4755 Trading Cards

 Topps photo

 After 70 years, the people at Topps Gum lost their baseball card contract to some upstart outfit.  Here’s what they should do.

 

First, it’s tough to feel sorry for you because your Bazooka Bubble Gum remains a good seller.  Second, pick another sport.  My suggestion is politics.

 

Political parties are like leagues.  So, we have the Republican League and the Democratic League.  Most members of each team are not team players.  But with the magnified star system in major league baseball these days, it’s become unnecessary.  Baseball has become as specialized as football, almost as slow.  Politics, dominated by lawyers, always has been.  So… a good fit on several counts.

 

Players are for the most part ugly.  Politicians are, too.  I mean, look at the Bambino, pictured above. And then think about Mitch McConnell.  One stunk of cigars. The other comes from America’s capital of bourbon breath.

 

Baseball players in Ruth’s era didn’t make all that much money.  Ruth pulled down twenty grand for the 1920 season.  Politicians are pretty well paid, not counting the graft.  Kind of on a par with baseball players of the era. 

 

That $20-thou is about one million in today’s money.  While it’s true that baseball players have better uniforms than members of the House and Senate, and serve a more important function, there’s no reason political trading cards can’t be big sellers.  And today’s kids will be better educated and have to deal with fewer but more meaningful statistics.

 

Put your ads on video games. Use middle school boys and girls as your spokesmen and women.  Or better yet, animations powered by voice actors who sound like kids… kind of like those of the Shriner’s Hospital and those gummy candy commercials.

 

Now, let’s get to the heart of the matter, which always is money.  What’s a pack of gum with trading cards cost these days?  It was a nickel in the 60s.  A quarter in the 70s.  So maybe now it’s a buck.  But it’s still an investment.  

 

Check out some of the collectible trading card prices on eBay and elsewhere.  Megabucks for the right ones.  Even packs of cards, unopened and with the gum still in them go for big bucks.  

 

Imagine what a Mantle rookie card or an early Pete Rose is worth today.  Even the more obscure players draw something on the pricey side.

 

So those political cards likely will, too.  What’s a donald trump going to be worth?  Or former congressional bigwig Paul Ryan.  Bill Clinton. Either Bush. Reagan. JFK, LBJ. Even guys at the state level.  What’s an Andy Cuomo card going to be worth tomorrow. 

 

Mayors: Daly, Koch, LaGuardia… Marion Barry… and the ever-popular Wade Kupszukiewicz of Toledo.

 

Judges, from the lofty John Roberts on down to Justice of the Peace Marryin’ Sam of Dogpatch.

 

Topps’ chairman is Michael Eisner… yes, the same Michael Eisner who started as an NBC Page and rose to chairman of Disney, which he saved from destruction.  You’d think a guy like that would have the marketing sense to figure things out.

 

We’re happy to do your thinking for you, Mike.

 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021

 

4754 About Face!

 Library of Congress photo

 

The gathering on the mall was called "The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom."  And while it wasn't spontaneous, it wasn't carefully planned either. But what it was a watershed moment in the history of the civil rights movement. Never before -- and never since -- has a gathering of that magnitude taken place in that place. Is it really 58 years in the past?

 

It was there that the rest of the world met Martin Luther King, Jr. King was a Southern preacher who knew how to put words together.  The gathering was fairly evenly divided between blacks and whites and the stage show that accompanied it was more white than black. It galvanized thinking on civil rights and inspired legislation galore. Good legislation.

 

What we're seeing today is a stunning reversal of the thinking that went into that march.  We're seeing good legislation weakened or shot down or saddled with conditions that might as well be reversals.  We're seeing the south rise again.

 

This march wasn't about Martin Luther King, it was about us. It was about the voting rights act.  It was about dozens of court decisions dragging us from the 19th and early to mid-20th century forward.

