One Thing Jimmy Carter Got Right

Let's face it, when the old son-of-a-gun is right, he's right. Back in 1980, Carter's speech at the Democratic convention contained this undeniable truth: the former commander of the Atropos and the Hotspur would, indeed, have been a good president.

If I was at that convention I would be cheering too.

Radio Memories: Happy Valentine's Day

Our Radio Memories posts returns this week with a timely story for Valentine's Day.

In the time before television, it was radio, and the dearly departed art form of radio drama, "The Theater Of The Mind", that held the public's affection. For the last year we've tried to pause every Sunday to tune in on old broadcasts from this older time, to reflect on the lessons these old shows may contain, hoping to hear stories with messages that can be of service to us, today.

"[O]ne must experience great sorrow before one can have great happiness"...

This is the theme explored in this week's program, an episode from a dramatic series that could never work as a television show, shaped as it was for fulfillment through the mind's eye of its audience: the historical biography series called Mr President.

The show's introduction was gently re-written each of its 6 seasons, between 1947 and 1953; I think the 1949 season offered the most wonderful description of the series' concept:
"The biography of responsibility".

Each week a little-known episode in the life of an American President would be dramatized, but the actual name of the President would be withheld from the audience until the final act (often the final words of the final act), inviting the audience to guess at the President's identity, in a fun test of the listener's knowledge of history.

We played an episode of the Mr President series last November, and I admit it was pretty easy to figure out the unnamed President in that one; this week's romantic example, also from 1948, will be much, much harder to guess correctly, I assure you..!

I hope it can bring some measure of comfort to those for whom Valentine's Day brings as much pain as it does joy to others around them. We can all use some reassurance that love lost can be found anew, in different form; that no matter how much things change, some things never change, and among these remains the continuing chance for renewed embrace of something bigger than ourselves, the ongoing opportunity to build a relationship, one soul healing another, each finding new reasons to live... and to love.

Previous 2010 Radio Memories posts:

Frontier Fighters: George Pickett
Destination Freedom: Citizen Toussaint [Toussaint L'Ouverture]
Ports Of Call: Haiti

For a list of our 2009 Radio Memories listings, go here.

Radio Memories: Service And Leadership

"I was convinced that the President needed three essentials if he was to survive his job: a sense of humor, a belief in the power of prayer, and a refuge away from the Executive Mansion."

In the years before the shadow of television fell upon our culture, families gathered around another item of living room furniture for their entertainment: the radio, closing their eyes and opening their imagination to the wonderful world of radio drama, the theater of the mind.

Every Sunday we tune in to memories of those distant times, to find a link between our present and our past, in the hope of lighting a way to a better future. Rarely do the distances feel as magnified than with this week's offering: the historical drama, Mr President.

Radio drama allowed playwrights and sound effects crews the opportunity to recreate history in detail rarely possible in television, with that visual medium's requirements of physical sets and physical actors needing to look like their historical counterparts. Starting in 1947, the ABC network began a radio program that plunged audiences for the next six years deep into American history in a series built around an interesting hook to make history itself seem more interesting to listeners expecting otherwise from boring history studies endured in school.


Robert Jennings and Dick Woollen created an anthology program starring Edward Arnold entitled "Mr President", dramatizing, and humanizing, a different President of the United States in each episode. The hook was that the actual identity of the President would be withheld, thereby inviting the audience to test their knowledge of US history. At the play's climax, the announcer (in the early seasons) or a character in the story (in the latter days of the series) would reveal whether the audience's best guess had been correct... an interesting intersection with the formula used in detective radio programs so popular with listeners in those days.

Each week the series would open with a short introduction meant to strike a difficult balancing act between establishing the President as a leader worthy of respect, but a mortal man, not an infallible genius:

Mr President, at home in the White House, elected leader of our people, our fellow citizen and neighbor.
These are little known stories of the men who've lived in the White House.
Dramatic, exciting events in their lives that you and I so rarely hear.
True, human stories of... Mr President.

The series starred Edward Arnold week in and week out as Mr President, an actor whose rise from humble beginnings to movie stardom rivals the rags-to-riches biographies of many of the presidential characters he portrayed on the air.

Many of the surviving episodes teach an elusive lesson: that the greatest leaders often arrive at their title through being such excellent servants, and that the secret to effective leadership lies in the humility of a leader's service, and the sincerity of a leader's sacrifice, as they give in order to receive.

This episode of Mr President was first broadcast on a Sunday long ago, on October 31st, 1948. See if you can guess which Chief Executive made the observation opening this week's Radio Memories post; but don't worry, I picked a rather easy one. If you enjoy the challenge, and develop a taste for more, be forewarned: the few surviving Mr President shows tend to be listed in collectors' and dealers' archives by the name of the President, rather than a general episode description... defeating the whole purpose of the historical guessing game in the first place! (It would be like listing whodunit detective programs by titles such as, "the butler shoots the millionaire", "the secretary poisons the boss"...)


Meanwhile, we invite you to listen to a servant of the people renewing his humility through his sense of humor, refreshing his courage through meditative prayer, and remembering his mortality by balancing the stress of duty with a calming, restful peace; all worthy habits that help us survive the tests of character involved in becoming a true leader.




