DICK KELLY, A DEAR FRIEND

I had a spectacular day yesterday, that started with my eight mile meditation. That means I ran eight miles along Chicago's lakefront up from Monroe harbor into Lincoln Park and back again. I ran with a dear friend who has trained for many marathons with me since 2004.

The weather for the run was mild and sunny. The views of Lake Michigan were captivating and delicious.

The eight miler was over in a flash, in part due to conditioning and in large part due to fine conversation.

We finished the run with a trip to the marathoner's coffee shop, the Corner Bakery at Monroe and Wabash. I had a vision of the post-run treat: a tangy lemon bar (hopefully a fresh one) and some fresh steaming coffee. It was heavenly. I can still taste the tart lemon a day later.

Then home to clean up and chores.

Then off to Oak Park to visit one of my dearest friends, Dick Kelly, who is very very ill. Dick is bed-ridden with more ailments than I can count.

We visited for a couple of hours as if nothing was different. I didn't want them to be different. I never want any of my friends to leave my company or their loved ones.

Dick and I had met in Democratic politics in 1973 in that amazing eighteen month period in which I met my wife to be and many of my dearest friends for the next thirty-five years.

Dick has lived a life of great energy and a passion for social justice. He and my wife Beth were cut from the same mold, Catholics who cared all about love and forgiveness, the building of community and alleviating suffering and nothing about the reactionary leadership of their Church.

As I told my running buddy the story of Dick's life as a civil rights' activist in the South and in Chicago in the 60's and 70's, an activist in anti-war, union and other progressive causes, an athlete with a sweet fade away jumper and a good husband and family man, I was telling the story of someone I admired. I admire generous people who live authentic lives. Dick is one of those people. Living generously for others came as naturally as breathing for him.

I also admire Dick because he always had a boyish side to him---a fun-loving openness, a wonderful sense of humor and a zest for the richness of life.

Dick has hundreds of friends. I am happy to have been one of them.


Voltaire

ROYKO AND LIEBLING AT THE NEWSEUM

Joe Liebling and I have been hanging around since I met him last week at the coffee house. I have been having a lovely time of it as he has told me about his career in journalism in America. He had a thrilling forty year career. Many writers do.



Joe spent a fair amount of time in my beloved France during the dark days of World War II. He was a war correspondent who wrote his dispatches for The New Yorker. In more peaceful days after the War ended, Joe wrote columns about the joy of French cooking. Gargantuan French meals were the mainstay for Joe at that time, undoubtedly leading to the gout and hastening his death at a mere 62 years of age.



I was walking by the Greek coffee house last Friday with Joe when we came upon a tall grumpy man swearing as he was reading some Chicago newspapers. Joe knew him and introduced me to Mike Royko.



Mike had a firm handshake, which I was soon to learn had developed from a lifetime of playing Chicago softball and thousands of rounds of golf.



I, the curious one, asked Mike what was troubling him so. He said, "The goddamn Chicago newspapers are in the toilet. I knew this was going to happen. It started with Murdoch, continued with Conrad Black. Awful. I am sick. I need a drink."

Joe said, "Mike, what you don't need is another drink. It is your drinking and my reckless eating that got us here ahead of our contemporaries."

I thought for a while about having met two American writers in the past week, both of whom were so upset over the state of journalism in America. I ventured forth boldly (I know no other way) with an idea.

"I have an idea. Let's take a trip to America and get a closer view of what's going on in journalism. Where should we go ?"

Mike said, "Chicago. It desperately needs us. Chicagoans are so distressed with the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times that they are regularly diving off the Michigan Avenue bridge to their death in the Chicago River."

Joe responded,"Mike, that is tragic but New York is the place. Home to my beloved The New Yorker and The New York Times."

"The New York Times that missed the absurdity of Bush's Iraq War. That New York Times ?"

A storm was brewing. Royko appeared volatile and likely to throw a punch at the portly Liebling. Joe had never seen a punch up close and personal, only from ringside as a reporter on the boxing scene. I, promoting tolerance and good will, said," Let's go to Washington, D.C. and check out the scene from the center of power."

Joe and Mike went along with it, though Mike mumbled something unprintable about New York. I had never been to Washington but looked forward to the adventure. Nothing is more fun than traveling with writers, particularly brilliant American writers.

We sat three abreast in the latest model jet run by The Angelic Express. The trip to DC took about ninety minutes. Royko had four cocktails and a beer and was promptly entertaining all of us with stories about bumbling Chicago politicians and judges. We touched down at National Airport and within twenty minutes found ourselves outside this massive building called The Newseum.

