Please step out of the vehicle

As I drove to church yesterday morning, crossing Perring Parkway from Woodbourne on a green light, a northbound driver on Perring Parkway swept through a red light, missing me by about a car length. Had I been a couple of seconds earlier or a few miles per hour slower, he would have hit me broadside at speed and today Fred Rasmussen or Jacques Kelly would be working up my obituary for tomorrow's print edition of The Sun.

The romance of the automobile has never entranced me—hell, I drove a Chevette for the better part of a decade. And now, my daily travel to and from work, Hamilton in the northeast corner of the city to Port Covington at the southern end, is an ordeal.

Pickup trucks the size of ranch houses. Environmentally disastrous SUVs whose owners cannot manage the unwieldy things in parallel parking. The smell of weed emanating from cars and suggesting operator impairment. Dolts heedlessly pulling into intersections to block them as the lights change. Cowboys weaving in and out of traffic to gain a minimal advantage, who also appear to mistake Perring Parkway for the Bonneville Salt Flats.

They must be as maddened by city traffic as I am, without acknowledging how much they contribute to the situation.

They have fallen for the false promise of autonomy in automobile culture. Look at the ads for vehicles on television, in which sleek cars glide along picturesque roadways with no other vehicle in sight. Contrast that with the reality of creeping along city streets, or even sections of interstate highways during peak hours, at 12 mph.

But the automobile manufacturers and advertising agencies are not solely at fault. For sixty years the federal and state governments have prioritized and subsidized the construction and maintenance of roadways, even though we have known since Robert Caro's Power Broker (1974) that the more roads and bridges and throughways that Robert Moses built, the more traffic was generated. All the while, mass transit has been starved.

One reason is that mass transit not American; it's all lefty and European. Owning a private vehicle is genuinely American. I once saw a Republican's sneer that Democrats want us all to live in apartments and take mass transit to our government jobs. Yes, real Americans drive their hulking SUVs from their McMansions two to three hours distant from the workplaces where they keep capitalism great. Yes, owning a private vehicle and driving it alone, without any sissy ride-sharing, is what shows that we maintain rugged individualism, like hanging a set of chrome bull testicles on the back of a pickup truck.

I long for the day when my children will take the car keys away from me.

Erick Erickson doesn't get to decide

Since it's Sunday, I hope you don't mind a little theological discussion. If you do mind, just return to your secular pursuits

A while back, Erick Erickson, one of the amplified conservative voices, disparaged Pete Buttigieg's religious views, adding, by way of wider disparagement, that the Episcopal Church to which Mr. Buttigieg belongs, is "no longer a Christian institution."

I don't think he gets to decide who is or isn't Christian. I stand up every Sunday in an Episcopal Church and repeat the Nicene Creed. When I get to "he will judge the living and the dead," which the couple of hundred bishops who assembled in Nicea in A.D. 325 agreed on, I do not imagine that they were envisioning Erick Erickson.

But to be fair to Mr. Erickson, he hardly stands out as having made idiotic remarks about Christian belief. The council at Nicea, after all, was summoned by the Emperor Constantine in an effort to quell the disputatious and occasionally violent disagreements among the faithful, and Who's In And Who's Out has been a popular game among the sects ever since.

Perhaps all would benefit if those of us who consider ourselves Christian could keep in mind that we don't get to decide who is Christian and who is not, who is worthy of salvation and who will be denied it.

That doesn't mean that we can't talk theology and disagree. I think that pre-millennial dispensationalism is crackpot theology, and that the close vote in the fourth century to allow the Book of Revelation into the canon was badly decided. Biblical literalism is laughable, as are those mainstream congregations whose mission statement  appears to be, as a college roommate once said, "to mean well." Those prosperity Gospel congregations smell of a degraded and corrupt Calvinism. But when all those people call themselves Christians, I don't get to deny it. (Go ahead, call me a Latitudinarian. I'm a high-church Rite II Episcopalian, and I can take it.)

Let me put a question to you to test against your own tradition. Assume a person living among us in a nominally Christian culture who leads a moral life: honest, generous, virtuous, someone any of us would call a good person. But not a believer. At the Doom, what do you say will happen to that person? Will your denomination assign that good person to Hell? And if not, then what?

The Church has dealt with this conundrum before. The Roman Catholic Church constructed Limbo to include, among others, virtuous pagans, because the Church needed Aristotle. So are you OK with parking that virtuous person in some lobby just outside Heaven?

WWJD?

The face in the mirror

In the morning when I look in the mirror, I see someone in his late sixties with gray hair, a paunch, and a face that disturbingly resembles my father's That is not who I am.

In my head I am eighteen years old, six feet tall, a skinny one hundred thirty pounds, about to step into the wider world from Fleming County, Kentucky. That's who I am, and the scattering of personae I've gathered over the past half-century (graduate student, husband, father, editor, teacher, parishioner, Marylander, sexagenarian, whatever) are all in some sense artificial, not quite who I am.

Next month my fellow graduates of the Class of 1969 at Fleming County High School will be at a party to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of their graduation, a party I can't attend because of an obligation in Baltimore.