Previous Radio Memories posts:

Mercury Theatre: Hell On Ice
Gunsmoke: Indian Raid?
Biography In Sound: George M. Cohan
Fibber McGee And Molly: The Scrap Drive
D-Day Broadcasts (from June 5, 1944)
Red Skelton: Vacations
Frontier Gentleman: Gambling Lady
Information Please: Guests Walter Duranty and John Gunther
The Aldrich Family: Cleaning The Furnace
Tom Mix, Terry and the Pirates VE Day broadcasts from May 8 1945
You Are There: The Capture Of John Wilkes Booth
Fort Laramie: War Correspondent
CBS Radio Workshop: Son Of Man
Great Gildersleeve: Easter Rabbits
Dimension X: Time And Time Again
An American In England: Women Of Britain
Cavalcade Of America: Bob Hope Reports
The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast
Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War
Escape: Vanishing Lady
Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

Egyptian Slave Freed From Slavery... In America

Shocking story this week about an Egyptian girl kept enslaved as a house maid for three years by a rich Egyptian family... in the US.

At nine years old, Shyima was "hired" by a wealthy Egyptian couple to work for their family first in their Cairo apartment, and soon after as a "maid" in their California home. Her duties forced her to awake before dawn and work until past midnight, cleaning the luxurious five-bedroom mansion. Her "employers" kept her in a windowless garage that was neither air-conditioned or heated. The light bulb in the garage blew out shortly after she arrived, and was never replaced; Shyima consequently spent her personal life in the dark... in more ways than one. "I thought this was normal", she answered when she was eventually asked why she didn't just run away.

Thanks to sharp-eyed neighbors, who anonymously tipped off Los Angeles authorities that a young girl seemed to be living in Mr. and Mrs. Ibrahim's garage, Shyima was saved; since the trial of her "benefactors" she has been adopted into a family that, unlike the Ibrahims, takes her to Disneyland to go on the rides, not just to carry everyone's bags. Shyima's video interview is a welcome reminder to keep faith in the possibility of happy endings:

[Shyima] graduated from high school this summer after retaking her exit exam and hopes to become a police officer.
Shyima, now 19, has a list of assigned chores. She wears purple eyeshadow, has a boyfriend and frequently updates her profile on MySpace. Her hands are neatly manicured. [This detail is in contrast to the earlier observation made by the police who first rescued Shyima: "They noted her hands were red and caked with dead, hard-looking skin."]

She has had her future given back to her; if only the same could be said for other children still trapped in the bonds of slavery:

The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer.

The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the U.S. Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants trapped behind the curtains of suburban homes, according to a study by the National Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group. No one can say how many are children, especially since their work can so easily be masked as chores.

[Hat Tip to Hot Air]

Have American Values Shifted?

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman suggests today in the New York Times that America is no longer the right-leaning, conservative nation that it had been for the latter half of the twentieth century. From his perspective, the citizens are shifting their traditional views on the role of government, foreign policy and, unfortunately, moral absolutism:

We have documented a similar, if less drastic, shift in public views of morality. Just three years ago, a majority of those we surveyed said that “there are absolute standards of right and wrong that apply to everyone in almost every situation.” Today, however, respondents by a narrow margin say they believe that “everyone has to decide for themselves what is right and wrong in particular situations.”

God Bless America

I love America.

That's easy to do, since there are so many things to love about the United States of America.

First and foremost I admire America's belief in progress. Just because something is bad now, doesn't mean it will stay bad forever; things can be changed, for the better. Not changed, as in eliminated, or replaced, which is the usual result of most revolutions. America's revolution was to keep, to conserve, the good things they felt they had achieved, and to add to them. To "plus" themselves.

I love Americans (and one in particular: my American wife!). They are optimists. They are creators, they do things, build things. They add to what's already been built. They "plus" our world.

I have faith in America. America is the living example of what faith means: to hold an idea in your imagination, and work to bring it to light. The labor that goes into this act of creation requires some of the strongest brand of courage there is: the courage to admit you're wrong. If what you're building isn't what you were aiming for, you need to be able to see the difference. Otherwise you build a prison rather than a paradise, poison instead of medicine. Few are those with the bravery to dis-illusion themselves as they labor, to strip away fantasy, and bathe themselves with doubts, in order to obtain a clean version of reality. Safer to never question, to never re-think, to never test our faith... safest of all, is to never try to create anything.

As children, every youngster loves to paint, to sing, to draw... and does so, with little inhibition; yet most youngsters reach an age when they learn to see that their graceless stumbling isn't really elegant dancing, their scribbles aren't really great art. And they stop being creative, they put away paint and flute and ballerina slippers. "I'm not really very good now", they say, "that means that I'll never be good... so why go on trying..?" They lose their faith, confusing the short-term present with the long-term future... with eternity.

In their own way, Americans continue trying. They never abandon their faith in themselves, they persevere in their belief they will forever succeed in getting closer to the ideal they hold in their mind's eye, however long it takes. Their country, after all, was built on faith, the faith that their people will continue to become better Americans, and better able to keep re-creating the successes of those who came and "plussed" things before them.

America is a country so full of heroes, a word which to me means, "someone who does what they are supposed to do." A couple of Christmas' ago, I made a short video to express my gratitude for the example that Americans set, generation after generation, in showing just how much goodness there can be, in living life as a human being, created in God's image: as beings capable of imagining better things, and working to bring them to light.






From the macro, to the micro: a video I was lucky enough to find, of a gentleman who, for me, is a typical American: someone who believes in "plussing" their world, and acts on that belief:




May God continue to Bless America.