Wednesday, December 7, 2022

From San Francisco to Washington

January 28, 2011

San Francisco is enshrouded in fog as my plane takes off at 10 AM on Friday, January 28, bound for Washington, DC. Only the immense television tower on Mt. Sutro pokes its red and white top through the undulating gray carpet. After a gradual bank eastward, the green Berkeley Hills interrupt the expanse briefly, whereupon it continues to the Sierra Nevada, which are snowy as their name suggests. 
It has been a wet winter in California. The rain began in mid-November and continued with few interruptions until early January. Water courses out of vast canyons and collects in serpentine lakes behind unseen dams.  

Then the mountains show themselves under a think blanket of snow. I know from experience that Yosemite Valley is probably visible from the south side of the airplane. I’m on the north. Yet the canyons and valleys I see are a spectacular sight in themselves. 

After a few minutes, the Sierra slide effortlessly by and I am over the light brown and apparently lifeless expanse of the great high desert to the east. Since it is winter, this table land is now marked by what appear to be trickles of water that must be raging torrents brought to life by snowmelt. What in the summer would be dry riverbeds and mostly invisible are now dark blue or gray undulations in the earth’s surface. 

We follow Interstate 80, which seems to attract secondary roads and railroads that converge and diverge from it. Then the interstate moves off to the northeast and for about half an hour there is no evidence of human habitation, not a road, not a house, not a power line. Finally a tiny smokestack appears, a single road leading to it, but there are no buildings anywhere near. Who works here? How do they get here? What do they make here - mine and refine something? What else could it be? 

An occasional broad, brown valley streaked with wispy strips of snow divides the ranges of white mountains from one another. I imagine that this high desert is something like Central Asia, a territory best crossed on the back of a camel or accompanied by a caravan of yaks. 

Ice crystals form on the window. The tiny television screen provided by Virgin America informs me that we are at about 35,000 feet and it is 60 below zero outside, Fahrenheit. Cloud cover. I pick up my new traveling companion, Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of my literary heroes and namesake, were I Polish. I bought the hard cover at Copperfield’s in Santa Rosa for eight dollars. He begins with his first brief travels outside of Poland in the 1950s, to India and to China. Only after these first chapters does he say much about Herodotus, whom he began to read when he was still at home in Poland, trying to write about countries he had never visited during those years when communist governments were loathe to allow journalists to travel abroad: 

“Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.” 

Kapuscinski follows this with an essay on memory and Herodotus as the first journalist, who relied upon living informants, for there were almost no others: no archives, no records, no books. In those days, if one wanted to know about a distant place, as Herodotus did, one either had to go there or talk to someone who had been there. Or talk to someone who had talked to someone who had talked to someone . . . who had been there. Or so he claimed. 

Land emerges from under the clouds again and I put the book down. This bleak landscape is transformed by snow into something beautiful, especially when the sun picks up the yellow, red, and orange of these canyons below. I focus on one great canyon in particular, bright red, dusted with snow, and sprinkled with tiny trees or perhaps sagebrush. The whole landscape looks like it could be bent into a Christmas tree ornament or a holiday confection covered with powdered sugar. Here and there a line or two in the snow marks a highway, a railroad, a telegraph line. There is an occasional copse of trees, a pond, an isolated farmhouse connected by a line in the snow to another line. 

Meanwhile Kapucsinski, by way of Herodotus, ponders the nature of difference and conflict. Herodotus lived in the 5th Century BC, at a time when the Persians twice invaded Greece, unsuccessfully, yet remained the superpower on the Greek horizon. What caused the hostilities between Greeks and Persians? Or among the Greeks themselves, or all the hostilities since? Why do these people hate us? Why do we hate them? Why do the nations so furiously rage together? One might say that Herodotus walked to the ends of the earth to find an answer to these questions. 

