Category: Current Affairs

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A Brief History of Congressional Decorum, II

1880: The Weaver-Sparks Affray

During deliberations on December 21, the House took up a funding bill–“a measure from the consideration of which no one would suspect a disgraceful riot could possibly arise,” The New York Times noted. But debate over the bill, or rather a debate over how the bill should be debated, quickly deteriorated into accusations of party disloyalty and political skulduggery. Soon, the quarreling centered on two members: James Baird Weaver, a member of the Greenback Party from Iowa, and William Andrew Jackson Sparks, Democrat of Illinois.

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While Weaver (left) inveighed against Democratic monetary policy, Sparks (right) and several others tried to shout him down, and someone was heard to call Weaver a liar. Sparks apologized for getting exercised but said he wasn’t the one who called Weaver a liar. Weaver accepted the apology, then issued a warning. Here’s how The Times described the scene in its December 22 editions:

” ‘I would not harm a hair of your head [Weaver said]; but don’t make any mistake about me. My fighting weight is 185 pounds, and my address is Bloomfield, Iowa.’

“This increased the general merriment and increased Mr. Sparks’s anger. Shaking his fist at Mr. Weaver, he shouted: ‘I have a contempt for that man’s arm. It can’t be used to hurt me. The manner in which he received my explanation shows that he is not a gentleman, a fact of which his conduct in the Presidential campaign has given abundant proof.’

“At this point, for the first time during the long controversy, Mr. Weaver lost his temper, and replied to Mr. Sparks by saying: ‘In the presence of the House of Representatives I denounce you as a liar.’

” ‘… And I denounce you as an unmitigated scoundrel,’ rejoined the irate Sparks.”

Weaver and Sparks rushed at each other but were restrained from fisticuffs as dozens of members rushed toward the Speaker’s desk. The Times again:

“At this time, the commotion on the floor of the House had the appearance of a mob fight, and from the galleries it looked as though such a termination was inevitable. At least three members were struggling to encounter each other in combat, and at least 60 others were wrestling and shouting to prevent the threatened conflict. … In the midst of the uproar some wag from the rear of the hall shouted: ‘Trot out the American eagle,’ referring to the silver mace surmounted by that bird, which is the emblem of the authority of the House when borne by the Sergeant-at-Arms. Finally, Sergeant-at-Arms Thompson made his appearance, bearing the silver mace, and parading with it among the members forced them to be seated, thus quelling the disorder.”

The House adjourned. When it met again the next day, Reps. Sparks and Weaver were taken to task for what other members termed a “pot-house brawl” and “gambling-house quarrel.” Members debated whether the would-be combatants should be censured or simply required to apologize. Rep. Selwyn Zadock Bowman, Republican of Massachusetts, thought a mere apology wasn’t sufficient for the “gross outrage” committed against the House. “The two gentlemen … had bandied between themselves the vilest and the most opprobrious epithets that could pass from one man to another. They had boasted of their fighting weight [here the House reportedly erupted in laughter]; they had treated it as a joke; they had … endeavored to strip off their coats, and had only been separated by force.”

“The vilest and most opprobrious epithets”? How times have changed. Notwithstanding Bowman’s plea to preserve the dignity of the House–“a sacred tribunal,” he called it–Sparks and Weaver were allowed to end the affair with apologies to the chamber.

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A Brief History of Congressional Decorum

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1856: Sumner and Brooks

The House of Representatives has rebuked South Carolinian Joe Wilson for his “You lie!” outburst during President Obama’s speech last week. Wilson’s behavior is an outgrowth of something ugly that’s stirring among us. I don’t know how to summarize what that something is, but its hallmark is an intolerance that skips over debate and argument and rushes straight into hate-mongering and an insistence that those who dare disagree be denounced and silenced. I’m mindful I’m writing in a town, Berkeley, that has its own history of trying to shout down voices it doesn’t want to hear. There’s always a good reason to muzzle your foes and to caricature them as the spawn of the devil or worse.

I look across this bleak landscape and I find some ironic solace in the fact we’ve been here before. When I was a kid, I liked to read about the Civil War. A pictorial history we had included a chapter or two on the prelude to the war. One of the episodes that made an impression was the brutal beating of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina. The attack took place May 22, 1856, on the Senate floor after Sumner, an abolitonist, denounced pro-slavery forces in Kansas and their allies in Congress. Here’s a description of the incident by James M. McPherson in “Battle Cry of Freedom“:

