Legend

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

— H. L. Mencken

This much can be proven: the soft drink known as Dr. Pepper was first sold in 1885 by a Waco, Texas, pharmacist named Wade Morrison.

A patent from that year documents as much.

As to the drink's specious name—well, like much of history, you must take most of the story on faith.

The legend holds that Morrison named the soft drink after a former employer, Dr. Charles Pepper, of Rural Retreat, Virginia.

Pepper had been a surgeon in the Confederate army before retiring to open a pharmacy in Rural Retreat, from which he dispensed a sweet and spicy elixir not dissimilar to Morrison's later concoction.

The legend suggests further that Morrison was Dr. Pepper's assistant and was in love with the doctor-turned-pharmacist's daughter.

Told he wasn't suited to marry the boss's daughter, Morrison swiped one of the doctor's formulas and fled to Texas.

But whether Morrison ever worked for Pepper is questionable.

Although US Census records show Morrison indeed lived in the vicinity of Rural Retreat and worked as a pharmacy clerk, he may never have even known the doctor, much less worked for him. 

But Morrison, aiming to turn his soft drink into a powerhouse throughout the South, was happy to market it under Pepper's name and title.

By doing so, he reasoned, he could conjure both the notion of "healing" and warm memories of the Lost Cause—a winning combination in the soul-sick South.

Morrison's branding strategy worked.

By the turn of the 20th century, his company, Artesian Manufacturing & Bottling, had sold hundreds of thousands of bottles of Dr. Pepper in Texas and Virginia.

Soon the company would become the Number 2 seller of soft drinks in America, outsold only by Coke, and Morrison would crown Dr. Pepper the "King of Beverages."

Even today, ignoring "woke mobs," the company stands by the legend that Wade Morrison named Dr. Pepper after the Confederate surgeon.

POSTSCRIPT: To learn more about Dr. Pepper's brand history, go here.

Above: Dr. Pepper by Annie Morgan Preece. Oil on canvas. 6 x 6 inches.

My Morning Ritual

A daily ritual is a way of saying I'm taking care of myself.

— Mariel Hemingway

Like hundreds of millions of people around the globe, I wake up every morning and perform precisely the same task.

I brew coffee.

For me, it's more a ritual than a routine.

A routine, psychologists say, is a more or less meaningless activity, while a ritual is purpose-filled.

Brewing coffee certainly is purpose-filled for me. 

I'd describe its purpose as "to start the day with elation."

Some days, I know, will deliver several moments of elation.

But some days will not.

My morning ritual compensates for that.

It's like an insurance policy that protects me from a ho-hum day.

"It is unrealistic to want to be happy all the time," says alternative medicine advocate Andrew Weil.

He's right, of course.

But doesn't everyone deserve at least one dose of happiness a day, even if it's caffeine-induced?

The morning ritual is a catalyzer of happiness.

It is a homecoming, a refuge, or, in the words of the German philosopher Byung Chul Han, a "technology for housing oneself."

Life coaches and self-help gurus point to the morning ritual as the prime example of "self-care."

It gives you the feeling that you're in control, even if that's for only a few minutes of the day.

Were I more original, I'd invent my own morning ritual, as did many famous people in the past:

• Ben Franklin sat and wrote naked every morning for an hour after rising.
  
  
• John Quincy Adams (also naked) took a dip in the Charles River.
  
  
• Jane Austen woke up every morning and played the piano for an hour.
  
  
• Alexander Dumas began his mornings with a stroll beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where he would stop to eat an apple.

• Marcel Proust woke every day to smoke a bowl of opium and eat a croissant.

• Winston Churchill drank a whiskey and smoked a cigar first thing every morning.
  
  
• Marilyn Monroe drank raw egg yolks in warm milk.
  
  
• Elizabeth Taylor arose to eat bacon and eggs with a mimosa.

Many contemporary celebrities have more imaginative morning routines than mine, as well. 

TV producer Simon Cowell, for example, wakes up every morning and watches Hanna-Barbera cartoons. 

Warren Buffet drinks a can of Coke and reads The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, like clockwork. 

Michelle Obama wakes up at 4:30 and works out in the gym. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wakes up and drinks water and lemon. "I try to drink it slowly and mindfully,” she told Balance the Grind.

Victoria Beckham wakes up and drinks two tablespoons of vinegar.

