Author Archive: Bill Black
I'm a baby boomer, lefty Democrat, Boston Irish Catholic, born in 1953. I work as a public affairs consultant in Washington.
Ted Koppel at 70
Today is Ted Koppel’s Birthday. He turns 70 years old and I’m sure he’s going strong.
I met Ted Koppel briefly some years ago. We were both on a small plane going into Marco Island, I think. I was attending the meeting of my client, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS). Ted looked like he was heading for vacation. As we walked across the tarmac to the terminal, I used the opportunity to test a proposition. As PR consultant to STS, I had been telling them that a big problem they had was that nobody knew what they did. In fact, nobody knew what the word “thoracic” meant. As a result, despite their life-saving activities at the very top of the medical profession, they had little public support when they complained that payment for their services was actually declining, just when we would be needing them most. For the record, “thoracic” means chest area. They are heart and lung surgeons.
So, I thought, “I wonder if a very smart and influential guy like Ted Koppel knows what a thoracic surgeon does?” So, this exchange took place:
“Mr. Koppel, hi, I’m Bill Black. I’m a consultant for the thoracic surgeons. Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“No, go ahead.”
“Can you tell me what a thoracic surgeon does?”
“Sure. Operates on the throat.”
“Sorry, no. They are heart surgeons and you’ve given me a great anecdote.”
“Fine,” Koppel says with a disgusted wave of his hand, “There’s your anecdote.” And he marched off, clearly pissed.
Sublime
There are few things in life more transcendentally beautiful than the morning after a big snowstorm. And there is nothing in life that brings such beauty to your doorstep.
I experience this beauty this morning at about 7 am with vigorous trudge three blocks to Rock Creek Park. The sites and sounds were exquisite. While there was the muffling effect of snow and a low wind, there were also, surprisingly, bird calls. What hardy creatures to have made it through a night of blizzard conditions.
The snow was above my knees, which made trudging laborious. In some spots it reached my upper thigh. One neighbor was out shoveling to “get ahead of the storm.” He explained that he had shoveled the night before and all his work was blown away. Of course, there’s supposed to be another blast this afternoon, which will likely blown his morning’s work away, as well.
I’m such a snow junky that my expectations are rarely satisfied by the actual storm. This one did it. And it ain’t over yet.
Bliss.
A Beautiful Reminiscence
It is still dark when my father shakes me, cold seeming to radiate from his outside clothes. He touches my shoulder, not wanting to wake my sister in the twin bed.
“I’m awake. I’m awake,” I say.
He leaves, and I go to the bathroom, where I put on layers of clothes, nothing good that will get dirty or torn. I walk downstairs and head out to his truck.
While my specifics are different, the mood is very familiar. It honestly brings a tear to my eye as I think about, and miss, my father. Another such memory is evoked by a poem by Robert Hayden called, Those Winter Sundays. Here’s an excerpt:
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
My father died at age 52 when I was 17 years old. He remains with me in spirit. Maybe it’s these kinds of memories that make me love the snow.
Bring it on!
New Favorite Blog
I want the bullet! Bring it on! I love big snowstorms and so, apparently, do the people behind the Capitol Weather Gang. With a mega storm coming, I’m checking it almost as much as I check Talking Points Memo.
Reality Check
But I don’t think anybody with half a brain (and maybe that excludes more people than it should) doesn’t realize that the Democrats problems are overwhelmingly tied to the fact that we’re in the midst of the worst recession since the end of the Second World War. Whether it’s 75% of the problem or 80% or 90% I sort of go back and forth on in my mind. But clearly this is overwhelmingly the issue.
That said, for the life of me, I can understand why they haven’t passed the Senate bill with the reconciliation fix on healthcare.
Religion as a Means, not an End
I’ve been re-reading Screwtape and was struck by the following quote, which I think effectively describes the Christian Right in America in the last 30 years. They use their religion as a political weapon to achieve temporal ends. Bear in mind, Lewis is writing this during World War II and Screwtape is explaining how to push a mode of thought that leads to evil. If C.S. Lewis has it right, these “Christianists” are in for a surprise on judgment day. (emphasis added)
Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the “cause”, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours—and the more “religious” (on those terms) the more securely
Frank Rich
Rich writes:
Perhaps McCain was sneering at Obama because of the Beltway’s newest unquestioned cliché: one year after a new president takes office he is required to stop blaming his predecessor for the calamities left behind. Who dreamed up that canard — Alito? F.D.R. never followed it. In an October 1936 speech, nearly four years after Hoover, Roosevelt was still railing against the “hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government” he had inherited. He reminded unemployed and destitute radio listeners that there had been “nine crazy years at the ticker” and “nine mad years of mirage” followed by three long years of bread lines and despair. F.D.R. soon won re-election in the greatest landslide the country had seen.