The Persians with whom he spoke maintained that the East-West conflict of the day was all started by men stealing women. A man stealing a woman was certainly the legendary cause of the Trojan War. Something had to start it. Someone crosses a line, sometimes a literal line in the sand, or soil and embarks upon a war of aggression; or someone crosses a metaphorical line, a line demarking decent behavior from indecent, beginning a long chain of stroke and counterstroke, aggression and revenge. Kapuscinski writes: “What happened? Simply this: that you have been revenged upon for crimes perpetrated ten generations ago by a forefather whose existence you weren’t even aware of. . . . in Herodotus’s world, (as well as in various societies today) the eternal law of revenge, the law of reprisal, of an eye for an eye, was (and remains) alive and well. Revenge is not only a right – it is a most sacred obligation.” Journalists and historians cover these stories well, for they, not to mention their readers, are drawn to the exceptional and the dramatic. War and conflict also demark both vast periods of time and huge expanses of earthly space from one another, between Persian rule and Roman, between Arab and Turk, between British and American. 

Of course there are often vast periods of peace in between conflict. This vast land below, compared in terms of history to Europe, is remarkably uneventful. The conflicts of Europe have been well-chronicled for at least eight centuries and chronicled in some fashion for two millennia before that. There is no shortage of written records and old buildings and walls to sift through. The center of the American continent under the clouds below has been the subject of history for at most a few hundred years. There has been one major conflict, the Civil War. There has been essentially one government. 

More clouds stretch out below. I doze off. When I awake, the rocky, arid west has been left behind and we are over the well-marked fields and roads of the Midwest. As far as the eye can see is farmhouses, roads and fields, with occasional stands of trees. We are in the east; east of the longitudinal line through the heart of North America that marks the border between farming and ranching, west of which there is often neither farming nor ranching, nor much of anything growing at all. Despite being east of this line, we call this the Midwest, the land of Central Time, where I grew up and came to manhood, the limitless grassland where, midway through Ole Rolvaag’s novels, the heroines go stark raving mad. 

I poke some buttons in front of me and the little red airplane appears in northern Iowa near the Minnesota border. Usually the plane follows Interstate 80 most of the way across the country. Some weather and wind pattern must have made the pilots wander a couple hundred miles north. A carpet of clouds again gains command of the landscape. After a few minutes the first shadows of evening appear on the undulating surface as we traverse Lake Michigan, whose waters accentuate the blueness. 

A few seats in front of me an infant begins to cry, gurgles, then carries on as if it were being wantonly strangled. Then just as quickly as the fuss began, it goes back to sleep and all is quiet aboard the jetliner. 

As the clouds below carry on their dominance, I return to Herodoscinski and his Niebuhrian meditations on the nature and madness of man, about Croesus and Cyrus settling their differences and embarking upon the conquest of the Massagetae, who lived east of the Caspian Sea. Cyrus wanted to rule over this land, cooking up some story of Massagetaean trespass from generations earlier to justify his invasion. What must the two kings have talked about as they rode along in a golden carriage drawn by horses while the soldiers plodded along, often driven by the lash? Did they talk at all? This Cyrus, whom the Greeks dreaded and despised, whose son and grandson the Greeks despised even more, was nonetheless beloved by the Judeans. Isaiah referred to him with great praise and many commentators claim that Isaiah believed Cyrus to be the Messiah. 

Cyrus, for all of his faults, was a monotheist and took pity on the Judaean monotheists his Babylonian enemies had taken captive. On the theory that an enemy of his enemy was his friend, he returned these captives to Jerusalem along with a check for their temple restoration and neighborhood rebuilding fund. I’m not making this up. 

The years of Persian domination, roughly 500 – 320 BC, were good years for the Jews. They were good years for the Greeks as well, but in spite of the Persians, not because of them. The Persians ruled Judea benignly. It was after Alexander took over on his way to conquer the world that things really deteriorated in the lands of the Bible. Alexander died of drink – and various other excesses – before he was thirty, leaving a vast empire for his generals to quarrel over. Quarrel they did. Civil wars resulted. Nonetheless, great cultural exchange and development ensued. In the middle of it, Jesus of Nazareth lived and died. Thanks to Alexander bringing the West to the East, his message spread around the world through the common language of the day, Greek. 

Cyrus’s expedition ended in disaster. He and his army were slaughtered near the banks of the River Oxus, in the heart of Central Asia, by the Massagetae and their warrior queen, Tomyris. She found his corpse on the battlefield afterward and shoved his severed head into a wineskin filled with blood, saying, “I warned you that I would quench your thirst for blood, and so I shall.” 

