But the unquestioned primacy of its watchdog duties has given serious journalism an air of self-righteous adolescent rebelliousness and sanctimony.
Veteran journalist James Fallows has written about this phenomenon in more polite terms. By falling “into the habit of portraying public life in America as a race to the bottom,” he wrote in his 1996 book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, journalists foster greater public cynicism, which, ironically, hurts the business of journalism. “If people thought there was no point even in hearing about public affairs — because the politicians were all crooks, because the outcome is always rigged, because ordinary people stood no chance, because everyone in power was looking out for himself — then newspapers and broadcast news operations might as well close up shop. … If people have no interest in politics or public life, they have no reason to follow the news.”
If the press is to uphold its self-proclaimed duty to protect our system of governance, it has to envision itself as being more than an elite defender of the public interest removed from the social fabric. Instead, journalism should fully embrace a more affirmative — and dare I say grown-up — role as the very connector of that fabric, the web of communication that defines the contours of our diverse society. …
Covering the news isn’t the same thing as making a concerted effort to give voice to our nation’s people and places. Too few Americans see themselves in daily journalism today. And if hiring statistics are any indication, professional journalism may not even care whether it reflects the nation. Despite the major demographic shift in our country over the past generation, the percentage of overall newspaper staffers and supervisors who are non-white has remained unchanged since 1994.
And opportunities for non-journalists to contribute to newspapers are meager. The op-ed pages of major newspapers have long since been given away to professional opinion makers, interest groups and the powerful.
American journalism needs to discover new ways to bring regular people into the conversation. I’m not talking about more cheap social media tricks that ask people whether they agree with a court decision or what they plan to do over the long weekend. I’m referring to ongoing efforts to bring real people’s stories — with their conflicts of interest, their messiness, their refusal to be categorized in partisan terms — directly to the public.
The loss of thousands of journalism jobs in recent years has made journalists even more self-obsessed. This concern about the survival of their careers and their outlets is understandable but counterproductive. Journalists don’t look very useful when Americans constantly see them talking among themselves about themselves.
I could demolish much of this merely by posting this comment from Rodriguez’s piece:
“American journalism needs to discover new ways to bring regular people into the conversation.”
This is typical of the arrogance of big daily newspapers. Small weeklies, like the paper I run, have been a part of the community for more than 100 years. Our community is part of the paper. Our page 1 lead photo is more often than not submitted by someone in the community. About half our paper, or more, is items written by members of the community. In the past 20 years, my community has lost about 2,000 people (net decline of population) and my subscriber base has grown.
My community writes and takes the pictures I run. I just put it print for them.
That’s not how I usually do things where I’ve worked, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t and, if appropriate, wouldn’t do that. For one thing, advances in technology mean that someone can take a photo with a cellphone that is perfectly usable for newsprint. For another, try as I might, I cannot be in more than one place at a time.
Fallows was wrong, and therefore Rodriguez is wrong, as well about journalists fostering greater public cynicism. If anything, reporters aren’t skeptical enough about what government does at every level, including your local city council and school board. (Take away the D and the R, and you’ll discover that politicians can be as craven or as thoughtless at the local level as they are at the state and national level, even politicians who make a pittance to serve on the city council.) Wonder why incumbents have a reelection rate of almost 100 percent? It’s because the media gives them free, and generally uncritical, publicity every time there’s a city council or school board meeting. The bar for a challenger of an incumbent to overcome that free publicity is very close to the ceiling.
Cynicism is an important aspect of the job of a journalist. People lie to journalists, or at least tell them something less than the complete truth, with depressing regularity. I was once told by the girlfriend of someone who was arrested that her boyfriend wasn’t going to be charged with anything in connection to his arrest. Before that, a grandfather whose sons set a house fire that killed his three grandsons and unborn granddaughter said that no, his sons didn’t do that. (His sons were sentenced to one life term per dead child.) The news of the following week disproved her assertion. How anyone can believe Hillary Clinton’s latest claim that she and Slick Willie had problems making ends meet after they left the White House in 2001 is beyond me. Indeed, watching some legislative bodies at work — full of people put there by the voters, of course — should make journalists swear off democracy forever. And journalists start the day in a sour mood because of the combination of traditionally low pay, long and irregular hours, and work environments that never win any Best Places to Work contest.
