And a Happy New Year from the Twilight Zone

                                                
Some of us gray in the temple remember when the Christmas season represented a period when many of us – Christians and non-Christians alike – at least pretended to put aside the ugliness of political and societal differences and display a little compassion, charity and understanding of one another. Many of us, believers or not, did so in recognition of Jesus’ teachings as outlined in the Gospel of Matthew as well as the hopeful prospect of a better year to come. Yet in 2022 one could see how far we’ve strayed from this custom in the very different social-media Christmas greetings of the current president of the United States and his predecessor, now a declared presidential candidate for 2024 and a still-bitter, flailing loser from 2020.

President Biden: “There is a certain stillness at the center of the Christmas story: a silent night when all the world goes quiet. And all the clamor, everything that divides us, fades away in the stillness of a winter’s evening. I wish you that peace this Christmas Eve.”

Former President Trump: “Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is illegally coercing and paying Social and Lamestream Media to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant and USA LOVING Donald J. Trump and, of course, the Department of Injustice, which appointed a Special “Prosecutor” who, together with his wife and family, HATES “Trump” more than any other person on Earth. LOVE TO ALL!”

Well, at least Trump made a stab at professing love for his adversaries and enemies (who tend to be one and the same). That said, you wonder how clairvoyant the former president is, given the assortment of investigations and allegations stacking up against him. Maybe clairvoyance ain't what it used to be.

Son Eric Trump’s Christian prophetess, Julie Green, informed the Trumpian faithful a few days before Christmas 2022 that God was sending a huge storm to wipe out President Trump’s enemies, specifically longtime (and long-beleaguered) public health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden, former President Obama, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, vanquished 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Facebook, Wall Street, China and Democratic Congressman and perennial Trump nemesis Adam Schiff. Thus far, all appear to have survived the very worst God could muster in terms of Winter Storm Elliott – if indeed God was behind the crippling storm.

All of which suggests we shouldn’t necessarily put politics aside during the Christmas season but instead quietly and earnestly re-examine how our professed religious, spiritual and philosophical tenets (assuming we claim them) actually inform our politics, let alone our daily lives. In a delusional nation where many of us now realize we would only recognize outright fascism if it came goose-stepping into plain sight with a bad haircut and toothbrush mustache, we must also now acknowledge we wouldn’t recognize and accept Christ’s presence unless accompanied by a sufficient array of Hollywood-styled special-effect miracles.

My wife and I have a Christmas Eve tradition of watching on television at least one of the many cinematic versions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in which crusty, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts the night before Christmas. The ghosts manage to enlighten Scrooge about the worth of all human lives and the duty of better-off folks to dedicate themselves to helping relieve the misery, neglect and want of the less fortunate, including the poor and the meek. It’s not just a Christmas story but one that speaks of new resolves, new outlooks and new beginnings with another year fast approaching. My favorite version is an atmospheric 1984 production filmed in Shrewsbury, England, bolstered by a blustery performance by George C. Scott, who seems to have invested some of his “Patton” portrayal in old Scrooge.

This year, however, we watched for the first time a truly formidable version of the Dickens novella – a dark, angry Rod Serling twist on “A Christmas Carol.” Filmed in 1964 as a ghostly melodrama encouraging American support for the United Nations and the broader goal of global dialogue and international consensus, the production came about during a period of growing distress across America over war abroad and civil strife at home. As seen in his screenplay for the powerful 1964 Paramount film “Seven Days in May,” about a U.S. military plot to overthrow the U.S. government, Serling was more and more worried about the direction of the United States amid displays of intolerance, demagoguery, indifference and homegrown fascism. (“The time is 1970 or 1980 or, possibly, tomorrow,” the "Seven Days in May" movie poster warned.) “Seven Days in May” and the Fletcher Knebel/Charles W. Bailey novel that spawned it were inspired by the antics of U.S. Army Gen. Edwin Walker, a white supremacist who repeatedly made clear his extremist right-wing views while in uniform, leading to his resignation and decision to settle in Dallas to continue his political agitation, helping create the volatile environment that greeted President John F. Kennedy during his November 22, 1963, visit. Among those Americans earlier hopeful for a film version of the popular novel: Kennedy, dead of assassination in Dallas not even three months when the film was released in February 1964.