An occasional glance at the many tiny television screens aboard reveals news of demonstrations in Egypt. Kapuscinski takes me there on a brief trip in 1960: “My initial glimpse is in the evening, as my airplane approaches Cairo. From up high, the river at this time of day resembles a black, glistening trunk, forking and branching, surrounded by garlands of streetlights and bright rosettes defining the squares of this immense and bustling city.” He explains recent Egyptian history: “In 1952, Nasser, then thirty-four, led the military coup that overthrew King Farouk; he became president four years later. For a long time he faced strong internal opposition: on the one hand Communists fought him, and on the other the Muslim Brotherhood, a conspiratorial organization of fundamentalists and Islamic terrorists. To combat them both Nasser maintained numerous police units of all sorts.” 

Kapuscinski reports in magical realist fashion what it was like to live in this police state. He arrived with a bottle of Czech beer, drank it his first night there, then faced the disposal problem: what to do with an empty beer bottle in a country where alcohol is strictly forbidden? He dared not leave it in the waste paper basket in the hotel, for it would be discovered and reported. He decided to walk out in the morning, bottle wrapped in a paper bag, and drop it into the first garbage can he could find. Unfortunately, there was someone eyeing him at every corner, lurking in the vicinity of every garbage can, watching everything that moved. 

“The street now turned, but beyond the turn everything was exactly as before. I couldn’t throw the bottle out anywhere, because no matter where I tried, I encountered someone’s gaze turned in my direction. Cars drove along the streets, donkeys pulled carts loaded with goods, a small herd of camels passed by stiffly, as if on stilts, but all this seemed to be taking place in the background, on some plane other than the one on which I was walking, caught in the sightlines of perfect strangers, who stood, strolled, talked, most frequently sat, and all the while stared at what I was doing. I grew increasingly nervous, and as I started to sweat profusely, the paper bag in my hand was getting soggy. I was afraid that the bottle would slip out of it and shatter on the sidewalk . . . “ 

Eventually, he returned to the hotel, bottle still in hand. He went out again late that night, whereupon, under cover of darkness, he quietly deposited the sanctioned bottle in a garbage can, returned to his room and fell exhausted into bed. 

Why did Kapuscinski read Herodotus, whose information was so dated? He provides numerous clues throughout his journey. Perhaps the most intriguing comes at the end, when he quotes T. S. Eliot from a 1944 essay about Virgil: 

“In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turns and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together . . . ” 

Ryszard Kapuscinski traveled in order to escape the provincialism of space and read Herodotus to escape the provincialism of time. 

The sky fills with color as we approach Washington. We descend through the clouds and the lights of suburban Virginia appear below. There is snow on the ground. The streets glisten, framed by bare trees. The plane makes one big turn as it approaches Dulles Airport, once considered impossibly far from Washington, and we feel the reassuring impact of the wheels hitting the runway. We have traversed in five hours what Herodotus in his day could not have completed in a lifetime.

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

The Swamps of South Carolina; the Slots of Nevada


The Third Hand A Historical Perspective

“I’d like to find a one-handed economist.”
- Harry Truman

vol. 2

The Swamps of South Carolina; the Slots of Nevada 

February 29, 2016

On this strange Leap Day that comes around every four years during presidential primary season, I look back on the strangest primary season I have ever witnessed and one of the strangest weeks I have ever spent in Washington.  I was here for the government shut-down in the fall of 2013.  That was certainly strange enough.  There was another shut-down during the Clinton-Gingrich years, which I witnessed from a distance.  I lived through, as a teen-ager, what many historians call America’s annus horribilus, 1968, when two great Americans were assassinated and the nation engaged in vitriolic debate about the Vietnam War.

This past week we onlookers beheld a party full of people who finally looked up from their drinks and canapés to see that that boorish character who crashed the party was still there.  They had hoped that people would simply ignore him, he would tire of talking to himself and leave, but we now see that people have assembled chairs around him and appear to be really listening. 

What?  We thought this was the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan.  The conservative, respectable Republican Party.  These presidents inspired plenty of opposition in their day, surely, but they maintained their dignity, generally earned the respect of their opponents and respected them in turn.  The party certainly changed over the years and we cannot expect the Grand Old Party be the same as it was 100 or even fifty years ago.  And some fifty years ago it went through a similar fracas. 