As for the rest of Rodriguez’s opinion, I suspect there are a lot of daily newspaper reporters who look down their noses at those who work for weeklies … at least until they become the victim of job cuts themselves. It is the height of arrogance to assert that quality journalism only takes place at The New York Times, or the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (for whose parent company I used to work until one of those job cut things), or the Wisconsin State Journal (which has resolutely refused to hire me despite my literally lifelong readership).
Weekly newspapers, such as the perpetually award-winning Ripon Commonwealth Press and The Platteville Journal, cover their areas in far better detail than any daily newspaper could. People buy weeklies to find out what is going on in their area, not what is going on nationally or internationally, except to the extent national or international trends affect where they live. (A quarter century ago I commented that people where I was then living seemed to have a better grasp on what was important than where I came from, the People’s Republic of Madison, to which the husband of one of our employees said, “Yeah, never mind Nicaragua — where’s my sweet corn?”)
Being a good reporter requires, first, curiosity about people. I have written more stories than I can count about business owners. I want to find out two things — why they do what they do, and how they do it — how they make a product, how they provide a service, what is it they do that makes their product or service stand out. What could be better, after all, for a reporter than to write about interesting people doing interesting things? This is far from original or brilliant insight, but it apparently isn’t taught to that many reporters, since I often don’t see it where readers should see it.
That part about being “the very connector of that fabric” is a point Rodriguez doesn’t really explain, which makes me wonder whether he even knows what he’s asserting. So I will: It means not merely getting off your chair and out of the office to talk to non-politicians and non-public officials. It means getting involved in the daily activities of life. If you have kids, you become quite interested in their schools, even though you should be interested in your schools anyway as a taxpayer. Showing up at your kids’ activities as a parent — even if you’re multitasking — might convince your readers you don’t have fangs and bite. (Well, most of the time in my case.)
I worked in a daily newspaper newsroom in the early 1990s, as one of four reporters (in addition to a sports reporter). The number of married reporters in that office totaled zero. The number of reporters with children in that office totaled zero. The number of homeowners among the reporting staff totaled zero. The number of regular churchgoers among the reporting staff probably totaled zero. You can’t cover your community without, to use a cliché, skin in the game beyond a regular paycheck.
That, of course, is advice that late-1980s Steve would have ignored. Late-’80s Steve worked and lived in a community where, it’s safe to say, the number of people like me — college-educated and unattached — could be counted with, at most, two hands, out of a community of more than 4,000. (I dated two of them. Didn’t work out.) Some would also argue that entanglements prevent reporters from being impartial and unbiased. Impartiality is dangerously close to apathy, and eliminating bias is probably impossible among human beings, but being fair is not.
The other point that needs making, and the point journalists seem to need to be reminded of, is that the First Amendment doesn’t apply only to journalists. The First Amendment applies to all Americans, including those critical of the news media, and those trying to replace the existing news media with what they think is better. Journalists ignore their audience at the peril of their own employment.
In 1979, I went to the Boy Scouts’ Philmont Scout Ranch with my father and other Boy Scouts, the summer before I went to high school.
Jimmy Carter, whose picture is next to the word “ineffectual” in the dictionary, was president. The U.S. was weak in defense and foreign policy, and the economy was about to start seriously sucking.
Thirty-five years later, our oldest son is going to high school after the summer. The economy sucks though the Obama administration and the media don’t want to admit it, and we are about as weak as we were in defense and foreign policy as we were in the bad old days of Jimmy Carter.
Victor Davis Hanson remembers 1979, and not fondly:
As Richard Nixon became increasingly paralyzed by Watergate in late 1973, the enemies of Israel felt that it was an opportune time to launch their so-called Yom Kippur War. The next year, the negotiated armistice in the Vietnam War collapsed, and the North Vietnamese seized the Mekong Delta and prepared for a final offensive against South Vietnam.
In 1979, after two full years of Jimmy Carter’s reset foreign policy — and after the president’s “malaise” speech and the surreal attack by the aquatic rabbit — various risk-takers concluded that the United States had decided that it either could not or would not intercede against aggression. In short order, the Chinese invaded Vietnam; the Sandinistas seized power in Nicaragua, and Central America descended into a Communist miasma; the Iranians took U.S. hostages in Tehran; terrorists stormed Mecca; the Soviets invaded Afghanistan — and, after that last event, President Carter confessed that he had undergone “a dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are.”