“All spring, Charles Sumner had been storing up wrath toward what he considered ‘The Crime Against Kansas’–the title of a two-day address he delivered to the crowded Senate galleries May 19-20. ‘I shall make the most thorough and complete speech of my life,’ Sumner informed Salmon P. Chase a few days before the address. ‘My soul is wrung by the outrage and I shall pour it forth.’ So he did, with more passion than good taste. ‘Murderous robbers from Missouri,’ Sumner declared ‘hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization’ had committed a ‘rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.’ Sumner singled out members of the F Street Mess [a group of southern senators instrumental in writing the Kansas-Nebraska Act] for specific attack, including South Carolina’s Andrew P. Butler, who had ‘discharged the loose expectoration of his speech’ in demanding the disarming of free-state men in Kansas. Butler’s home state with ‘its shameful imbecility from Slavery’ had sent to the Senate in his person a ‘Don Quixote who had chosen a mistress to who me has made his vows, and who … though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight–I mean the harlot, Slavery.’

“Sumner’s speech produced an uproar–in the Senate, where several Democrats rebuked him, and in the press, where even Republican praise was tempered by reservations about the rhetoric. The only thing that prevented some southerner from challenging Sumner to a duel was the knowledge that he would refuse. Besides, dueling was for social equals; someone as low as this Yankee blackguard deserved a horsewhipping–or a caning. So felt Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of Andrew Butler. Two days after the speech Brooks walked into the nearly empty Senate chamber after adjournment and approached the desk where Sumner was writing letters. Your speech, he told the senator, ‘is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.’ As Sumner started to rise, the frenzied Brooks beat him over the head thirty times or more with a gold-headed cane as Sumner, his legs trapped under the bolted-down desk, finally wrenched it loose from the floor and collapsed with his head covered with blood.”

The House voted 112-95 to throw Brooks out–but the motion failed because southern members voted against it and deprived it of the two-thirds majority it needed to pass. The reaction at home? As McPherson notes, “From all over the South, Brooks received dozens of new canes, some inscribed with such mottoes as ‘Hit Him Again’ and ‘Use Knock-Down Arguments.’ “

I note that in looking up “Joe Wilson” on The New York Times site today, at the top of the page was an automatically generated ad: Support Joe Wilson Today: Stand for Joe. Stand for truth. Make a contribution today.” By some accounts, he’s raised millions since he screamed at the president.

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‘Inside of a Dog’

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My friend Pete pointed me to the New York Times review of “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.” It’s a nicely written piece, and a lot of it resonates with what we’ve seen in the nearly three and a half years since we became unintentional dog “owners.” I like this bit from the review, for instance:

“The idea that a dog owner must become the dominant member by using jerks or harsh words or other kinds of punishment, she writes, ‘is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the timeworn fiction of the animal kingdom with humans at the pinnacle, exerting dominion over the rest. Wolves seem to learn from each other not by punishing each other but by observing each other. Dogs, too, are keen observers — of our reactions.’

“In one enormously important variation from wolf behavior, dogs will look into our eyes. ‘Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.’ They are staring, soulfully, into our umwelts. It seems only right that we try a little harder to reciprocate, and Horowitz’s book is a good step in that direction. “

Kate points out there’s a comic reference in the title, an old Grouch Marx line: “Outside of a dog, a book’s a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Bravo, Kate!

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That Day

A semi-annual semi-tradition here, reposting an abridgment of a passage from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that Scott Simon read on NPR the weekend after September 11, 2001:

“I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm;
How he knuckled tight, and gave not back one inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
And chalk’d in large letters, on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you:
How he follow’d with them, and tack’d with them—and would not give it up;
How he saved the drifting company at last:
How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves;
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men:
All this I swallow—it tastes good—I like it well—it becomes mine;
I am the man—I suffer’d—I was there. …

I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken;
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris;
Heat and smoke I inspired—I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades;
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have clear’d the beams away—they tenderly lift me forth.
I lie in the night air in my red shirt—the pervading hush is for my sake;
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy;
White and beautiful are the faces around me—the heads are bared of their fire-caps;
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches. …

I take part—I see and hear the whole;
The cries, curses, roar—the plaudits …
Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs … the rent roof—the fan-shaped explosion;
The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air. …

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.”


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Bay Bridge: Friday Dawn

bridgedawn090409.jpgSpent the morning — Friday morning, I need to say, with Saturday morning fast approaching — out at the Bay Bridge construction project. I’d love to describe it in detail, and will, but right now I’m just plumb tuckered out. This is the scene at the Coast Guard boat landing on Yerba Buena Island. None of the construction is in this view, and it’s a little out of focus, but it does convey a little bit of the beauty of this morning. More later.  