Morning rituals are really all about doing one thing that's important to you, no matter what the day may bring.

The hell with the rest of the world, the morning ritual pronounces: this is mine.

As journalist Jess McHugh wrote in The Washington Post in January, morning rituals "provide a feeling of freedom and a rare moment for self-determination."

What's your morning ritual?

Above: The Morning Coffee by Charles Hawthorne. Oil on canvas. 30 x 30 inches.

You Can't Make Enjoyment a Goal

 

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.

— Thomas à Kempis

Minus the prayer, I spend a lot of my time in retirement along the lines recommended by Thomas à Kempis, a 15th-century advocate of what today we would call mindful living.

I read, write, ruminate, and try to remain a productive citizen.

I hope in the long run to devote even more time to mindful activities, reducing to near-zero the time that I spend on mindless pursuits, such as watching TV, scrolling through social media, and worrying about the state of the world.

But no matter how I wind up spending my time, there are no guarantees.

For as I have discovered in four years of trial and error, you can't design a retirement guaranteed to produce enjoyment.

You can only try things. 

Golfing, gardening, hiking, biking, birdwatching, breadmaking, singing, sailing, painting, philanthropy, or songwriting.

Globetreking.

Tutoring schoolkids.

Or playing dominoes in the park.

Whatever floats your boat.

When they promise you that, with sufficient planning, you'll enjoy your golden years, the retirement experts are lying to you.

Yes, retirement is an opportunity to reimagine yourself.

You no longer have to react to bosses and customers, or go places and perform tasks not of your choosing.

You're free to do what you will enjoy.

The problem is, you can't decide in advance that you'll enjoy an activity.

You cannot make enjoyment a goal.

"Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity," said the writer Paul Goodman.

The best you can do is to test out a lot of important activities, and learn whether enjoyment follows.

While they're still working, people wonder mostly whether they'll have the money to retire. 

The smart ones make saving a goal.

But they don't give thought to whether they'll enjoy retirement.

And there's a good reason for that.

You can't make enjoyment a goal.

Faking It

 

To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.

— Arthur Herzog

Fraudsters know it's easy to make a fast buck from a phony "news" website.

To prove how easy it is, journalist Megan Graham conducted an experiment a couple of years ago.

She built her own website and filled it with stories she stole from CNBC.

"Within days, I had the ability to monetize my site with legitimate advertisers," she reported. 

"It was shockingly easy."

Graham's success was no doubt due to advertisers' shoddy ad-buying systems, which funnel ad money through third parties.

Those companies take their fees off the top and buy ads with the money left over.

But in their haste to earn fees, the companies lose track of where that money is spent.

"Half a brand’s digital marketing spend is absorbed by middlemen," Graham says. "It’s impossible for advertisers to know exactly where their money is going."

But suckering advertisers and their agents isn't the real crime here. (It's perfectly legal to create a website filled with gobbledygook.)

Plagiarism is.

To sustain the illusion that they're legitimate publishers, fraudsters rip off stories from legitimate publishers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.  

Fraudsters can even automate plagiarism by using website plug-ins known as "scrapers," which swipe articles from legitimate publishers hourly.

To cover their crime, before posting the stolen stories, the more artful fraudsters run them through a paraphrasing app.

These apps thinly disguise the plagiarism—but only thinly.

They also provide inadvertent chuckles.

Consider, for example, how one fraudster mangled parts of a story about a Congressional hearing on stock-trading:

Original 

Some legislators called for more transparency. Rep. Nydia Velázquez asked about the lack of requirements for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

Fraudster

Some legislators necessitated additional transparency. Rep. Nydia old master asked regarding the shortage of needs for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

In this case, the fraudster simply published the paraphrasing app's results verbatim:

• Called for more was replaced by necessitated additional
   
• Velázquez was replaced by old master
  
  
• Asked about the lack of requirements was replaced by asked regarding the shortage of needs

How do the fraudsters get away with this?

As Graham showed, they count on advertisers' inability to detect original from plagiarized stories.

"It’s easy to make money from advertisers just by setting up a web page," she said, "That means there’s significant incentive to create sites filled with outright plagiarized content."

But fraudsters also count on visitors' shabby reading habits.

As studies have shown, digital readers are evincing ever-greater degrees of "cognitive impatience," robbing them of the ability to "deep-read."

To put it succinctly, digital readers lack discernment: we'll accept any crap that's dished out, no matter the source or the quality.