By contrast, Serling’s subsequent “A Carol for Another Christmas” practically qualifies as an expanded episode of “The Twilight Zone,” which coincidentally had ended its five-season run on CBS earlier in the year. The ghosts who come to visit and enlighten hard-hearted American industrialist and isolationist Daniel Grudge conjure up a realm not unfamiliar to those of us in 21st century America with our strife over desperate immigrants seeking to work and breathe free in the United States, anxiety over the imagined displacement of white Americans in favor of people of color, suspicion of all foreigners and bleeding hearts and, finally, the rapidity by many of us to embrace conspiratorial fantasies rather than hard facts as legitimate new sources dwindle in size and impact.

The Ghost of Christmas Past, portrayed by character actor Pat Hingle, showcases the anguished and the dispossessed of the times, in this case pitiful and forgotten behind barbed-wire fencing, exposed to the wintry elements, yet somehow finding hope and comfort in singing Christmas songs alongside small makeshift fires. The ghost poses damning questions to those among us forever rattling on about our individual freedoms as sufficient reason to disregard the public welfare and ignore the downtrodden, whether fellow citizens or those "unwashed masses" of other lands.

“If you shared a loaf of bread with them, how would you be relinquishing your freedom?” the Ghost of Christmas Present asks rhetorically. “Or if you joined other nations to administer vaccinations to their children, how would you desecrate your flag? Or if you had offered them solace and hope and comfort, how would you have made yourself susceptible to tyranny?”

“What are they singing?” Grudge asks the ghost, his concerns invigorated now that he actually sees suffering behind the barbed-wire enclosure.

“Foreign words – but not necessarily conspiracies to destroy you, Mr. Grudge,” the ghost says. “Just Christmas songs – and of those who don’t celebrate Christmas, songs of hope. They sang them in their language before you did in yours.”

The Ghost of Christmas Future, played by British actor Robert Shaw with the same vigor he invested in his portrayal of an obsessive, war-addicted German tank commander in “Battle of the Bulge” during this period, turns up in the rubble of a bombed-out town hall that Grudge recognizes. A stained-glass inscription at the front of the hall reads: “E Pluribus Unum.” The confused industrialist asks what happened, only for the ghost to allude to what years of failure to recognize and address social wrongs and press for constructive dialogue have finally yielded – warfare and an apocalyptic society ripe for tyranny and lawlessness. It’s a message worthy of our times when hatred and vitriol have made a mockery of the promise that social media once offered. Even now echo chambers in our civilization resound with threats against our once-sacred constitutional principles if we must share our freedoms and hard-earned rights with others with whom we disagree or whom we don’t accept as equals. So the question arises: What need is there then for a town hall?

“Attrition, neglect, misuse, a few passing catastrophes … time,” the ghost answers Grudge’s inquiry of what happened. “Of little consequence, really. There grew to be less and less need for a meeting place or a platform for debate. The American town hall, you will remember, Mr. Grudge, was a microcosm of all the meeting halls of the world, places where men could ‘talk it over.’ It seems we reached a moment in time where talk became superfluous, so now your town hall is past tense.”

Most disturbing is the arrival in the rubble of a clownish yet toxic character played in repulsive fashion by Peter Sellers. The character is adorned in a ten-gallon cowboy hat emblazoned with the word “Me.” He encourages his excitable, gullible followers assembled before him to recognize him as “the Imperial Me,” to which his sycophants cry: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” He revels in this near-religious adoration. And he warns of others from afar who want to infiltrate their numbers and overwhelm them.