But if I were there, those people would see through the accidental accumulations of those fifty years and identify me as that skinny eighteen-year-old with the brown hair and thick eyeglasses. And they would call me "John Early," because they know what my name is, the name my family used, the name they used, and I would hear in its authentic sound. (Kathleen calls me John Early; she has the words but not the tune.)

It's a slippery thing, identity, those selves we assume to fit the occasions. One plays the roles: professional journalist, college lecturer, adult. Some days it feels like imposture, because at the core there is still that skinny introvert, bookish, eager for the wider world but a little daunted by stepping into it.

But then the curtain rises, and the show goes on. 

We're not going back to a place that didn't actually exist

Some of the people I grew up among in Kentucky periodically post memes on Facebook about bringing prayer back into the public schools. I have a pretty good idea of what they want, because I remember what they had.

We began every day at Elizaville Elementary School by standing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, followed by the Lord's Prayer, until the Supreme Court belatedly realized that it is not the job of the state to provide religious instruction.

It was, mind you, the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer. What we were being made to understand between the flag and the Lord's Prayer, was that we were growing up in a country in being white (Elizavlle Elementary was segregated; I had no black classmates until the fifth grade) and Protestant was the norm, the template.

(If you think that is overstatement, recall that when I was in the fourth grade and John F. Kennedy was running for the presidency, there were open questions whether a Roman Catholic could be elected president.)

We see today a widespread synthetic nostalgia for a white Protestant America that never quite existed. You only have to keep in mind that there are black families in today whose seventeenth-century ancestors made them Americans a century before my Scots-Irish ancestors arrived.

That nostalgia feeds in to a cluster of concerns among older white people: economic insecurity (the result of three decades of Republican policies, abetted by Democrats, that privilege corporations and wealthy people over working-class and middle-class Americans), cultural anxieties (gay people getting married, mouthy women being elected to high office), and relentless demographic trends (the inexorable growth of a non-white population that will exceed the white one).

I responded today, perhaps unwisely, to a Facebook post that presented a confused melange of anxieties about Sharia law, immigrants and people who are being told to go back where they came from. (Hey, if you're not Native American, you're not from here.) Amid all the strident talk, it might be helpful to keep a few simple truths in mind.

Item: The United States is a secular republic. The Constitution is explicit that all people who adhere to any religion, or no religion, are on an equal footing.

Item: Sharia law is not replacing civil law in this country, any more than Torah law and Roman Catholic canon law are. Though it does seem to be Christians who appear to be most active in attempting to get religious doctrine written into the law books.

Item: The 3.5 million Muslims in the United States look unlikely to leave anytime soon, so it might be a good idea to learn how to live with them as fellow citizens.

Obama and the racial divide

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Accustomed as one is to encountering utterly daft remarks online, it’s still possible to stumble upon one so blindingly stupid as to take one’s breath away.

This morning I came across a comment from a woman castigating the news media for refusing to recognize how much Donald Trump has done as president to heal the racial divide in this country that Obama started.

By my count, our racial divide dates from 1619, when the first enslaved people were imported.

It was plainly present in the constitutional debates of 1787, when the notorious compromise of counting each enslaved person as three-fifths of a person in the census to give the slave states the politircal heft they demanded as the price of entering the Union.

The racial divide was on display in the compromises of 1820 and 1850, again to placate the slaveholders, and most certainly on display in 1861-1865, when the cost of ending slavery was more than 600,000 human lives and the destruction of the South’s economy.

One might say that a racial divide developed, or widened, after the stolen presidential election of 1876, after which white supremacists were permitted to regain political control of the former Confederate states and enact a raft of Jim Crow laws.

One might have spotted a racial divide in the twentieth century, in the segregated military, in voter suppression, in the legislatively and administratively endorsed redlining of city neighborhoods.

One might have surmised that a racial divide existed when screaming crowds of white men and women opposed allowing children of color into integrated public schools, or when Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, James Reeb,  Jonathan Daniels, and many others were assassinated for attempting to help black people get to vote.

I did discern a racial divide in this country associated with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency (twice, incidentally, with substantial majorities in the popular vote and Electoral College each time). What I saw was that a black man in the White House became an emblem for white people who feared that demographic and cultural changes threatened their fragile sense of superiority. They were quite right to see white supremacy in danger, and their rage and resentment are continually on display.

What I didn’t discern—and perhaps some of you can help me here—is just what President Donald Trump has done to heal that racial breach, beyond bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tiger Woods.

Fifty years ago ...

As Elwood P. Dowd in the Senior Class production of Mary Chase's Harvey at Fleming County High School, May 8-9, 1969, with Toby Fried, right, as Vita Louise Simmons and Molly Rigdon, left, as Myrtle Mae Simmons.

Miss Lynda McKee, the director, said afterward, "John Early, you were better than Jimmy Stewart, because Jimmy Stewart played Jimmy Stewart and you played Elwood Dowd."