Sometimes lame-duck presidents understand that they are perceived as weak or under siege — and yet can recover with resolute action. Iran–Contra by early 1987 had almost fatally damaged Ronald Reagan. But he rallied to negotiate with Gorbachev and promote policies that would lead to the fall of the Soviet Union. By late 1998, Bill Clinton was facing impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but a strong economy and his insistence on intervening in the Balkans against resurgent Milosevic forces saved his presidency. Despite Katrina, the disastrous 2006 midterm election, and popular opposition to the Iraq War, a weakened George W. Bush rallied to save Iraq through the surge and to cobble together punitive measures against Russia after the invasion of Georgia.
We are on such a precipice now, as the perception grows that Barack Obama is mired in scandal, an economy that has been stagnant throughout his tenure, and a disastrous foreign policy. It does no good to speculate whether critics at home are right in thinking that Barack Obama is “weak” in his foreign policy. Nor is there any point in arguing whether Obama believes that the U.S. is exceptional only in the relativist sense that Greece believes it is exceptional, or whether, as he stated more recently, he believes the U.S. is exceptional in absolute terms “with every fiber of [his] being.”
The point is not what we Americans think. Instead, the world abroad, fairly or not, has concluded after five and a half years that the Obama administration is both sanctimonious and absolutely risk averse. Translated, that means the administration likes to give sonorous and platitudinous sermons that needle both our friends and our enemies, but without any intention of seeing them followed by consequences. When Obama in a variety of ways assures the world that he is not George W. Bush, this does not always reassure America’s allies that he is resolute or warn our enemies that he is formidable.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that every foreign-policy initiative the Obama administration has embraced has failed: reset with Russia, the Cairo-speech outreach to Islam, surging in Afghanistan and promising to leave, the confusion over Egypt, lead-from-behind in Libya, bombing scheduled and then abruptly canceled in Syria, pulling every soldier out of Iraq, redefining jihadism through an array of euphemisms, abandoning the tough sanctions against Iran, pressuring the Israelis, a new special relationship with Turkey, and on and on.
Even the less publicized messages that the Obama administration has sent the world have revealed either incompetence or weakness — the failure to destroy the American drone downed and captured by the Iranians, or the sloppy outing of a CIA station chief in Afghanistan.
All the step-over lines, red lines, and deadlines abroad simply mirror-image the domestic false assurances of not losing your doctor or your health plan under Obamacare. The world has caught on that Obama uses a host of emphatics (e.g., Period!, Let me be clear!, Make no mistake about it!) precisely because he seeks to accomplish in speech what he cannot do in fact. Our enemies see one constant in the litany of administration scandals — the VA, IRS, NSA, AP, Fast and Furious, and Benghazi debacles: presidential distraction and indifference. The occasional eloquent presidential proclamations of “outrageous” are not followed by even a smidgeon of consequences.
For a variety of reasons, our European and Pacific partners privately sense that the American-led postwar global order is eroding and that regional hegemons like China, Iran, and Russia are filling the gaps. The Mideast badlands seem to be expanding into Egypt, Syria, and Libya. Iran wishes to do to the Middle East what Russia is doing to the former Soviet Union.
The surge had saved Iraq, and now the post-surge skedaddle is losing it. South America is increasingly regressing into leftwing statism and authoritarianism, assured that the United States either doesn’t care or privately likes its new trajectory. Al-Qaeda is hardly on the run; instead, it is spreading, partly on the suspicion that the United States with neurotic predictability seeks novel ways of not offending radical Islam. When al-Qaeda’s Dr. Zawahiri hears of overseas contingency operations, man-caused disasters, the Muslim-outreach efforts of NASA, jihadism as a personal journey, Guantanamo virtually closed, or civilian trials for terrorists and then not, he is not convinced the U.S. is ready to strike at the first sign of Islamist terror. China believes that the Obama administration is symptomatic of U.S. decline and without the wherewithal to protect its Pacific allies.
Aside from al-Qaeda–sponsored terrorism, there are lots of hot spots around the world that could flare up in the last two years of the Obama administration. Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the rest of the periphery of Putin’s Russia; Taiwan, the air and sea space surrounding Japan, the Vietnam-China border, the 38th parallel; Cyprus and the Aegean; the hostile neighborhood of Israel; Iran with its defiant nuclear efforts; and on and on. Some authoritarian rogue state or terrorist in the next 30 months may well risk aggression, on the expectation that never in the last half-century has there been a better opportunity to readjust the status quo. When Obama proclaims that climate change is now the most pressing American foreign-policy challenge, many bad actors abroad feel relieved — as if coal burning rather than aggression is about the only sin that might anger America.