“Now, then, they don’t come out in so many words and say that they want to take us over – they’re too clever for that – but that’s what they want,” the demagogue tells his mob of true believers. “They want to take over us Individual Me. And if we let them seep in here from down yonder and across the river, if we let these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among us, then, my dear friend, my Beloved Me, we’s in trouble – deep, deep trouble!”

As entertainment, “A Carol for Another Christmas” is tough to watch, owing to the long, preachy stretches of monologue Serling’s long-winded ghosts deliver when more incident and exchanges of dialogue might have spurred the teleplay along its way. Nor does Grudge turn into giddy humanitarian a la Scrooge the following morning. Grudge seems more measured in what we can only assume is some small change of heart, maybe just in disposition and tact. Perhaps Serling intended his viewers to wonder and think further, but it’s hardly the joyous transformation readers of “A Christmas Carol” have been conditioned to expect.

Some cast members are striking, including lanky Sterling Hayden as the grim, uncompromising Daniel Grudge. In real life a decorated Marine in World War II who in 1964 gained newfound fame as an unhinged, commie-hating Air Force general who ignites nuclear holocaust in “Dr. Strangelove,” Hayden had seen his acting career suffer earlier from post-war dalliances with the Communist Party – some Americans briefly considered the Soviets our steadfast allies after the successful war against Nazi Germany. Other actors in the TV production never made the final cut, including Peter Fonda as Grudge’s son, a World War II casualty who was to function as a ghost on par with Scrooge partner Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol.” In fact, the son here is named Marley. Alas, Fonda is glimpsed only twice, and very briefly, as a voiceless apparition, then no more.

The ABC-TV production was deemed so bleak that it went nearly a half-century after its 1964 premiere (and, tellingly, three days after Christmas that year) before being revived by Turner Classic Movies in 2012. Outraged John Birchers conducted a massive right-wing write-in effort to protest the original broadcast. Yet today the teleplay  proves that even as society and politics change, they remain the same, if not more so. “A Carol for Another Christmas” is, yes, very much a piece of its times – the Vietnam War and racial strife at home only worsened after its solitary broadcast, aggravated further by the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Yet the film resonates amid the madness of our own times, including the sorry spectacle of those willing to sacrifice neighbors, co-workers, even family members during a deadly pandemic by vilifying vaccinations, public health precautions, even doctors and nurses risking their lives to save infected patients. I remember a town-hall meeting in late 2021 conducted by Republican Congressman Pete Sessions in the University High School auditorium in Waco where resistance to President Biden included, amid a multitude of crackpot grievances and conspiracy theories and incomprehensible rants, one constituent’s insistence that Biden – "Brandon" – be tried Nuremberg-style for curtailing liberty and freedom through his administration’s zealous pro-vaccination efforts. 

Plenty of current events prove the continuing relevance of “A Carol for Another Christmas” but one more will suffice for the moment: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s deplorable decision to caravan busloads of immigrants, including utterly blameless children, from Texas to Washington, D.C., then dropping them off in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in 18-degree winter weather as an “own-the libs” political statement about disputed federal immigration policies. Count me as a critic of the Biden immigration policies. To me, they border on incoherence. Yet the answer is not Republicans' cheering on what constitutes human trafficking for political ends. Steve Vladeck, the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas Law School, correctly condemned this heartless gesture: “What kind of leader thinks this is the right thing to do? What kind of person?” Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a former Republican consultant, expressed outrage at the callousness and hypocrisy involved, especially given many of the immigrants – asylum seekers from Ecuador, Cuba and Venezuela – lacked even winter coats: “Don’t lecture me about a made-up ‘War on Christmas,’ or tell me ‘Christ is the Reason for the Season,’ if you support staging this cruel stunt on Christmas Eve, using human beings as political pawns, throwing them out on the street in frigid weather.” Former Republican consultant Steve Schmidt was perhaps most blistering in his criticism: “We need less evil in America. We don’t need men like Greg Abbott. Worse, voters chose him [and just two months ago]. Everyone that did got to carry a bit of his shame this Christmas season. They get the satisfaction of knowing they made Christ weep on his birthday.”