In a real sense, we're complicit in the fraudsters' crime.

My Rabbit Hole

I lead a monastic life, a theater unto myself, sequestered from the tumults and troubles of the world.

— Robert Burton

Crime, violence, vanity, ignorance, disease, poverty, corruption: I'm done with them. 

Done with the day's news stories and current events. 

Done with the real world—with the theater of the forlorn. Done with sorrows, follies, afflictions, and lies.

I can't take them any more.

I'm heading down my rabbit hole, where I can escape the world's heaviness and be a "theater unto myself."

If you care, you can find me there painting.

"A simple line painted with a brush can lead to freedom and happiness," the painter Joan Miro said.

He got that right.

How about you?

What's your rabbit hole? 

Above: Baron von Hoppin' by Jan Weir. Oil on linen. 6 x 8 inches. The Rabbit King by Joan Miro. Etching, aquatint and carborundum on paper. 38 x 28 inches.

Trump's Undeniable Charm

I so want to ignore Trump, but cannot. His name comes up every day. He's the car wreck you can't look away from.

Yesterday, at the America First Policy Institute Summit in Washington, he outlined his authoritarian vision of his next presidential term.

It was the speech of a crackpot through and through.

And scary as hell.

Yes, Trump is an unlettered buffoon, but he has his certain appeal.

It's the appeal of the reluctant savior, the hero and patriot whose hour has come.

Ours is a “failing nation,” a “cesspool of crime,” he told the crowd of 600. "I have to save our country.”

In March 1940, George Orwell reviewed the first English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf, overlooking the book and reflecting instead on Hitler's charm.

"Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality," Orwell wrote. 

While der Führer promotes a "monstrous vision," "the fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him." Perhaps it's his face, Orwell suggested. 

"It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs," he wrote. "In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself."

Hitler harbors a personal grievance of unknown origin, Orwell said. His impulse is to avenge himself.

"He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to."

But charm alone isn't Hitler's secret weapon, Orwell wrote. He also knows that all aggrieved people crave vengeance.

"Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also want struggle and self-sacrifice. Hitler has said, 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

The similarities to Trump are unnerving.

We all don't fling ourselves at his feet, thank goodness, but millions of Americans worship him.

It's that undeniable charm—and the craving for vengeance—that explain Trump’s attraction.

Down

Well, I caught Covid.

I have been down for three days with the standard array of symptoms, which are now in retreat, thanks to Paxlovid.

Down is our metaphor for ill.

Well is up, ill is down. 

When we're well, we feel up, upbeat, high-flying, on top of things.

When we're ill, we feel down. We fall ill, come down with a disease, keel over, are laid low, feel under the weather, and—if we don't recover—are cut down. 

In a pandemic, we sink fast and drop like flies.

When we suffer symptoms we're afflicted, from the Latin verb affligo, meaning "to throw down." We feel low, run down, down and out, down for the count, or just plain down.

Feeling down sucks. The chronic fever and chills, soar throat and body ache make it impossible to feel anything but down. 

I sleep a lot and watch old mysteries on TV.

Does illness have any upside?

Thoreau thought so. "'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes," he wrote in his Journals.

We can only guess what he meant; there's no more to the entry.

But we can assume Thoreau had in mind recovery.

An illness is an opportunity, first off, to recover our bodies, because in illness, bodily events become the events of the day.

In illness, we can reflect on the unforgiving primacy of our bodies; take inventory of the bad habits we should shed; and remember that our bodies are impermanent—that time's awasting and there's much to be done.

In illness, we can recover our selves. We can read good books—at least until brain fog recurs. (I'm reading, in fits and starts, a delightful biography of the painter Monet). We can read and reflect on our values, our goals, our weaknesses, our debts, and the things we've left undone. We can also cultivate the "attitude of gratitude" for our partners and caregivers—in my case, the same person—and for our family members, friends, and neighbors.

Last, but not least, in illness, we can recover leisure. We can be mellow, indulging ourselves with "extreme self-care." An illness is an excuse to take hot baths, drink soothing fluids, eat comfort food, crawl under a blanket, lounge on the sofa, and take constant naps. We can do these things any day, of course, but not with impunity, because over-indulgence can quickly turn self-care into torpor and sloth.

"I don't respond well to mellow," Woody Allen's character says in Annie Hall. "You know what I mean? I have a tendency, if I get too mellow, to ripen and then rot."