Today in 1964, the Rolling Stones recorded their “12×5” album at Chess Studios in Chicago:
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Today in 1972, Elvis Presley recorded a live album at Madison Square Garden in New York:
Normal people probably did not pay attention to the Wisconsin Democratic convention in Wisconsin Dells this past weekend.
I’m not sure I’m normal, but I would rather organize my desk than attend a convention of people who are profoundly wrong on nearly every issue facing our state and nation today. (Which doesn’t mean the Republicans are profoundly right on nearly every issue facing our state and nation today. I didn’t pay attention to their convention either.)
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke reportedly pledged to be bipartisan in a speech to delegates. Which must have made delegates wonder why she would say something like that. One answer would be she was actually talking to Wisconsin’s unattached voters, all 14 of them, though none are likely to pay attention to politics on a fine summer weekend.
A Facebook wag suggested the Democrats’ idea of “bipartisan” was getting one of the renegade Senate Republicans, Sens. Mike Ellis (R-Neenah), Luther Olsen (R-Ripon) or Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center), to vote with them. I find that unconvincing, because I doubt anyone can come up with more than one vote that passed because of the votes of all the Democrats and one of those Republicans. (There is one, the metallic mining bill, which failed 17-16 because the Senate at the time had 17 Republicans, including Schultz, and 16 Democrats. The way to fix that, of course, is to have enough of a majority where defectors’ votes don’t matter. Act 10 passed 17-16, with Schultz opposed.)
The more correct definition of “bipartisan” is “the other side surrenders.” Politics is a zero-sum game — one side wins, the other loses — and though that has always been the case, it is particularly true in these hyperpartisan days.
What might be another reason Burke used the word “bipartisan” in a certainly unbipartisan atmosphere? Matt Batzel has an explanation:
Five months is a long time in campaigns, with very few voters closely following the state legislative races this far out. Public polling, while common for US Senate and Gubernatorial races, is non-existent for state assembly ones. A lot can change over 5 months in terms of the national, state and local political climates. But Democrats have already conceded that the political climate will be unfavorable in the fall.
With this climate in mind, Democrats have apparently abandoned their attempts to find candidates for every Assembly seat as they have in recent cycles. Democrats did not field candidates in 23 Assembly seats, including … 10 where Obama received 45% or more in 2012 …
Just before the 2012 election, Joel Gratz, executive director of the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee, said Democrats had a “legitimate chance” to pick up 20 seats in 2012 (Republicans ended up picking up one). Now in 2014, Democrats don’t even have candidates running in three of those seats: 25th (Rep. Paul Tittl), 29th (Rep. John Murtha) and 35th (Rep. Mary Czaja). In the case of Rep. Murtha, the Democrats had a candidate, but he failed to get enough signatures to make it on the ballot.
Democrats also failed to field candidates in three seats where there is no Republican incumbent: 33rd (Rep. Steve Nass- running for State Senate), 58th (Rep. Pat Strachota- retiring) and 59th (Rep. Dan LaMahieu-retiring). Typically, it is easier to win a race that lacks an incumbent and the advantages that come with it (name identification, existing fundraising and organization, etc).
Liberals believe they are facing a bad election cycle. Gov. Scott Walker at the top of the ticket will most likely help Republican Assembly candidates down ballot. The national political winds seem to be blowing in the face of Democrats. Since actions speak louder than words, the Democrats are admitting this year is going to be difficult for them.
Democrats need to pick up 11 seats to get the Assembly majority, which means they have to win 50 of 99 seats. Actually, that’s 50 of 76 seats, since there is no Democrat running in 23 Assembly districts. Assuming they hold their current 39 seats, Democrats have to win 11 of 14 districts currently held by Republicans. (And remember that the GOP is the party that drew the legislative district boundaries.)
Winning 11 of 14 races — on top of keeping every one of your own members — is mathematically unlikely. Even if the Senate flips — which would require probably winning the seats Ellis and Schultz are departing, and those seats’ Republican history goes much farther back than Ellis’ and Schultz’s political careers — the Assembly won’t, which means that the Democratic wish list of eliminating Act 10, increasing the minimum wage and increasing taxes on the “rich” are dead on arrival at the Assembly speaker’s desk.