The building was about five stories tall---all glass windows on the front of the building. A feeling of openness and light was the effect of the architecture. Joe was the first to comment on the design, "Clever design, very appropriate to the news business. We are opening the public's eyes to the truth in America and shedding light on it."

Mike ambled ahead of us a bit. At the entrance to the museum we came upon a glass enclosed display of two dozen front pages of newpapers for the day from Maine to California. Then, all hell broke loose.

Mike yelled, "Goddamn it. What the hell did I tell you. Look at this for chrissake. This paper is a comic book, it's not a newspaper."

Joe and I caught up with him and looked down at the front page of The Chicago Sun-Times. The paper had a front page photo of a golf star standing at a podium looking grim. At the bottom of the page were three little graphics, one on baking, one on sports and the third on car repair. There was no writing on the front page except the headline and a sentence or two under the photo.

Joe was aghast and consoling to Mike. I took it all in and started to process it. I found so much in my lifetime absurd. This bit of nonsense was just another chapter.

We entered the building and spent a solid five hours captivated by the history of journalism in America from penny papers to something called Internet blogging that I am trying to understand.

Mike was beaming when we came upon the display of Pulitzer Prize winners. His photo was prominent for 1972, the year he won the award for Commentary. Joe had his turn at the display of press critics, where he took his place as the unrivaled champion.

The more time we spent in the museum the more glum both Joe and Mike got. Joe spoke for both of them. "The news business has been captured by huge corporations. God help America in the 21st Century."

I was not as despairing as my new friends. Hope always defeats despair, always has and always will.

I lived in an earlier age and fled my native France in my middle age. At the time I fled, the country had no independent press of any kind and no constitution with a First Amendment like that in America guaranteeing freedom of speech and the press. My writings were smuggled into France in the early morning hours and burned if discovered by the Catholic Church or the French government.

I just felt that the need for truth and an independent press was so ingrained in the American way of government and law, that no concentration of capital would doom the news business to mediocrity and extinction.

We finished our visit to the museum and DC and were home by dinner. Royko was melancholy and very drunk by now. Joe and I got him home safely and cheered ourselves up with a great French meal and two bottles of port.

And that is the way it is.


Voltaire

ABBOTT JOSEPH LIEBLING

I met the most fascinating man the other day after returning from a four mile run in a fresh snowfall near the Bahai temple.

The very very rotund and brilliant Renaissance man----A. J. Liebling.

I met owlish Joe Liebling outside a Greek coffee house in my neighborhood. He was sitting at two tables pushed together and strewn with newspapers. I was attracted to him by his mumbling and cursing to himself about bad writing and publishers and all sorts of sins of the Fourth Estate in America of all places.

Sidling up to him I hoped he would have time for some good rich talk. Talk as dark and rich and delicious as the first cup of fresh coffee in the morning. Fortunately, he was a warm, amiable man with an intellect as thirsty and insatiable as mine.

Over the next four hours I learned about Liebling's exciting career as a writer for The New Yorker. Writing for that fine publication from 1935 until his early death in 1963, this Francophile wrote masterful and ground-breaking press criticism, sports reporting about the boxing scene in New York, war reporting from Europe during WW II and French gourmet cooking reviews. An impressive breadth of knowledge.

Anyone interested in a career as a writer should study Joe's use of the English language. Writers can feast on his work and wisdom.

I have read some of Joe's press criticism in his essays in The Wayward Pressman and The Press. They are wonderful. My American correspondent Peter Katsaros tells me that these books are a must read for every American citizen. Peter added that reading Liebling's books on the press in his law school days was the high point of law school. Who am I to disagree ? Peter's reporting has been quite good to date.

Had Liebling lived in my day he would have been a frequent visitor to Cirey and Ferney. Joe wrote with a joyful and honest pen. Like me he would not have been welcome in France. America is lucky to have had him write for the ages.

And I am thrilled to have him as a new friend.


Voltaire

My Trade is to Say What I Think

I spent a wonderful long life writing satire in poems, plays and my distinct creation, the philosophical tales.

What great fun that writing was: 20,000 letters and 100 books. I still laugh for hours when I reread Candide. I am so deeply grateful to Leonard Bernstein for writing the music that brought my favorite creation back onto the world stage in the 20th century.

Yes, I admit I caught quite a bit of hell for my writing. Two trips to the Bastille before I turned thirty and a violent mugging by a gang hired by an aristocrat convinced me that France in the early 18th century was no place for freedom of thought or my unconventional pen.