T. H. White, in The Making of the President 1964, wrote about this last time the Republican Party tore itself apart.  As it became clear that Senator Barry Goldwater was on his way to being nominated, leading Republicans pleaded with former President Eisenhower to issue some sort of statement, an endorsement of Governor Rockefeller, perhaps, anything that might slow down the rush to Goldwater.  Ike, characteristically, would not act unless he saw a clear path to success.  That is how he acted throughout his career and it worked very well for him.  He was a very successful president, perhaps even a great one, because he chose his battles very carefully.  Thus T. H. White wrote about him and his party:

“Eisenhower, for Republicans, is like the Holy Ark that the ancient Israelites carried into battle against the Philistines.  Somewhere deep inside the mystery of Eisenhower lies that which most Republicans think their party is about.”

It is another measure of how our politics has changed that we must now substitute Reagan for Eisenhower as that Holy Ark; and even Reagan is quickly fading into history beyond the recall of living memory.  People under the age of forty today have at best just dim childhood memories of this last Republican president who maintained his popularity within the party and much of the electorate throughout his tenure in office. 

What is the Republican Party about in the late winter and early spring of 2016?  The question hangs in the balance.  A strange tilt-o-whirl, Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere pervades this primary season, as if a massive earthquake were going on – the walls are shaking, the furniture is moving - without end in sight. 

What worries me most is the fate of the Presidency itself.  A reality television star, given to boorish outbursts and dogged by allegations of impropriety and financial malfeasance, appears to be on track to win the Republican nomination.  The way things are heading, “American Idol” may well be the best name for the occupant of this office.  What would Isaiah or Jeremiah make of that? 

One would think that the Republican establishment should be able to find a suitable candidate to stop the stampede to Trump, but not only does there not appear to be such a candidate, there does not appear to be such an establishment either.  There are two former Republican Presidents, both named Bush, either of whom, in normal years, might be called upon to speak some words of wisdom and encouragement to party stalwarts.  Not this year.  

The Democrats, though divided, are in slightly better shape.  They like both of their presidential retirees and, generally, nominees.  On the culture front – everything having to do with sex, gender and diversity - they seem to be winning and if one were to bet money, one would bet on the White House remaining in the hands of the Democrats.

But not much else.  The House will almost certainly remain Republican.  The Republicans may well retain control of the Senate.  Senate Republican leaders appear to have no worries about a popular reaction against their refusal to even consider a nominee to the Supreme Court – or to consider closing Guantanamo either - indicating a confident feel for the pulse of their voters.. 

How can this be?

Is it that Trump is out and out saying the mean-spirited things that Republican leaders have merely been implying?  Are millions of Americans so fed up with political correctness that they just revel in someone who flouts these conventions?  Have the two parties drifted so far apart and the culture become so vulgarized that Donald Trump can appear to occupy the middle ground as some kind of common-sense everyman?  Is this what our gadget and entertainment-loving culture has created?

I stand by last week’s prediction that Donald Trump would lose a general election to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders by a wide margin.  Too few Democrats will vote for Trump and too many Republicans will not vote for him.  There is certainly time for another candidate to win the Republican nomination.  We still only have a few delegates allocated from four rather small, unrepresentative states, after all.  But no remaining candidate has the star personality power of the New York businessman. 

Will personality and an uncanny finger on the pulse of this strange new electorate be enough?  We may know as soon as tomorrow.






Thursday, February 18, 2016

The Snows of New Hampshire


I distinctly remember the run-up to the New Hampshire in 1964.  Senator Goldwater of Arizona had received a lot of attention during the previous year and people speculated about how well he would run against the popular President Kennedy.  Both men had arrived unexpectedly in the Senate in 1953 after winning elections against venerable incumbents.  The story was that they rather liked each other despite their differences and were thinking about a series of debates should Goldwater be the Republican nominee.





Then came the tragedy in November and all talk of politics ceased until after Christmas.