That scenario also means that the Republican wish list of further tax cuts and expanding private school choice would be similarly D.O.A., which is why the 2014 election remains important. Let’s just say, though, that the Democrats are not exactly dealing from a position of strength as the campaign season opens.
You know that yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the Barneveld tornado.
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of an event central to online meteorologist Mike Smith‘s career and life:
… at this time 40 years ago, I was gobbling down a quick lunch while I got ready to go back to work at WKY TV and Radio. I had been called in about 3am to cover severe thunderstorms and we were in between storms. I knew the afternoon and evening storms were going to be much worse.
In those days, we had black and white radar. The photo below shows a “hook” echo moving into Oklahoma City, with the tornado about to strike Will Rogers World Airport.
As a result of starting to chase storms two years prior, I knew the storm would pass southeast of the TV station and we had a chance to get a picture of the tornado. Amazingly, we did. Fellow chaser Steve Tegtmeier got this photo of the tornado before it touched down. It was only the second time (the first was KAUZ TV in Wichita Falls in 1959) a tornado had been broadcast live.
To keep track of each of the storms and so I could remember everything that I needed to tell our viewers, we did radar tracings like the one below. I would hold it in my left hand while gesturing to the map with my right. TW = tornado watch from 2 until 8pm and SVR TSTM = severe thunderstorm warnings in effect for several counties.
As you can imagine, the systems we were using were primitive compared to today’s. Yet, somehow, we were able to get tornado warnings out for every one of the central Oklahoma tornadoes in our viewing area and there were no fatalities.
In northeast Oklahoma, none of the TV stations had radar or meteorologists (but they did have a popular puppet doing weather!) and there were 16 fatalities.
Tulsa tornado, June 8, 1974, NOAA Because of the tornadoes and flash floods in the Tulsa area, all of the television stations were knocked off the air. The WKY weather department got a call from the cable company serving Tulsa informing us of their stations’ situation and wanted to know if we would cover Tulsa until their stations were back on the air. If so, he would put our signal on their cable. We did. The contrast between our approach and what the Tulsa stations were able to do was striking.
Back in Oklahoma City, the outpouring of appreciation was simply overwhelming. More than seventy letters, an editorial cartoon and countless phone calls from people thanking us for saving their lives.
The number one single today in 1958:
The number one album in the country today in 1971 was Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Ram”:
Today in 1972, Bruce Springsteen signed a record deal with Columbia Records. He celebrated 19 years later by marrying his backup singer, Patti Scialfa.
Birthdays today start with the Wisconsinite to whom every rock guitarist owes a debt, Les Paul:
You might call this a transition day in rock music history. For instance, one year to the day after the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” …
… Brian Jones left the Stones, to be replaced by Mick Taylor.
The Rolling Stones had a big day today in 1963: They made their first TV appearance and released their first single:
The number one song today in 1975 (pictured with the official tractor of Roesch Farms):
Five years later, Gary Numan drove his way to number nine:
Today is the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe, D-Day.
I hadn’t planned on writing about D-Day because so many others are commemorating it today … until I found something that I think well symbolizes D-Day specifically and the difference between Americans and others on this planet. It was written by Thomas D. Hazlett in 1999 about Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II:
Even today we think of the Wehrmacht as a mighty force. Certainly, its well-trained, well-armed, battle-tested soldiers struck a fearsome pose at Normandy, the most heavily fortified coastline in history. The Allies viewed the Germans as an unforgiving piece of iron.
So doubts ran high as 175,000 Allied troops–Yanks, Brits, Canadians, and Aussies–traversed the English Channel. Could the children of democracy prove themselves warriors? Would they freeze in mortal combat? Adolf Hitler, who slept until noon on D-Day, believed the disciplined defenders of Third Reich would crush the soft soldiers of the liberal West.
Yet Ambrose shows that it was the rigid Nazi war command that fell apart on D-Day. The Allied soldier kept his head while all about him were (all too often) losing theirs. Such resilience proved necessary. The best-laid plans of the Supreme Allied Command were almost immediately rendered moot; the massive landing amounted to a chaotic dumping of troops into a very hostile environment. Allied forces landed out of position, units were a shambles, and radio communications were knocked out.
