Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 11/4/2020
As I write this, thanks to deadlines, the national election is still a few days away. In this final period, we’ve seen a huge voter turnout, a play for disputed states by Vice President Joe Biden and a whirlwind tour of areas predetermined to be welcoming to President Donald Trump.
It has been the oddest, most stressful election in years; one that has played out as a pandemic has killed nearly a quarter million Americans and an economic crash that has left millions of people devastated.
2020 has definitely rivaled 1968, the only other year I’ve lived through with as much upheaval.
To make matters worse, the results of the election won’t be known for days as the counting of ballots outside of traditional polling places will add time to the proceedings.
It’s like we’ve gone back in time a century, but that’s okay with me if we get a fair and accurate accounting of votes.
Journalists, by the nature of their jobs, see and hear enough to be fairly jaded, even on the local level. I believe, though, most of the people with whom I’ve worked actually are true believers in our republic. We want it to live up to the potential we all know it has.
I’ve never had the opportunity to be on a national beat and I’m certainly too old ever to do something like that now, but I really don’t mind. I can’t imagine what it would be like to follow a candidate and see up close how people behave when a mic and camera isn’t in front of them.
It’s at times such as these I turn to former newspaper people for guidance from previous years – years when elections did not involve the internet, TV, instant and uninformed punditry, talk radio, memes that spread lies and interference from foreign powers.
First up is Mark Twain, who got his start being published in newspapers. He wrote, “No party holds the privilege of dictating to me how I shall vote. If loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot. If there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies in the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. I claim that difference. I am the only person in the 60 millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism.”
I love the fact that Twain was an iconoclast.
Here is how he viewed the right to vote in 1875: “Our marvelous latter-day statesmanship has invented universal suffrage. That is the finest feather in our cap. All that we require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever; he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be known to be a consummate scoundrel. No matter. While he can steer clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince. We brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after all, for we restrict when we come to the women.”
Ambrose Bierce is another one of my journalist and literary heroes. “Bitter Bierce” as he was called, wrote columns and short stories in a take-no-prisoners style. He is, in my mind, as significant a writer as Twain, but his work was largely forgotten after he disappeared in 1913 when he went to Mexico to cover the revolution.
He compiled many of his ideas in the book “The Devil’s Dictionary.”
His definition of the noun, “vote:” “The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.”
For “politicians,” he said, “An eel in the fundamental mud in which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared to the statesman he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.”
For “politics,” he defined it this way: “A strife of interests masquerading as a contact of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”
Don Marquis, the New York writer known for his poetry involving Archy and Methibel, wrote something that is certainly true today: “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
H.L. Mencken, journalist and satirist, is perhaps the most problematic of the people I’ve quoted here. His views on many subjects, especially race, are indefensible. I do admit I believe the truth of this quote: “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
I don’t know about you, but I take some comfort in the words of journalists of the past who looked at the political system with a jaundiced eye. And after 2020 I hope all of us will do the same.