Ironically, Abbott – a man who clearly envisions himself as a presidential prospect – tweeted on Christmas Day his seasonal greetings, confirming to one and all the transformation of so much of latter-day Christianity into a crucible of cruelty, deceit and hollowness, given his political party’s claim as one of family values and Christian nationalism: "May the joy of our Savior's birth fill your hearts today and every day." Included in his post was a passage in Isaiah 9:6: "For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, prince of peace."

Abbott’s decision to play King Herod in a latter-day, real-life Twilight Zone scenario runs counter to his professed Catholicism, at least if Pope Francis’ own Christmas Day wishes are any indication. Apparently offered in a social-media post unrelated to Abbott's affront to Christian sensibilities, Francis reminds us of what increasingly confounds so many evangelicals today: “Today as then, Jesus comes into a world that does not welcome him, that rather rejects or ignores him, as we do so often with foreigners and with the poor. Let's not forget the refugees, the marginalized, people who are alone, orphans and the elderly, prisoners.”

Rod Serling’s Christmas ghosts couldn’t have said it better, but far more of us need to pick up the refrain.

A Few Benign Ghosts of a Newsroom Now Past

ARN Editor Dick Tarpley and seasonal help at the city desk

Merry Christmas Eve! While I seldom reminisce anymore about my days at the Abilene Reporter-News, I'm bowing to ghosts of Christmas past to conjure up a few newsroom spirits from long-ago times. Because of the length, I’m posting separately here not only a few newsroom memories but my thanks to longtime ARN colleague Roy Jones for his overly generous words about my quarter-century tenure at the Abilene Reporter-News — a period of such benefit, joy and edification that I cite Abilene, Texas, as my hometown even now. (Yes, I really do. Notwithstanding my early Yankee years, I remain a proud Dallas native, born at Baylor Hospital at the height of a seven-year drought that humbled much of Texas.)

I appreciate Roy’s “mentor-to-all” credit given me, even if it’s exaggerated to the extreme — a reflection no doubt of his Christian generosity and thoughtfulness as well as his understandable pride in his colleagues' work. Roy also kindly reposted for wider distribution my earlier Facebook post ruminating and rhapsodizing on the razing of the ARN building at North First (or Second) and Cypress just before Thanksgiving 2022. Regarding Roy’s accolades: While it’s true I assumed a number of diverse posts and interesting assignments in the Abilene newsroom, I regard myself as no more than a footnote character amidst so many more considerable talents, including Jim Conley, Bob Bruce, Al Pickett, Richard Horn, Warren Weber and Roy himself.

In an affectionate farewell column upon leaving the Abilene Reporter-News for the Waco Tribune-Herald in spring 2002, I reflected not on what I’d done in the newsroom and for the community (if anything) but rather what I learned under editors-in-chief Ed Wishcamper, Dick Tarpley and Glenn Dromgoole. Had I been permitted more room, I would have cited advice, insights and talents I picked up from fellow reporters, city editors, copy editors and photographers. The quality of journalists Tarpley (and others) hired was phenomenal, even as we young Turks sometimes questioned and even ridiculed his abilities and judgment, as all upstart reporters do with graying superiors and sage presences. Yet Dick’s insights into character, integrity and potential in terms of ARN personnel colored the newspaper long after his tenure as editor ended in late 1985. His contributions thus informed, alerted and entertained the paper’s then-significant readership across rugged, spread-out, always-hard-to-pigeonhole West Texas.

