Gary's StoryStack

"Ya gotta WANNA!"

“When I launched this Storystack, I said I would not be writing about politics. After all, who, these days, needs yet another opinionator? Instead, I’d be writing true stories to engage, entertain, and uplift readers.

So . . . although this true story may seem to concern politics, it concerns something more fundamental: civics.

Civics is a social science that studies the rights, privileges, and obligations of a citizen in society.

Exercise those three and you can experience plenty of uplift.

To begin, consider the recent issuance of subpoenas to journalists who reported deficiencies in the defensive features of the President’s new airplane—the gift from Qatar. The Justice Department says it’s not out to punish the journalists, but to force them to disclose who in the government leaked that information.

This Administration, like all that have preceded it, cannot stand to be held accountable for things that imperil it. Making themselves accountable is a fundamental duty of their job.

Just as the job of reporters is to hold those in power accountable.

The job of citizens is to question authority; Bill Moyers called that the most patriotic act a citizen can perform.

And the job of government employees who know that the government is hiding failures or wrongdoing is to blow the whistle.

Which brings me to today’s civics story:

Jules is an unforgettable character I met when I worked in Los Angeles. He passed up medical school to try to make it to major league baseball as a pitcher. He came within an eyelash of getting there. When he was pitching for the Charleston, South Carolina club, a bookstore owner there gave him books for free, because Jules was the only ballplayer he’d ever met who read anything but the comics.

Jules read everything, and he committed to memory the most stirring passages from literature, verbatim, which he quoted freely and often. Here’s a mouthful from Jules:

“It’s like John Milton wrote, ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.’

“You take the three Johns, those great thinkers about democracy — John Milton, John Stuart Mill, John Locke — those bastards are solid!

“I have a fervor for the dignity of the individual. The predominant theme has to be the greatness of democracy. To me, when a government is run right, everybody in the neighborhood is pickin’ up a bat and gettin’ a chance to swing. Democracy is a nine-inning affair, and we must all bear down or else dictatorship will take over.

“It’s like Thoreau said, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ They’d like to do somethin’. But too many people say, ‘Ya can’t fight City Hall.’ Years ago, Vince Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers coach, used to say, ‘Ya gotta WANNA!’

All the passion Jules put into his pitching he transferred to what he saw as his duty as a citizen. He became what is known as a political gadfly, appearing at meetings of various governmental bodies, armed with research, and confronting bureaucrats and elected officials with data they could not deny. They routinely had him arrested for disorderly conduct, only to have a judge dismiss the charges and chide those officials for not honoring the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Jules made his living as a janitor on the night shift at a junior college. He lived a spartan life. He got himself on the ballot in the 1978 Democratic primary for governor of California, and he received 83,000 votes, somewhat short of the 2.5 million the incumbent governor, Jerry Brown, received. Almost all the votes for Jules came from people who’d never heard of him. But the ballot listed a candidate’s occupation, and when disaffected voters saw the word Custodian under Jules’s name, they identified with him and registered their objection to politics as usual.

One day during his campaign, Jules picketed the studios of NBC, objecting to the broadcaster’s refusal to grant him equal time on the air to present his platform. He quoted the NBC attorney, who was fed up with Jules’s threats to sue, and who said, “We’re going to play hardball with you.”

Jules replied, “Counselor, I relish the opportunity. Hardball is the only thing I ever indulged in.”

Another time, Jules was fed up with what he saw as the failure of the local U.S. Attorney to pursue allegations of corruption against an executive of the board of higher education. So, Citizen Jules stepped into a telephone booth and called the office of the Attorney General of the United States, to ask for help. He placed 19 collect calls, and only on the 19^th call did someone accept the charges.

It was a woman attorney who said, “Sir, we’ll accept the charges, but first, please tell me who are you?”

“Young lady,” Jules replied, “don’t you realize that you are talking to your employer?”

Elected and appointed officials are our employees. When they forget that, they must be reminded and be held to account. Journalists – and citizens empowered by stories journalists write – have a job to do.

It’s called CIVICS.

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Cheers,

Gary