Finally, on January 3rd, as expected, Senator Goldwater of Arizona announced his candidacy.  With two months to go before the New Hampshire Primary, this was in plenty of time and not too soon after the traumatic assassination.  The president now was Johnson, an election impended in the fall and the nation had to prepare to vote for him or whoever the Republicans might choose.

Goldwater was expected to win the New Hampshire Primary.  He spent a lot of time there and had a good organization.  Nonetheless the crawlers across the bottom of the television on the evening of March 10 gave the early lead to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, a write-in candidate who had not announced his candidacy and who probably had no serious intention of running.  But remember that this was not that long after the era when candidates got the nomination without ever actually campaigning for it.  It was considered undignified to want the job too much.  Dwight Eisenhower simply announced in January of 1953 that he would accept the Republican nomination if drafted.  He did not even visit New Hampshire, but a shade over 50% of the Republican voters wrote in his name and he won the primary by about fifteen points over Senator Robert Taft of Ohio.

Things were different then.

I believe the network cut away from normal programming – my brother and I were watching “McHale’s Navy,” or something - for a couple of shots of voters talking to reporters as snowflakes fluttered down.  By the time the 10 o’clock news came on, it was apparent that Lodge, unaccountably, had won.  There was then another month before the next primary.  Nonetheless, Senator Goldwater’s campaign just gathered more steam.  His organization was still good and his people went about sewing up delegates.  Nelson Rockefeller mounted a valiant effort, but he was a very flawed candidate.  He was too eastern, too New York, and too divorced.  Goldwater was nominated on the first ballot at the Republican Convention in July.

Senator Goldwater has faded into the warm embrace of history by now and so we have forgotten how scary he seemed at the time and it was not just the child licking ice cream while the atomic bomb went off in the background (one of the first true television attack ads and it only ran once before being pulled) that made him so. 

T. H. White, in The Making of the President 1964, wrote about how difficult it was to cover the Arizona Senator.  Goldwater was a plain-spoken man, given to profanity and imprudent statements.  He appeared to endorse the use of tactical nuclear weapons, something that was quietly discussed in the halls of the Pentagon and various think-tanks, but nowhere else.  “Did he really say this?” reporters would ask one another.  Everyone would nod and out would go  another story that would help him to win the nomination but lose the general election in spectacular fashion. 

And so, here we are fifty-four years later, trying to understand what just happened in New Hampshire.  Donald Trump has won the New Hampshire Primary.  Being eastern, New York and twice divorced does not appear to be a problem for him.  Nonetheless, I predict that “TRUMP” “is how Republicans today spell “GOLDWATER.”  It may well also be that “BUSH” or “RUBIO” will turn out to be how they spell “ROCKEFELLER,” in which case the party is doomed to a defeat of epic proportions in November. 


Just do the math:  Donald Trump will get almost no votes from Black or Hispanic voters.  There goes 30% of the electorate before the campaign even starts.  It is highly doubtful that will attract a majority of women voters, of whatever race or income.  Many Republicans say they will not vote for him in the general election – a few more percentage points that he will desperately need to win.  How can he possibly win the general election in November? 

He has some amazing strengths as a campaigner.  He is good copy.  He is a natural performer.  He has plenty of money.  In some ways he reminds me of another New Yorker who defied the political establishment over a century ago to become president:  Teddy Roosevelt.  But Roosevelt was a  genuine war hero who had proven his manliness on the field of battle and was an experienced politician with many accomplishments.  He had a certain manic energy that came to focus in the White House and made his one of the most successful presidencies ever.  Donald Trump has done little besides make real estate deals. 

In his so far amazingly successful candidacy we see the triumph of a gifted marketer, brander and performer.  I do not think he will get the nomination or win the election if he does, but what we are staring at is a primary election process that is disquietingly like American Idol and its many imitators.  Neither the candidates nor the TV journalists questioning them look much more serious than the contestants and glitzbahs that appear on these tawdry entertainment contests.  If electronic polling ever replaces the act of going to a school, church or firehouse to cast a ballot, I tremble to think of what democracy will look like a few years hence.

Beginning in August of 2015, there have been fifteen debates, in a bewildering variety of formats, for, initially, seventeen Republican candidates.  The last was a verbal donnybrook that left veteran Republican advisers aghast.  At least five more are scheduled.  Can anyone imagine even the telegenic and charismatic John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan managing to maintain their dignity and gravitas were they alive to endure such a circus? 