I remember three insights from Dick, perhaps not uniquely profound now but surely meaningful at the time: First, in reference to an ARN alumnus of enormous literary repute, Dick's caution that any story too good to be true probably was; second, regarding a young newsroom upstart in the early 1980s, that reporters should be better listeners than talkers, lest they drown out sources, stories and relevant details; third, Dick’s praise for my newspaper columns in the 1990s after I commented, during our last conversation upon my leaving Abilene, that my work as a daily newspaper columnist was a mere patch on the immensely popular columns of the great ARN Page One columnist Katharyn Duff, who reigned in that post for 18 years: Tarpley, by then retired but writing an excellent Sunday news column of his own for the ARN, pointedly disagreed, insisting my out-and-about Texana columns (started at the request of then-Editor Glenn Dromgoole) eclipsed Katharyn’s in that each had a beginning, middle and end and conformed to classic storytelling form and journalistic tradition. True? It no longer matters. Perhaps it's relevant to note that no less than Katharyn, a week after I began writing the Page One column in spring 1989, very charitably complimented my efforts in an endeavor I always viewed as a tribute to her own work — and then gently encouraged me to find my own style as a columnist rather than imagining hers as the only proper course. And, whatever else, I certainly never replaced Katharyn in the hearts and minds of West Texas readers, probably because of an easygoing, conversational style far more engaging than mine — the sort that conjured up Katharyn and her friends lunching and laughing and tale-spinning at Mack Eplen's Cafeteria just down Cypress Street.

Roy Jones, Jim Conley discuss culture

Of those other employees Dick Tarpley tapped and shepherded and helped advise in careers remarkable if not always appropriately heralded: I marveled at the glowing empathy my friend Jim Conley demonstrated that so ensured an authentic richness of perspective and humanity in effortlessly written prose, whether regarding a disreputable scalawag like West Texas flim-flam man Billie Sol Estes or a richly multi-layered, charismatic character such as globetrotting anti-communist and former Texas politician Jack Cox, both better known to a dwindling generation of Texans from the JFK, LBJ and John Connally era. (Jack, a Republican and a friend who lost his uphill gubernatorial battle with Connally in 1962, once told me that JFK never would have been assassinated in Dallas in 1963 had Jack won in 1962 because Jack sure never would have invited him to Texas.) I was in awe of the completeness and telling nuance in storytelling and the close and important knowledge of the law that so blessed Roy Jones’ much-cherished, highly readable courthouse reporting. I well remember, too, the vast carbon copies and printouts of past stories Roy kept nearby, always accessible if needed. I also recall the courtroom whimsy Roy shrewdly used to enliven his coverage, such as what a cattle feedlot owner said about the odor — that it smelled like money! Bob Bruce, by contrast, set the example for tidy conciseness and promptness, skills I never fully mastered unless lashed to the wheel of the ship. At deadline many of us in the newsroom — harried by city editor Gary Morton's understandably hollering "I need your story NOW! Just give me what you have!” — would glance over and see Bob, his duties for the afternoon edition finished and by then occupied with cleaning his fingernails before moving on to other matters.

Al Pickett and his sports crew young and old astounded me with their razor-sharp accuracy and eloquence on demand, accomplished under unbelievable deadline pressure — something I quizzed Al about during our lonely, post-midnight drive back to West Texas after jointly covering a big high-school playoff game in the biting cold in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. (I was doing last-minute color for the paper that night.) I could write fast but never with such ballsy confidence and finesse as the ARN sportswriters. From the ARN city desk, too, I watched Warren Weber offer passing pearls of wisdom about better writing on the fly (likely borrowed from his well-stocked home library of Hemingway, whose lean style shaped more than one generation of American journalists). More importantly, he calmly counseled reporters skeptical about particular assignments on just how much better and more rewarding their labors might be if they earnestly invested themselves in the task — advice I tried (however successfully) to emulate during my own subsequent tours of duty as a city editor in Abilene and Waco — duties, incidentally, for which I had almost no training except for the sterling examples provided by Warren and other long-suffering city editors at the ARN.