Complaining

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain.

— Julian Baggini

Complaining is my hobby.

Sure, I could quit my hobby, but only by replacing it with an equally engrossing one.

Woodworking comes to mind.

But then I'd have to invest in a lot of fancy lumber and tools and find a place in the house to build a workshop, whereas I'm already fully equipped to complain.

Unlike woodworking, complaining also has the advantage of being a portable hobby.

I can complain any time, anywhere, about any subject you can imagine.

Despite all the possible subjects, I tend to limit my complaints to a finite set.

You could call me a specialist.

My perennial subjects are other drivers, bureaucrats, banks, phone trees, blister packaging, and auto-fill.

When it comes to complaining, many people have a much wider range than mine.

Their complaints are panoramic.

They will complain about summer days, newborn kittens, gourmet meals, world heritage sites, and virtuoso performances. 

When the market goes up, they'll complain that it was down.

When the movie was fabulous, they'll complain that it was too long.

When the line is short, they'll complain that it's moving slowly.

For these people, complaining is less a hobby than an occupation.

We call them pains in the ass.

Complaining as an art form has a spotty reputation among thinkers.

Aristotle called it "wailing" and said it was a disagreeable habit of women, servants, and "soft" men.

Seneca said it was pointless—like trying to evade taxes.

Kant thought complaining was undignified and unworthy of a gentleman. "No true man will importune a friend with his troubles," he said.

Eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison thought that complaining signaled a character defect. "It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect," he said.

But complaining has its defenders, too—especially among contemporary thinkers.

"Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be," Julian Baggini has said.

When it's not simple whining, Baggini points out, complaining can take the form of protest, often the basis of important social and political reforms.

Complaining can also relieve common miseries.  

As social creatures, according to Kathryn Norlock, we need to complain, if for no other reason than to "make the unchangeable easier for complainers to bear."

This "cathartic" variant of complaining not only provides us a much-needed psychic safety valve, but underpins many of the greatest passages of world literature, as Emily Shortslef has observed.

Through an "array of rhetorical modes and literary forms of complaint," Shortslef says, writers through the centuries have elevated complaining from mere kvetching to tragedy, giving readers the chance to contemplate the "inherent vulnerability of humans to loss and injury."

Just imagine if Job, Hamlet, Ahab, Yossarian, or Portnoy had been told never to complain.

Time Wasters

A man who dares to waste an hour of time
has not discovered the value of life.

— Charles Darwin

I recently heard the owner of a meeting planning firm say that her agency has started billing clients specifically for the time devoted to answering "half-baked" emails.

Her staff had informed her that clients had been wasting large amounts of their time with emails that were preposterous and scatterbrained, and that the situation of recent was worsening. Some clients would send more than 20 a day.

So she took steps to profit from the clients' lack of professionalism.

Workplace communication isn't easy. It takes a bit of care.

The careless communicator—too hurried to compose his thoughts, look up the answers to basic questions, or question whether an idea has the slightest merit—never seems to realize that he's squandering others' time (and his own, in the bargain).

He doesn't see that his imprecision, incaution, and indifference to others' time bear a cost, and that by robbing himself and others of time he destroys value.

I like the meeting planner's new practice. She's making lemonade from lemons, and boosting her bottom line.

As the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, "the life we receive is not short, but we make it so."

We have but a few grains of sand in the hourglass.

Can we afford to let others waste them with impunity?

Another Instance of Newspeak

California taxpayers subsidize abortion tourism.

— Brietbart headline

GOP crazies are accusing Democrats of a weird form of political point-scoring.

They're calling it "abortion tourism."

Republican Senator Steve Daines used the term only yesterday to decry a Democratic bill meant to protect a woman's right to travel across state lines for an abortion.

He claims that state-funded "abortion tourism" appeals to "greedy woke corporations," because it lowers the cost of paid maternity leave.

Some left-wing columnists begrudgingly agree with him.

Give me a break.

"Abortion tourism" isn't a thing.

It's no more a thing than "colostomy farming."

Abortion is a medical procedure. Tourism is a facet of the leisure industry.

Plastering the two terms together does not make them a thing.

It's only another Orwellian coinage.

The GOP loves Orwellian Newspeak, the language of 1984 that the ruling party in the novel created "to diminish the range of thought."