 

But what has happened is what always happens when a major movement loses its figurehead. That's the first step toward death of a movement because now there's no real leadership.  What happens in every case I can think of, is that when the figurehead is disfigured, the underlings take over and either fight or diffuse.  The thing loses steam and dies.  Countermovements develop, especially in the case of minority rights where there already was a stone wall in place.

 

King’s assassination in 1968 was the beginning of the end.  Not because he was murdered, but because eventually, competing minor interests take over and everyone scatters.

 

Sometimes there are aftershocks.  We’re having one of those now.  At the moment, the culture is experiencing a revitalization.  But so is the countermovement.  Diversity has become the latest Hula Hoop or video game. 

 

The countermovement figurehead now is trump.  And as evidenced lately, he’s no longer necessary.  The leadership has been taken over by people like Florida’s governor.  Or the Senator from Texas. Or the minority leader of the Senate. Or some attention whore on Fox News or one of Fox’s minor offspring.

 

SHRAPNEL:

--Ed Asner was one of the good guys. Livened up the union meetings he attended and was on the correct side of most political issues.  Asner died this weekend at age 91.

 

--One day left for the US to get out of Afghanistan. To be followed by the bodies of the American servicemen who died trying to help our Afghan allies out.  They arrived at Dover Airbase Sunday and from there will be taken home.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions?  wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021

4753 Wronging a Right

 

Carl Sandburg was an early pioneer of Zoom conferencing and podcasts as evidenced by this photo circa 1958

The poet Carl Sandburg said the Civil War was fought over one word.  The word was “is.” Here’s the full quotation: “The United States is not are. The Civil War was fought over a verb.” 

 

He said it on the campus of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois on October 7, 1958, as part of ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas Senate debates.

 

Is vs. are.  And of course, Sandburg wasn’t one to minimize the effects and causes of the war.  He took the long view.

 

But not long enough.  Look at us now.  Nominally, we’re one country. But only nominally.  We’re more balkanized than the Balkans. We’re like the minor states of the Soviet Union fighting each other for Moscow’s table scraps.

 

This space has long said the Confederacy won the war and now governs it alongside its occupied territories in the mountain and desert west.  And, more recently, of its semi-independent cells of operatives in parts of the east and the Midwest. 

 

The mindlessness of vaccine and mask opposition are the current battleground.  And that’s just a cosmetic battle. 

 

Behind and beyond is a deeper divide and a far more important foundation of ideas.

 

What are we as a country?

 

Sandburg dealt in words… often powerful… moving.  But words are symbols of concepts and concepts are what we ignore as we pay tribute to their sounds and forms over their meanings. 

 

The Census Bureau tells us there are a bit over 328 million of us.  It’s hard to get your head around a number of that size. But it’s also hard to get your head around the notion that we have differences and that we once found ways to live among each other.

 

The pipe is so clogged now that no plumbing snake can clear it.

 

How long before we start debating the return of slavery?  How long before we destroy ourselves in a storm of Covid?  How long before religious practice becomes mandatory? How long before the houses of cards and air castles we’ve built collapse under their own weight?

 

How long before a justice system becomes so corrupt as to freeze?  How long before we’re priced out of our homes and our hopes?

 

The President wants to spend trillions on infrastructure. But, Mr. President, what about our internal infrastructure? It’s not just the roads and bridges, card houses and air castles that are falling apart. 

 

We may be too big to function. But we’re not too big to fail.

 

And what would Sandburg say? Or Lincoln or Douglas?

 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021

 

 

Mini 032 The Fishing Village

 

Back when, in the days radio still did local news, we’d call the cops in the pre dawn hours to see what might be going on.  One little fishing village desk sergeant had the same story each Saturday morning.

 

“Nothing much happening.  Just a couple of African Americans stabbing each other at the Boatman’s Inn.  You’re not interested in that, are you?”

 

Well, yeah. We were.  And he didn’t exactly call the people involved “African Americans.”

 

We were interested because they were real people doing really bad things to other real people.

 

Now, it’s not people stabbing each other in a cheap roadside bar a mile from a fleet of rinky-dink fishing boats owned and run by a bunch of non-African Americans.