England was a far better place. I loved the intellectual freedom of England in my three years there after my ouster from France. Wrote a book about my learning there, Letters on the English.

You know much of the rest of my story. Most of my books had to be smuggled into Paris and sold underground. Read my Philosophical Dictionary and you will see why. Both the hateful, fearful Catholic Church and the French Regent had the ear of the prosecutor, so I made my home in Ferney in Switzerland. I did my best to make that home the intellectual capital of Europe in the Enlightenment. Quite a few historians say I did a good job at it.

Ferney was a delightful place. Plenty of space, beautiful gardens, a great library, guest quarters for visiting thinkers from all over Europe who wanted to come and study and talk a while. I built a church on the grounds, hired a priest I could tolerate. Life was very very good.

And, do you know what ? I returned to Paris a hero on the eve of my death in 1778. The prayer that I had always lofted skyward ringing in my ears. "God, may you reveal all my enemies to be wholly ridiculous. You have answered me."

I led a life dedicated to truth, beauty, tolerance and justice. That carries risks but they are all worth it.


Voltaire

The Athenian Jury Trial

I must commend the Greeks----those of the Golden Age of course------for their marvelous contributions to democracy. Both the right to vote for leaders and the right to have cases decided by juries of citizens have civilized many societies ever since 500 B.C.

Now the juries in Athens took a while to choose and administer, given the fact that a jury had to have 501 members.

And the juries sometimes got it wrong. The worst example of an Athenian jury going off the rails (forgive the prophetical reference to an industrial development that followed my death by 70 years) was its conviction of Socrates for "corrupting the young."

Those of you who know me and what I fought with great energy in my lifetime recognize that religious hypocrisy made me crazy. Well, Socrates was convicted for corrupting the young by teaching them that they did not have to worship or honor the Olympian gods.

Socrates' jury trial was a travesty. The Olympian gods were a pack of scoundrels, whose escapades made some memorable stories and myths to entertain people for thousands of years. But, as moral examples of conducting a good honorable life the Olympians were clueless.

Now that I think of it a bit. To worship and honor the Olympians would do more to harm the moral fiber of the Athenian youth than would have a good talk over coffee with Socrates.

Socrates taught the youth of Athens and anyone else that would listen to him for free, much to the chagrin and regret of his wife and children who had little to live on.

Too bad the Greeks did not have a brilliant constitution like the Americans came up with, in which the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution wisely protected a robust free speech, the freedom to exercise religion and kept the church and state at a respectable distance.

Of course the Americans had the benefit of 2200 years of recorded history to learn from and some brilliant founding fathers. The Americans saw the value in voting and jury trials, protecting both rights with great energy.

Wise folks, those ancient Greeks and modern Americans.

Voltaire

WHILE THE DEMOCRATS SLEPT

Forgive my foray into American history. I barely knew America before I passed into my present state: eternal satirist. I always thought America had great potential. Still believe that.

But, somewhere in my memory I remember a conversation with my American friend Ben Franklin. He spoke of some brilliant courageous move by George Washington leading the American troops in some ships across the Delaware River at night. The British troops were sleeping. The Americans surprised them with the night time attack and won a big victory.

That appears to have been what happened this Tuesday when Republican Senatorial candidate Scott Brown upset the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley in a special election for a U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, a Democratic stronghold.

I just finished the New York Times article on the election. It appears that all the top Democrats were sleeping, vacationing, inept or some combination thereof. Coakley, who probably would have made a fine Senator, was an inept and arrogant campaigner. In a sports crazy state she knew little or nothing about Boston Red Sox history. She found the gritty work of politics distasteful.

The Dems in the White House, who are some of the finest political organizers around, took Massachusetts for granted until it was too late.

I was having coffee this morning with Harry and Bess Truman, who had just finished one of their brisk walks. We were talking about the Massachusetts Senatorial election. Harry and Bess told me that Harry and his team had upset Tom Dewey in the 1948 Presidential race in a similar way. Dewey had been so far ahead in the polls in the summer of 1948 that he and his team stopped campaigning for quite some time. Until it was too late.

Repeating the mistakes of the past. That what the Democrats did on this one.

That is it for today. I am going running.


Voltaire


Voltaire

SARAH'S BIRTHDAY

Happy birthday to Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Dennis, my oldest daughter. Born in a raging snowstorm, in the famous winter storm of 1979.

She is a star, has always been and will always be.

Outstanding for her passions: love for her families and friends, love for education.

The world is a lot better place because this young woman is striding through it.

In love and admiration,


Voltaire