Newspeak comprised a "verbal shorthand," Orwell said, that "consisted of words deliberately constructed for political purposes."

These words packed "whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables." 

Their purpose was "not so much to express meanings as to destroy them."

When you destroy meaning, Orwell showed us, you destroy thought.

Right-wingers like Daines would no doubt deny they're using Orwellian Newspeak.

They'd insist that "abortion tourism" is merely a linguistic cousin of "medical tourism," the term we commonly use to describe international travel for medical care.

They'd insist that "abortion tourism" carries no particular judgment.

But that defense is disingenuous.

They know the term is a wry distortion which implies that the woman who seeks an abortion is frivolous—a tourist; and the abortion clinic that serves her is a leisure-industry profiteer—a Disneyland with stirrups.

When nothing could be farther from the truth.

"Words, Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "how innocent and powerless in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

Dock Boggs

In the bright sunny south in peace and content,
The days of my boyhood, I scarcely have spent, 

From the deep flowing springs to the broad flowing stream, 

Ever dear to my memory and sweet is my dream.

— Dock Boggs

I first learned of Dock Boggs from Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic, the rock critic's look into the "old, weird America."

New York Magazine called Marcus' landscape the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, and anonymous poets of all stripes."

Boggs was one of the latter—a morose, hard drinking Appalachian poet who sang like his blacksmith daddy and picked a blues-style banjo in the fashion of the Black banjoists he heard in the railroad camps surrounding his home.

Boggs was born in 1898 in Southeastern Virginia and, as a young man, made a living working in the coal mines and peddling moonshine.

For three years in the late 1920s, he tried desperately to earn a living as a professional musician, entertaining at parties in the mining camps and recording 12 songs (eight for Brunswick Records in New York and four for Lonesome Ace Records in Chicago). 

But he quit music in 1929 when the stock market collapsed the parties and recording deals came to a sudden halt.

Boggs stayed out of the music business for over 30 years, until he was rediscovered in the early 1960s by the leaders of the folk revival.

In 1963, one of them coaxed the 65-year old Boggs out of Norton to play at large festivals. 

Boggs also recorded an album that year for Folkways Records in New York, and became a strong influence on Bob Dylan, David Crosby, and even the 15-year old Bruce Springsteen.

Say what you will of it, Boggs' music is raw. 

"I put so much of myself into some pieces that I very nearly broke down," he once told folklorist Charles Wolfe. 

Greil Marcus claimed in Invisible Republic that Boggs sounds when he sings "as if his bones were coming through his skin."

"If God ever requires that rocks cry out," singer-songwriter Lesley Miller wrote, "they may sound as old and earthy as Dock Boggs. 

"His banjo rings like the end of time, and his voice cries out from the deeply submerged recesses of the American heart and mind."

Boggs' old-time music is the polar opposite of today's Country, where the emotions and rural references are formulaic and trite and about as "country" as the corn pone at Popeye's. 

Boggs' characters, in contrast, are real: they're dirt farmers, hillbillies, convicts, wastrels, and murderers, all deeply afflicted by the fates they must suffer. 

Not one drives a Ram, supports our troops, or wears tight blue jeans. 

And they usually wind up vanquished, humiliated, or dead, not home on the couch with the hot wife and the football game.

"Dock deserves fame for his efforts to live true to what he believed God expected of him," English professor Barry O'Connell wrote.

"Never a conventional life, his was also shaped by extraordinary gifts. Among them was an almost instinctive capacity to see and hear the events of his world newly.

"Through his music, he transmuted the everyday into something more beautiful and startling and acute than we are usually able to feel."

Above: Dock Boggs by R. Crumb.

Postscript: Listen to this lovely instrumental by Nora Brown. It's Dock Boggs' "Coke Oven March." 

Trump's Defense

They who rule unjustly and incompetently have been raised up by God to punish the wickedness of the people.

— John Calvin

As the inculpatory evidence mounts every day, it's reasonable to ask what defense Trump's lawyers will use in the upcoming trial, The People v. Donald J. Trump.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me that his best defense is the one known as vis major (a tort law defense, not a criminal law defense; but what the hell).

God did it.

Arguing vis major, Trump can escape all liability for the damages to democracy that occurred on his watch, simply by blaming God.

He can put forward in his defense the writings of John Calvin, who argued in Institutes of the Christian Religion that God, not voters, appoints our leaders—both the good and the wicked ones.