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Smoke

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We have a fire in Southern California, and everyone gets to share in the fun. Above is a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution (original here) showing the extent of smoke from the Station Fire in the mountains north of Los Angeles (and from a series of fires burning in the mountains of British Columbia). Here’s a snippet from the Smoke Text Product (actual name) put out by NOAA’s Satellite Services Division:

Monday, September 1, 2009

DESCRIPTIVE TEXT NARRATIVE FOR SMOKE/DUST OBSERVED IN SATELLITE IMAGERY
THROUGH 0400Z September 2, 2009

Southern Canada/North and Central Plains/Midwest:
Remnant smoke was seen covering a very large portion of southern Canada,
the Northern Plains, most of the Midwest, and parts of the Great Lakes
region. Most of this smoke is remnant from multiple large wildfires
that have been burning in southern British Columbia over the past few
days. Smoke stretched west to east from British Columbia to south Quebec
just north of Vermont, as far north as central Hudson's Bay, and as far
south as the Central Plains where it has been mixing with the dense smoke
from the southern California wildfires.  Several areas of moderately
dense to very dense smoke were present, mostly along and north of the
US/Canadian border with one of the largeest areas of very dense smoke
northwest of Lake Superior and another over southern Alberta/southern
Saskatchewan.

For more on how the smoke situation is evolving across the country, see NOAA’s Air Quality Forecast page, then check the smoke forecasts accessed through the table on the left side of the page. (NOAA’s graphical forecast pages are awesome, but they require either a tutorial or a lot of time just messing around with them — the latter is my method — to discover everything that’s there).

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Health Reform, Meal Reform, and Wal-Mart

My friend MK Czerwiec — she’s an R.N., M.A. (in medical humanities and bioethics, from Northwestern), and comic-strip artist — wrote a while back that the elephant in the room in the health-care “debate” is one of the principal reasons we get sick and our medical costs run so high: the Great American Diet. You know: the massive number of calories we consume, the processed food, the fat, the salt. She points to writers like Michael Pollan and David Kessler who discuss our diet’s impact on both personal and societal health. And she’s in the midst of cartooning the issue (here).

Enter Wal-mart, by way of a commercial we saw tonight while watching a recorded episode of “Monk.” It was a short thing, and the theme was how busy, budget-conscious moms can feed their families while saving big bucks. Here’s a sequence of sloppy screen shots:

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Step 1: Mom’s shopping for breakfast at the fast-food drive-thru. Here’s how much it’s going to cost her to shove a pile of greasy, empty calories down her kids’ maws.

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Step 2: But wait. Mom’s got something up her sleeve. Or actually on a plate that at least her daughter seems to be less than thrilled to see.

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Step 3: Turns out Mom’s gotten out of rancid old Mr. McGreasy’s breakfast line and done what any good mom should. She went to the store and loaded up on what Alex Trebeck and the “Jeopardy” crew would call comestibles. Let’s see: There’s Yoplait, Jimmy Dean sausage, egg and cheese croissant sandwiches, and a jug of Sunny D non-juice.

A screenshot of a 2009 Walmart television ad.

Step 4: Mom saves. Over $600 a year. And if you could read the fine print in the ad, which is pretty hard to do even in a still photo, you might be able to understand how that $600 is derived.

Now, it would be easy to say, “Let’s not be a snob about other people’s food choices.” Or, “Let’s not be a hypocrite.” And I’ve got a friggin’ mountain of breakfast pastries, cookies, brownies, Dairy Queen shakes, and lots more under my belt to make me humble about what I say about Wal-mart’s suggested breakfast menu.

But look at the Sunny-D ingredient list from the company website. Note that the company chemists have mixed in a variety of artificial sweeteners to cut down on the amount of high fructose corn syrup that they dump into the bottle. Yoplait does have identifiable food in it along with the inevitable high fructose corn syrup. The Jimmy Dean croissant sandwiches? Jam-packed with caloric goodness. (In fact, if one limited one’s self to single servings of each one of these products for breakfast, you’d be talking about 700 calories.) And the croissant features a “War and Peace”-length ingredient list:

“Croissant: Enriched Bleached Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate [Vitamin B1], Riboflavin [Vitamin B2], Folic Acid), Vegetable Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oils, Water, Salt, Mono- and Diglycerides, Annatto Extract [Color]), Skim Milk, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast, Water, Contains 2% or Less of: Salt, Eggs, Wheat Gluten, Enzymes, Sugar, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Mono- and Diglycerides, Calcium Propionate and Potassium Sorbate (Preservatives), Soy Flour. Cooked Sausage Patty: Pork, Water, Contains 2% or Less of: Sodium Lactate, Salt, Sugar, Spices, Sodium Phosphates, Monosodium Glutamate, Sodium Diacetate, Caramel Color. Precooked Egg Patty: Whole Eggs, Water, Soybean Oil, Nonfat Dry Milk, Modified Corn Starch, Salt, Xanthan Gum, Natural and Artificial Butter Flavor (Butter [Cream, Milk], Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil Soybean Oil, Lipolyzed Butter Oil, Natural and Artificial Flavors), Citric Acid. Pasteurized Process American Cheese: American Cheese (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes, Artificial Color), Water, Cream, Sodium Citrate, Salt, Sodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid (Preservative), Lactic Acid, Artificial Color, Enzymes, Soy Lecithin.”