Breaking into newspapering

In the spring of 1968, when I was a junior in high school. Lowell Denton, publisher of the weekly Flemingsburg Gazette in Fleming County, Kentucky, offered me a job for the summer.

His wife, Jean, who was editor, reporter, and columnist, liked to take the summers off, and Lowell, having spotted a letter to the editor I had written to the Times-Democrat, the other county weekly, decided that I had enough literacy to handle the job.

So that summer, for my first paying job ($1.25 an hour), I sat down at a table with a Remington standard typewriter and a stack of copy paper. My first task was to English the county correspondence. The Gazette engaged a group of older ladies in communities around the county to send in weekly social notes from their locales, and my task was to regularize the spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Though I began as an editor, I was also a reporter.

Sent to cover the fiscal court (the county council), I quickly learned not to begin taking notes when the Rev. Owsley Crain began speaking, but to hold off until he more nearly approached his point. At the Ewing Fair, I had to get the names of the winners of the Beautiful Baby contest. (One summer, Mr. Pierce Million, who provided the sound system, played a scratchy recording of "Born to Lose" as the mothers and babies approached the infield.) I interviewed the superintendent of schools at summer's end about plans for the new school year. I wrote profiles of local citizens, often having to ferret out information from the inarticulate

I learned early on to pay attention to the typesetters. It was Cecil Pugh, who operated the Linotype, who pointed out that internment for interment had gotten into an obituary. Later, Lowell acquired a typesetter that produced a punched tape allowing the typist to delete a line with a mistake and start over; when the tape was run through a dummy machine, it produced a galley of the corrected type. The typesetter was my cousin Marie Arrasmith, who was also the bookkeeper, and I paid close attention to her, because her store of local gossip was encyclopedic.

I wasn't all writing and editing. I collected the mail every morning, took classified ads and social notes over the phone, fetched colas and snacks from the gas station across the street, typed subscribers' addresses on stencils for the Addressograph, later in the offset era drove the pasted-up pages to the printer in the next county, drove the finished papers back, helped with the addressing and bundling, and swept the office on Friday afternoon.

Jean Denton wrote a column, "Jean's Jottin'," and in the summer it became "John's Jottin'," the main burden of which was to offer congratulations to local worthies. I was allowed a separate column of my own, "From the Wastebasket of John E. McIntyre," in which I wrote about things I had read and offered naive liberal political comments. (Lowell, remarking on my enthusiasm for Eugene McCarthy that summer, asked someone, "Is John Early still supporting that Communist?")

Jean was harder-shelled than Lowell, the kind of Republican once described as "rock-ribbed," a Nixon loyalist to the end, and beyond. We got along fine, because in spite of political differences we shared a taste for Ross Macdonald's murder mysteries and an admiration for Joan Didion's prose.

Lowell and Jean were ideal employers. They encouraged me to learnt the craft and indulged my youthful excesses. (The Gazette's circulation was around 3,000 a week. There is a good deal to be said for making your early mistakes in a place where not many people see them.)  The six summers in high school and college that I spent working for them were an invaluable education.

The Flemingsburg Gazette was, in fact, my journalism school. As an undergraduate at Michigan State, I was told I couldn't take a journalism course without first undergoing Introduction to Communication. I took it for one term. The text was a crudely photocopied set of vapid essays by the department chairman, and we had to watch video of two other department faculty members who evidently thought that their feeble badinage constituted dry donnish wit. At the end of the term I took all the course materials and dropped them down the incinerator shaft at East Akers Hall.

When in 1980, abandoning an uncompleted dissertation in English, I approached The Cincinnati Enquirer for an opening on the copy desk, I had enough grounding as an alumnus of The Flemingsburg Gazette to make headway there, and for all that has happened since I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Lowell and Jean Denton, who identified and encouraged promise.

I'll stand with government workers

My mother, Marian Early McIntyre, was the postmaster in Elizaville, Kentucky for twenty-four years, much of that time as a federal employee before the Postal Service was spun off.

She pretty much saw everyone in town every day and was quite accommodating to the patrons, even the difficult ones. We lived upstairs (it was a one-room post office), and she often opened up to hand out mail to people who had been unable to come by during regular hours. She was diligent, too; her accounts tallied exactly every month.

Of course she was a Democrat. (I've remarked elsewhere that the reason government workers are Democrats is that they are the people who believe that government works.) She and my father were Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy Democrats. I do, however, suspect (nothing was ever said aloud), that they may have voted for Senator John Sherman Cooper, of whom they always spoke with respect.

For her, as for many federal employees, the pay was modest, but the post offered health insurance for the family and a decent pension.

She saw her job as providing a necessary service to people, and she did it gladly. That is why I do not mutter or grumble when there is a long line at the post office. I know that the employees are trying to accommodate all the patrons, even the difficult ones, for modest pay and benefits.

And I think that that is the case for many, perhaps most, federal employees, working with little acclaim to provide the services we need or want. I'll stand with them, particularly the ones who find themselves in distressed circumstances because of an unnecessary government shutdown begun as a political stunt.

They deserve much better.