 

We’ve come a long way.  We no longer care about the color of your skin.  But we still care about people killing each other.  And these days, it’s what you don’t do with more importance with what you do.

 

Knives?  How 1970s! Now we have a better weapon of choice, germs.

 

Are the maskless and the vaccine deniers any less deadly than the knife wielders? In fact, aren’t they not only more deadly but even more cowardly?

I’m wesrichards@gmail.com 

My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them ®

© WR 2021

 

4752 Hurriecane Henri

 

  

 

(NEW ROSES,PA) -- Old habits die hard.  Here it is, a lovely sunny Sunday afternoon in a small town shielded by mountains and bad highways, about 270 miles due west of Moote Pointe, NY, which is on Long Island near New York City, and was right at dead center of Hurricane Henri’s path.

 

The gas tank is full.  The refrigerator and freezer are almost empty.  There’s a new bottle of Smirnoff’s on the shelf. Every piece of dirty laundry is washed, dried and folded.

 Moote Pointe Marty is in the local New Roses Mega Mart with a shopping cart full of stuff.

Batteries. Duct tape.  A small radio. A few flashlights, a few candles.   A car charger for the cell phone.  Couple of bags of ice. A small barbecue and some charcoal.  A 50-pound bag of cat litter.  Chips, V8 juice, a few cans of Dinty Moore and Chef Boyardee and diced chicken breast and two family-size boxes of Total.

 

Harvey Checker-Outer looks at this stuff coming toward him at the register.  Always good for a few laughs and a good conversation, this fella, and he asks “Camping?”

 

Marty says “Nah, having an address in this ZIP code and a phone in this area code is as close to camping as I get.  This is hurricane prep stuff.”

 

For the first time in years, Harvey Checker-Outer is speechless.  But only briefly.  “Hurricane?  We don’t get hurricanes here.  What are you talking about?”

 Marty: “Ya never know.  Plus, I’ve done this a time or two and you get used to it.  You hear ‘hurricane” and “east coast” on the radio.  You see some weather reporter standing in front of a big map that goes from Florida to Maine and has all those splotches of reds and yellows on it, you go buy this kind of stuff.”

 At home, the computer is on.  It’s set to the New York Times animated hurricane tracker map.  You watch Irene amble up the coast.  You switch to the paper’s “neighborhood by neighborhood evacuation orders” map.  You try to get a live picture from the old street in Moote Pointe and you wait it out.  

Nothing much.

 In olden days, Marty was usually working during storms.  Nature of the job. It’s what news guys do.  But still, old habits die hard.

Shrapnel:

 --Henri didn’t hit New York even close to hard as the predictions said it would. But weather forecasting is as much an art as a science.  So don’t kill the messenger, just be thankful he/she/it was wrong.

 --Of all the stupid words and phrases news people applied to this storm was “Henri unleashed his fury.”  First off, you can leash a dog, but not a fury.  Second, it isn’t fury in the first place, it’s wind and rain. And they can’t be “leashed” or unleashed either.

 I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021

 

 

4751 Joe Galloway (1941-2021)

 

 Joe Galloway would have marked 80 this coming November if he hadn’t died the other day.  He was the greatest war correspondent of his generation and they called him “the reporter with the gun.”  He understood and hated war. But he was friend to the troops from the lowest dogface in camos to the highest of Colonels and Generals.

 

He was competitor and then comrade.

 

Those Vietnam days he worked for United Press international and often wrote circles around the bigger Associated Press. He wrote from the battlefield while most of the rest of us wrote from a shabby-chic office building on Rockefeller Plaza in then-safe Manhattan. We at the AP in New York were surrounded in art deco.  Our reporters were over there, too and in relatively large number.  In the big battles, Galloway, often alone, was surrounded by trees and tents and death.

 

He wrote books that were turned into movies. “We Were Soldiers Once, and Young.” Was a best seller. He wrote for US News & World Report, then Knight-Ridder, then McClatchy.  His lectures were held in packed houses when it was still safe to pack a house.