The point being: You’re not a criminal to make this stuff, buy it, eat it, or feed it to your family. We all do it, or have done it, and we all have had good reasons for it. But ignorance shouldn’t be one of those reasons any longer. It’s one thing for people to eat this way because they feel they have to — it’s a cheap way to eat, at least at first, and it’s perceived as convenient. It’s another matter altogether to promote the idea that this is good, wholesome, nutritious food that also happens to be inexpensive food. That’s an untruth on a par with selling the health benefits of cigarettes.

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Teddy Kennedy

A memory, and just one. Robert Kennedy was shot on the night before our last day of school in 1968, my last day of eighth grade. I remember going through that day not quite able to understand how life seemed normal for so many of those around me. But it did. A neighbor had planned a picnic for that night, and it went on as scheduled. But life that evening did not seem normal; all the adults were stricken. After midnight, Bobby Kennedy died.

Then we re-enacted the ritual remembered from the president’s assassination five years earlier, repeated with the killing of Martin Luther King just a couple months before Bobby was slain: a lying in state, a public funeral, a farewell.

It fell to Ted Kennedy to give the eulogy at his brother’s funeral. I was sick that day and so beside myself–talk about things you never get over, and this was one for me–that I don’t remember much of what he said. The bulk of the text came from Bobby himself, but mostly I recall the end, when he struggled to finish without breaking down. What a loss for him and his family, what a loss for us all. And despite all the personal stumbles, missteps, and humiliations Teddy suffered later, what strength it took for him to go on.

(The text of his Robert Kennedy eulogy is here, and the MP3 is here; you can also find it on YouTube with a variety of slide shows that range from the almost cloying to the bizarre.)

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Health Care ‘Debate’: The Complications

By now, most who have a voice — meaning journalists, broadcast rabble rousers, pundits, lobbyists, think tanks, and public officials both elected and unelected — have turned the current attempt to address shortcomings in our health-care system into a Clintonesque quagmire. What ought to be a simple, focused discussion–Everyone must have health insurance as a matter of national well-being. That insurance must not bankrupt anyone. How do we do that?–has become a mash of impenetrable rhetoric and hysterical charges. It’s amusing that the right has even taken to trying to make the problem of the uninsured go away by manipulating numbers. Zap those uncovered folks with a calculator, and they go away!

George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley, is a pioneer in the field of cognitive linguistics and an authority on the workings of framing in public debates. His well-publicized take in The Huffington Post is that the president and his people have blown it by making the health-care debate a pure policy discussion. He urges the administration to reframe its health care program “as An American Plan” that “guarantees affordable care for all Americans.” He then proceeds to lay out a messaging strategy to communicate that simple idea. The HuffPost piece is also worth reading for its critique on what Obama’s chief advisors do and don’t get about communicating with the public. If you think Lakoff’s argument is a little lofty and disconnected from reality, bear in mind that in February 2008, long before the issue was decided, he was predicting Obama would win the Democratic nomination and presidency, in large part because of the deftness with which he framed his candidacy. The guy’s got some cred.

Yes, the details of covering all the uninsured and making coverage affordable for everyone are complicated. But making that goal clear and repeating it at every opportunity is probably the only way to overcome the fear-mongering of those who would like to kill the plan and cripple Obama’s presidency.

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Food, ‘Food,’ and Health

My Chicago friend MK observes the current debate over the medical industry and how care is delivered (my formulation, now hers) fails to address a basic topic: “how we are getting sick in the first place.” She cites an estimate from Michael Pollan, the food industry critic and author of “In Defense of Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” that two-thirds of the medical expenses we incur as a society are directly linked to what we eat and drink.

That reminded me of an hour of KQED’s Forum that I heard about a month ago with Dr. David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration. He recently published a book called “The End of Overeating.” It’s an attempt to expose how we respond physiologically and neurologically to processed food (i.e., fat, sugar, and salt). Borrowing from advanced neurological research, he argues that the constant availability of, bombardment with, and ingestion of foods high in fat, high in salt, and high in sugar programs us to want more and more of the same (and boy, do we get more and more). The ultimate prescription is to disrupt that programming with a focus on what Pollan and others call ‘real food.’

Pollan’s formula is deceptively simple: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” (Written immediately after a breakfast that consisted of coffee and a ClifBar.)