Bill and Richard gauge wine, the news

And there was ever-modest, witty, thoughtful, intellectually curious Richard Horn, who evenwhen consigned to rigorous desk duties such as his all-too-brief tenure as ARN opinion editor was constantly fleeing the newsroom to attend town-hall and city council meetings to enrich his newspaper editorials and columns. When I abandoned the ARN city desk to personally pursue the endangered Concho water snake with herpetologist Okla Thornton one day in summer 1986, my intrepid companion was none other than Richard who, like me, couldn’t resist an outing that one ARN reporter had already quit over. Our efforts along the picturesque Concho River and our subsequent coverage inspired further research that found the harmless little water snake wasn’t as endangered or threatened as originally thought, ultimately clearing the way for Ivie Reservoir (or, as some of us oldtimers like to say, Stacy Dam, out of respect for the small community obliterated by reservoir waters in parched West Texas). How I miss those early evenings Richard and I gathered at Cypress Street Station, right across the street from the ARN, where we toasted the day's hard-won victories and lessons with a glass of wine and we dissected news of the day and intrigue of the newsroom. We were such regular and animated sights at the bar that Cypress Street Station proprietor Brian Green proposed framed artwork of us sitting in the bar, which out of modesty we vigorously discouraged.

I was awestruck at so many of my colleagues, including ARN photographers David Kent, Gerald Ewing, John Best and Don Blakley, who in the darkroom and on the scene taught me so much about picture composition and urgent, up-close-and-personal photography, the sort that constitutes craft but very often rivals art. Such is daily journalism, warts and all.

Even in retirement, some of us toil in journalism. At the bidding of pal and former boss Steve Boggs, I continue to write rigorously researched opinion columns and editorials (some actually invested with shoe leather and moxie) and edit the occasional columns of community colleagues on the Waco Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors as well as other columnists. (I thought ARN editors, in challenging years when shrinking corporate budgets threatened to strangle newsroom capabilities, were shrewdly resourceful in tapping experienced ARN exes for specific assignments and part-time duties including seasoned, all-knowing veterans Larry Zelisko, Scott Kirk and Jerry Reed.) Warren and Josie Weber, standout veterans in the newspaper profession, tutor budding journalists at Pima Community College in Tucson. Many former colleagues, while retired or now engaged in other honorable professions, so far as I know continue to champion this honorable and increasingly misunderstood profession, even as family members and friends and neighbors sometimes echo rhetoric of our being "the enemy of the people,” often voiced from perspectives of willful ignorance hard to imagine being so prevalent just a few decades ago. Other colleagues including Dick Tarpley, Bob Bruce, Katharyn Duff, Gerald Ewing, Don Blakley and Gary Morton are no longer around to hear such blasphemy.

To newspaper supporter and retired nonprofit leader Doug Worthington’s fun questions to Roy and others in Roy's Facebook reposting of my earlier thoughts on the razing of the ARN building, the array of collectible beer bottles in my newsroom office of some 15 years could survive only so many moves later on and have now joined their more common cousins in the landfill. And Roy was right. I didn’t drink from most of them but collected them from well-traveled colleagues (such as Roy from his military travels). And my newspaper dispatches from a riotous river canoe trip came as I traversed the Texas Colorado, not the Brazos. Some “amateur writer” of dubious repute wrote of a canoe trip down the Brazos — and, yes, his reflections gained some repute. (OK, I'm joking — John Graves' "Goodbye to a River" remains an absolutely stellar piece of writing, required reading for anyone interested in Texas literature.)

As for another question that arose among ARN exes about favorite parts of the building now razed and gone, I claim rich memories from just about every nook and cranny of the second-floor newsroom, though perhaps most especially the long, darkly lit, carpeted corridor behind the newsroom whose windows showcased, in all its magnificence, the mighty ARN printing press — like the work of so many of us once at the Abilene Reporter-News and other newsrooms across America, now consigned to history.