Good leaders reflect God's grace; wicked leaders, His wrath; but "all equally have been endowed with that holy majesty with which He has invested lawful power."

Trump may have been a wicked leader, but God was responsible; so Trump should not be punished for his treasonous deeds.

Instead, he should be revered.

"In a very wicked man, utterly unworthy of all honor," Calvin writes, "provided he has the public power in his hands, that noble and divine power resides which the Lord has by His word given to the ministers of his justice and judgment.

"Accordingly, he should be held in the same reverence and esteem by his subjects, in so far as public obedience is concerned, in which they would hold the best of leaders if he were given to them."

Stay tuned.

A hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Above: The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin (1852). Oil on canvas. 54 x 84 inches.

For Such a Time as This

Yet who knows whether you have come to 

the kingdom for such a time as this?

— Esther 4

Old Testament readers know well the story of Esther, the ambivalent queen who shirked her duty to save the Jews from annihilation.

Faced with the decision to stand up to the Persians, Esther's cousin asked, "Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Alas, evangelical Christian women have coopted the Biblical phrase "for such a time as this," calling it their "Esther moment" as they push and push the GOP to criminalize abortion nationwide.

But who says the other side—the pro-choice majority—can't take back the phrase and, come November, grab for themselves the "Esther moment?"

I believe, as pollsters do, that women voters will flock to the polls in November to hand the GOP its worst midterm defeat since 2006 (when George W. Bush was punished for his murderous Iraq War).

Don't discount angry women.

Assuming they still have the right to vote in November—with this court, you can't count on it—pro-choice women will have their "Esther moment" in the voting booth.

They will use their votes to assert their right to make their own reproductive decisions.

You heard it here.

Earwash

Now wash out your ears with this.

— Paul Harvey

Were its apostles—Hannity, Levin, Ingraham, et al.—not so flagrantly gangsterish, conservatism might have more adherents.

As things are, "conservative" is an aspersion and only 36% of Americans own up to the label, according to Gallup.

That percentage that hasn't changed in three decades.

To increase conservatism's base would take a thorough cleansing of the outhouse that is "conservative talk radio" today.

And it would take the reincarnation of Paul Harvey.

A staple of ABC News Radio, Harvey was carried on 1,200 stations throughout the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, reaching nearly 15% of the US adult population.

Famed for his tagline, "Now you know the rest of the story," Harvey had a quirky, affected delivery, a kind of velvety staccato that he stole from "old-time" announcers and which he made his own by introducing frequent—and senseless—pauses.

Cherry-picking the day's news and adding backstories, Harvey used his daily broadcasts as a platform for an obvious, but unstated, Midwestern conservatism.

Through his copy, he loved to picture instances of self-reliance, honesty, modesty, and diligence. 

He loved Horatio Alger stories and the gospel of hard work. 

He loved tales of sacrifice and heroism in war.

And he loved to berate big government for any effort to bring about economic justice.

"I was never one who sought to make the small man tall by cutting off the legs of a giant," he said of the Great Society. "I wanted to drag no man down to my size, but only to preserve a way of life which might make it possible for me, one day, to elevate myself until I at least partly matched his size."

Harvey's partisanship, veiled by his Puritan-cum-Pollyanna attitude, set him apart as a broadcaster.

So did his commercialism.

Like today's podcasters, Harvey would commingle sponsors' messages with his copy, so that editorial and advertising content flowed seamlessly from his lips.

The practice—we now call it "native advertising"—earned him the label "the finest huckster ever to roam the airwaves."

"I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is," Harvey once said.

A testament to his gentle conservatism, Harvey received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2005.

It's the highest honor a civilian can receive.

"Americans like the sound of his voice," Bush said at the ceremony.

"Over the decades we have come to recognize in that voice some of the finest qualities of our country: patriotism, good humor, kindness, and common sense."

You sure won't find anything remotely like those qualities on conservative talk radio today, where venom and lies are the stock in trade.

Now you know the rest of the story.

Spam!

My father had a visceral aversion to hot dogs, stemming from his military service during World War II.

Stationed on an Air Force base in southern England, he claimed that all his daily meals for a nine-month spell had consisted solely of canned Vienna Sausage, because the mess could obtain no other food. 

After that, he couldn't even look at a spiced ham product without growing nauseous.