 

In retirement, he grew tomatoes -- maybe it was peppers -- on a patch of land in North Carolina, not all that far from his birthplace, a few states away, in Texas.

 

He was in and out of hospitals over the last few years. What finally did him in was what the doctors call “complications” from a heart attack.  That was a huge heart to attack.

 

The thing about Joe wasn’t that wall of awards.  It wasn’t even about how he brought the war into focus for America. It wasn’t the Ernie Pyle phrasing, or the brilliant columns that followed.  It was Joe, himself.

 

You can’t separate the man from that. They were one and the same.  Sharp witted, sometimes cynical, sometimes poetic.  The eyes always open.  

 

In death, everyone had everything good to say about Joe.  In life, mostly, they did, too.  That happens rarely.  The painter Dali said in death everyone is 10-thousand times greater than he was in life.  Not true with Galloway.  Everyone knew. Everyone.

 

Now come the great wringing of hands, the “our thoughts and prayers are with his widow, “Doc” Gracie, a onetime circus performer turned medic. Keep all that. And keep Joe's books at hand for when you need to remember how to write.

 

Let me leave you today with a long quotation 

 

“We were children of the 1950s and John Kennedy's young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes without white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us.”

 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com 

© WR 2021 

 

4750 The Longest War

 

Things got so bad in Afghanistan that refugees poured into Iran.  Iran! The poster country for Islamic revolution.  Or at least it was until this past weekend.

 

That’s when the Taliban finished its south-to-north push to Kabul, the president of the country fled and left his underlings to worry about which Taliban jail would serve them their last meals.

 

Twenty years of America’s war in Afghanistan followed the Soviet Union’s almost as lengthy try and an even longer one from Britain.

 

The reasons for the US going in were iffy in the first place. Here’s the rationale:

 

Osama bin Laden used the country as a practice field and training camp, then bombed the American mainland.  We had to stop copycat killers.  And evidently, we did for the most part.

 

How’d we do that?  Sending troops by the boat and planeload.  Sending billions of dollars in sophisticated weaponry.  Training, training and more training.  

 

Then, trump said “let’s get out of there.” So began our exit. When the trump people started talking directly with the Taliban, the legitimate government rightly decided America switched sides.  Biden continued the exodus.  And credit to both presidents… probably plenty of American lives were saved. But…

 

The Taliban began rising from the dead, began takeover battles… and rolled over those sophisticated weapons and all that training faster than Amtrak can get you from Los Angeles to Penn Station.

 

The president of the “regular” government first isolated himself, then got out of Kabul.  The American flag came down at the embassy compound faster than your 600 horsepower Corvette gets you to the donut shop three blocks from your house.  And with less ceremony.

 

So we must ask, why did the “regular” army fall apart.  Gen. Wesley Clark thinks he knows. He told TV interviewers that it’s a survival strategy.  Afghanistan has learned to go with the flow. The Taliban gained strength and population after the USSR pulled out… then went underground again when the Americans came in.

 

Clark says the dream of the Taliban is to die in battle while the dream of the regulars is to go home after work. There’s something to that. You know, play with the kids, have dinner. Watch a little ESPN. Lie down with whichever of your wives whose turn it is.

 

Meantime, has the Taliban gone all touchy-feely?  In their first news conference after “electing” themselves, the leadership said “Hey, we’re going to give women rights.” The leopard changed his spots? Later they amended the statement to include “within the norms of Islamic law.”

 

We’ll see.  But no one’s betting the rent on the likelihood that the people who stoned adulterers to death and cut off the hands of thieves yesterday are going to read “suspects” their Miranda rights today.  After all, in that region of the world you invoke the right to remain silent by someone cutting off your head.

 

In the meantime, over here… we have an obligation to help those who helped us over there. We have a moral obligation to do that and do it fast.  Get ‘em out without the TSA wandings and just hope no one is wearing a shoe bomb.

 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021