Or Eisenhower.


On the other hand, American democracy is like a strong stomach acid; it can digest almost anything.  Revolutionary-sounding candidates generally do not win, then slowly moderate their views over the years.  Senator Goldwater recovered from his disastrous run for president to become a respected elder statesman.  William Jennings Bryan both inspired and frightened even more people when he ran for president in 1896, but he lost and lost decisively.  Two more runs did not improve his performance.  At the end of his career, however, his supporters could claim that he brought new voters to the polls and instilled faith in democracy during a gilded age of robber barons not unlike our own.  He then served as Secretary of State.

To find a revolutionary who ran for president and won, a truly dangerous-sounding and dangerous-looking man, we have to look all the way back to 1828 and Andrew Jackson.  He had been smacked by a British officer’s sword, led men in battle, killed men in duels and vowed to change the way things were done in Washington, primarily by destroying the Bank of the United States.  His inaugural party at the White House horrified genteel onlookers.  Nonetheless, after winning re-election (easily, I might add) he toured the country and received an honorary degree from Harvard.  Former President John Quincy Adams (who earned his Harvard degree) was horrified, again.  Yet the presidency of Jackson was ultimately a triumph because of his ability to hold the country together during the nullification crisis.  And so he is tucked into the sprawling fabric of American history as a hero – mostly.  Abraham Lincoln, of course, had a revolutionary presidency, but he did not seek it.  His heroic qualities came out as he rose to meet the secession crisis and ultimately mastered it.  The United States that we live in is his legacy. 

I’m trying to find some truly heroic qualities in Donald Trump.  Perhaps they are there.  Time will tell. 


Monday, October 20, 2014

Why I Like the Union Jack.

Why I Like the Union Jack.



I was recently in good old Park Ridge, Illinois for my 45th Maine South High School Reunion, with a free afternoon to hang out uptown.  Which reminded me of why I like the Union Jack.  I like the good old British flag for a number of reasons, not the least of which is having lived in Canterbury for a year.  And it’s a great-looking flag.  But the most important reason is that the good old Union Jack once fluttered proudly above the streets of Park Ridge, on Friday July 4, 1969, to be precise. 

Yes, it fluttered on a flag pole outside of Bob Rowe’s Evening Pipe Shop, proudly, and certainly not defiantly, amidst dozens of American flags lining the streets downtown for our national holiday.  We had taken the Jack to Maine East for the fireworks display the night before, waving it around a few times to the general merriment of anyone who noticed, then sitting on it like a beach blanket to watch the show.

So there we were the following afternoon, sitting outside the Shop when a couple of policemen emerged from City Hall across the street, advancing towards the shop looking even more grim and displeased than usual. 

One of them, the by-then notorious – to us teenagers - Sergeant Schueneman, growled: “Whose flag is this?”

“Not mine,” we chirped, which was quite true, for Bill Wood, the owner of the flag, was not there. 

The sergeant then proceeded to snap off the wooden pole, take the offending flag (of our mother country and NATO ally), turn around and disappear into City Hall, where the Park Ridge Police to this day maintain their headquarters.  We witnessed their withdrawal in stunned silence, looked at one another in wonderment, then dashed into the Shop, found Bob Rowe, the owner and our benevolent protector, and shouted:

“Bob!  Bob!  They’ve taken the flag!  Sergeant Schueneman just stole the Union Jack!  He just walked over here, broke the pole off and took it!”

Amidst much more shouting and consternation, Bob calmly took the phone, dialed the police station and held his hand up for quiet.  Upon reaching the desk sergeant, said loudly and firmly:

“One of your officers just came over here to the Pipe Shop and took a British flag that was on display outside.   That flag is private property and has been in the family for years.  You have no right to take that flag whatsoever.  I am coming across the street to the station right now, and I expect to get it back.”

He marched out the front door, all five feet two inches of him, across Hodges Park and into City Hall.  We held our breath.  Just minutes later, he emerged with the flag and we burst into cheers.   So I am happy to cheer for both the American flag and the Union Jack, two symbols of limited government, rule of law and much else that is good.