I don't recall ever seeing him eat a hot dog; not at a picnic, not at the drive-in, not even at the ball park.

Our family, as a result, also never ate Spam. 

You might say, as youngsters, we were Spam-deprived. 

(Oddly, we did often eat Taylor's Ham, a New Jersey-made "pork roll" hardly different from Spam except that, to comply with residents' taste, you would fry it to the consistency of saddle leather.)

Spam, not to be confused with electronic junk mail, has a sovereign past among canned lunchmeats.

Invented in 1937, the pork mash was Minnesota meatpacker Jay Hormel's way of monetizing the least desirable part of the pig, its shoulders.

Cooked and canned in a vacuum so it wouldn't "sweat" while unrefrigerated, the emulsified "miracle meat" got the name Spam at a company New Year's Eve party, when the guests were asked to name Hormel's latest product.

One guest blurted “Spam” and it stuck.

Three years later, 70% of Americans were eating the stuff.

Housewives bought 40 million cans of Spam in 1940, eager to see if Hormel's ad campaign was true: "Slice it, dice it, fry it, bake it. Cold or hot, Spam hits the spot."

But Spam really took off in 1942, when the Pentagon started to buy it—along with every other canned lunchmeat—by the boatload, to feed GIs in Europe and the Pacific.

Over 100 million pounds of Spam were shipped abroad.

The GIs, of course, despised it, saying "it's the real reason war is hell."

But locals felt differently. 

In England and the Asian Pacific, civilians—the majority at the point of starvation—scarfed Spam up, instantly making it a menu staple morning, noon and night.

They called Spam a "godsend." 

Their avidity meant that Spam would find its way onto main courses, served with everything from eggs to fish, toast to rice, cheese to vegies.

And it still is today.

Worldwide, Hormel has sold over eight billion cans of Spam since 1937.

A Message to Garcia

McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; 
Rowan took the letter and did not ask, "Where is he at?"

— Elbert Hubbard

In our teamwork-obsessed era, when it takes a village just to turn the lights on, we'd do well to bring back into everyday use the phrase "a message to Garcia."

As the Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors explains, to "take a message to Garcia" is to "accept responsibility and have enough courage and resourcefulness to complete a task."

Responsibility, courage and resourcefulness are clearly absent from the workplace today. 

The phrase a "message from Garcia" originates from a once-popular 1899 essay about a certain army officer, First Lieutenant Andrew Rowan.

Relying solely on his wits, according to "A Message to Garcia," Lieutenant Rowan ran the Spanish blockade to deliver a crucial letter from then-President William McKinley to the Cuban rebel leader General Calixto Garcia, who was secreted in his mountain hideout.

The Spanish-American War was about to heat up and McKinley wanted Garcia to tell him how many Spanish troops occupied Cuba. 

"There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze," "A Message to Garcia" says of Rowan, "and the statue placed in every college in the land."

The point of the essay is simple: Rowan's exploits should prove to boys that, in a world where lethargy and irresponsibility are the norm, initiative trumps know-how every time.

"No man who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed hasn't been appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it," "A Message to Garcia" says.

"Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook or threat he forces or bribes other men to assist him."

Rowan's guts and ingenuity are qualities every boy should strive to acquire, "A Message to Garcia"  says.

"It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this or that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing—carry a message to Garcia!"

In short, the workplace needs studs, omni-competent self-starters who are willing to carry the ball without a full playbook, constant handholding, or the promise of a merit badge at the end.

Alas, the self-esteem movement—and its sappy replacement, social-emotional learning—have robbed our workplaces of studs.

Today, employees are entitled. To offer even a lick of initiative, they demand moment-by-moment mollycoddling by their employers in the form of continuous stimulation, entertainment, rewards and appreciation. 

And so they are awarded gamified jobs, chill-out spaces, flexible hours, onsite masseurs, free catered lunches, nap pods, life coaching, artisanal coffee bars, and free gym memberships.

Absent those perks, they become "disengaged."

Even a text message to Garcia may never arrive.

Above all, "A Message to Garcia" wants readers to know that their value to employers comes not from book-smarts or eagerness, but from a kind of deferential dutifulness, a quiet reliability that puts the "help" in "hired help."

"The man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never has to go on strike for higher wages. 

"Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks will be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town, and village—in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such; he is needed, and needed badly—the man who can carry a message to Garcia."