But Ambrose identifies a crucial difference between the German and Allied fighting men. The Germans were hamstrung by sweeping orders issued from far away. In contrast, the Allies relied on mid-level and junior-grade officers issuing impromptu commands based on facts gleaned first-hand.
There is no more dramatic example of F.A. Hayek’s seminal discovery: the importance of dispersed information–“knowledge of time and place.” Hayek, who was to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1974, published his memorable essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in the American Economic Review just the year after D-Day. It explained the motive force driving Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” by noting that great efficiencies resulted when millions of dispersed individuals, motivated by market incentives, utilized the information uniquely available to them to make decisions. It’s why a decentralized competitive system beats a top-down bureaucracy, even when the planners are “experts.”
The bloody beaches of France graphically illustrate the advantages. German soldiers had been commanded to defend every inch of coastline. They were rendered immobile by strict orders to stay put–why trust low-level soldiers to freelance when the High Command had it planned out already? But that strict Wehrmacht policy saved Allied troops even in places where they were extremely vulnerable. The ferocious Panzer tank divisions set aside for counter-attack were too precious to trust to field commanders; only Der Führer had the right to deploy those. As the military genius in Berlin snoozed, German positions were overrun. Even then, despite reports from the front, Hitler held back his elite motorized units, convinced the real landing was to come at Pas-de-Calais.
Meanwhile, Allied soldiers dodged mines and intense enemy fire. They were hopelessly ill-equipped–in the chaos of the landing, their best heavy equipment never made it to shore–but they improvised. Mid-level commanders–sometimes a sergeant was the highest-surviving rank–seized the moment, issuing orders and rallying soldiers. Empowered by a flexible command structure, leaders emerged instantly, spontaneously. Fighting units were reconstituted and assault plans redefined on the fly.
Perhaps the classic demonstration was the landing on Utah Beach at 6:30 a.m.–the first wave. Due to unexpectedly strong tides, landing craft deposited units over 1,000 meters from their pre-arranged positions. Heavy machine gun fire pinned down those who managed to survive long enough to reach the beach. Crouching for cover, U.S. infantrymen assembled and spread out their maps. They had no radio contact, and most of their commanders could not be located. What the hell to do? Should they get down the beach to where they were supposed to be, or attack the German artillery directly in front of them?
The ranking officer quickly made a decision: “Let’s start the war from here.” With that, brave Americans charged Nazi fortifications straight ahead, knocked out guns, scaled the bluff, and circled around to capture the ground they had originally been assigned to take.
While no lowly soldier in the Wehrmacht had the authority to revamp official orders, the Allied invasion consisted of little besides ad hoc heroism. Decentralized information stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944, and irreparably breached the Atlantic Wall by dusk. Pretty good theory for one day’s work. Pretty good work for one day’s theory.
That night (in the U.S.), Franklin Roosevelt, president and senior warden of his Episcopal church, led the nation in prayer:
Forty years later:
Sunday, meanwhile, is the 30th anniversary of one of the worst tornadoes in Wisconsin history, in Barneveld shortly after midnight, without warning:
I’ve written about Barneveld before here. The summer of 1984 was the summer after my grandfather’s death, so I was tasked with driving to Boscobel to pick up my grandmother for my brother’s graduation. I went down Thursday, stayed overnight, and we went back to Madison Friday morning. Iowa TV was reporting on severe weather to the west, but where I was all it did was thunder off in the distance.
The next morning, though, as we left, I flipped through the FM radio and heard some strange reports about civil defense and people saying they were all right. They made no sense given that we had heard nothing about a tornado the night before; no Madison TV had live coverage from Barneveld, and we hadn’t seen anything on TV about a tornado. Then we drove through Black Earth, where the tornado had gone after flattening much of Barneveld, and saw, on the east side of town, a huge tree uprooted.
The next day was my brother’s graduation. His graduation party was interrupted by a tornado warning, for a funnel cloud sighting one mile from our house. (I remain skeptical because that funnel cloud should have been visible from our house.) Three days later, another tornado warning was issued in Dane County.
Less than a year later, I did a journalism-class story on the one-year-later aftermath. I was struck then by the incongruous combination of brand new houses, empty concrete slabs where houses had been, and scrape marks on Barneveld’s water tower far higher than any vandal could have accomplished. And, of course, there were a group of gravestones in the Barneveld cemetery with the same date of death on them — June 8, 1984.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 