Stop Sleeping on the Sofa of Lies

The world runs in floods of cliche anger and blistering bravado.

Everybody is fighting mad about being right about something.

I believe running just underneath it all is a stream of filthy inner whispers.

You’re a fraud. You’re not nearly good enough. You can’t, won’t, never will be!

Consider my dad, and how he dealt with these lies.

George Cogdill came up in wretched poverties of the Great Depression.

Hungry as a boy. Poor of formal education. Starved of value and dignity as a human being.

The stench off those old poverties followed him. No matter his pressed clothes, starched manners and middle-class, well-earned money, he worried! He worried and doubted his present and future away.

Fear of not being enough, or having enough, carries a stench. It’s like a stained old sofa, full of fleas and fumes of an unshakable past.

Some of the seemingly most successful among us sleep on it every night. They hear and heed its nasty voice. My dad dragged it through most of his life.

He tried to drink it away. That made it smell worse.

Getting sober and finally outrunning the old aromas of doubt carried him, finally, into a beautiful future with my mom.

And how often do we see symptoms of his error all around us today?

Shows of bloated ego, rampant narcissism, obsession with tribal belongings — all revelations of people who fear they DON’T belong. They armor to hide old shame.

The past is nothing to hide. It’s a thing to learn from and shed.

It’s gotta go.

It’s aromas mustn’t go with us.

The future makes no room for fetid old sofas, and what they have to say.

The Magnification of Man Tears

In his final appearance on the mound at Yankee Stadium, Mariano Rivera wept, openly.

One of the greatest of all time, a Hall of Famer by unanimous vote, revealed his humanity, courageously.

It was no time for male implacability.

No machismo cliches would do.

We are not stone. If we pretend to be, we will crumble.

Valentine’s Day signals the beginning of spring training. Men of rare gifts report to places that grow palm trees and try to grow into a game so hard to play some of its best never get beyond the bus circuit. It’s Americana, real and romantic, brimming with long-ball failures and grown men rejoicing on well-groomed ground dreamed about by little boys (and girls – my gorgeous Danette Cogdill played little league).

It is a sign of invincible summertime. It is a calling.

Gentlemen, this Valentine’s Day, love those you love aloud. It is time to reveal the best of ourselves. Show the hollows of the heart, deal with disorders of the mind, discard the dross.

If we can love a game, how much more must we love those who love us?

It takes a strong man to lift out his tears, especially before others. Likewise his words carried deep within. On them can surf what is best of him — the lover, the leader, the dad, teammate, friend.

What gets the better of us will always reveal the best or worst of us.

It will always measure our greatness, and our lacking.

A noble love kept silent, of someone, or even something, will become the only silence we’ll ever regret.

What Never Makes it to the Graveyard

Our times call for some Sol.

A favorite story of my reporting career came from an interview with Sol Schulman, given shortly before his last breath.

In 1933, a Jewish kid opened a little clothing store on the Main Street of Sylva, North Carolina. It’s a comely little necklace of a town, strung across a ridge of Appalachia. A place steeped in old time religion and ancient ground, hard to work.

That kid, Sol Schuman, was just shy of 20 year old. An outlier.

Sol set out succeeding at business and thriving at the best of being alive. He gave to every church in town, served charities and neighbors neck deep in needs.

Anyone near the Schulman family felt the pulse of generosity. What often divides humankind took a trampling under their kindness. Generosity showed up without Sol making a show of himself.

When we reported on him, Sol Schulman’s years had begun to show. Schulman’s Department Store on Main stood bustling with volunteers, selling the place to the walls.

Sol was done.

Sell it, give it to the hospital auxiliary, let it all buy precious things that save and give life.

These were his orders.

Sol wept in our interview. Beautiful in his patina of 90 years, bathed in tears of mourning his wife and their life, Sol said, “When you’re happy, you’re rich. When you have enough, you’re a millionaire.”

The aged millionaire had grown his happiness by giving countless riches away. He gave to those who believe the differently from himself. They gave gratitude and downpours of love back to him.

“I earned what money I have; I also love to give it away,” Sol Schulman once said. (Sourced from a story in the Sylva Herald, March 4, 2020).

Sol’s going out of business sale netted a return on investment that can school every CEO, founder, executive and laborer on earth. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went to uplift the suffering. Sol, who had never wanted for a thing, gave the last bits of himself into need.

He sure knew how.

His ways had netted him a business and a legacy most extravagant.

Sol died not many months after our story aired. The rest of the story lives in the following, a eulogy calling out to every woman and man who ever stumbled to grasp the greatest treasures among us.

“Sol was a wealthy man but his wealth did not come from money,” said Rabbi Dr. Michael Samuel during Schulman’s funeral service. “He realized money was no good unless it was used for the good of the community. He was a great benefactor with a generosity of spirit.”

He still is.

Sol gains an earthly immortality when he is remembered. Marked upon this writing is the lasting pulse of his legacy. The breath of those he served remains the benefactor’s lasting updraft

We live now in a new time of old wars. Men hate another for reasons of politic and belief. Treasons against the oneness of us all draw amens on television.

Rage gets confused for righteousness.

Against the backdrop of murderous terrorism—battles abroad and within households fresh from school pickup lines—there he his.

Sol Schulman, having his say. His truth far mightier than any sword.

No grave can ever fully hold such a man as he.

Wonders of a World Cup Moment

A moment in time, a calling to our times.

This consolation in the World Cup leaves me thrilled, and wondering.

Why on this earth can we not erase the fears that fuel racism in this common human race? Why have we not cured the soul-crime contempt that is disdain of skin color, and those who wear it?

There remains a force toward the banning of books, while the use of n-word epithets carries on. Reporting of late highlights nefarious language in threatening letters to public officials. I have heard and resisted the word heard in casual conversation, even now.

Some words are spoken bacteria, lethal to the human soul. Why have we not cured our cultures of such thought?

A look at the picture here reminds me of a practice by one of the world’s finest thought leaders. Father Richard Rohr says there’s an antidote to hatefulness found in detouring others into the heart. Against the carousel of contempt, revenge, fear and undue pride that can spin in human minds, he urges moving the targets deeper into ourselves. Down where the spirit breathes, far neath the surface, where we all suffer and triumph together.

In the heart of our longings to belong, all others must belong.

He’s talking about that innermost place where we would feel grateful if one different from ourselves pulled us from drowning. There is a kingdom within every woman and man that makes no room for tinfoil thoughts. Only treasure is mined from that eternal part of ourselves.

He’s onto something — an antidote to the enduring infections of thought and word that linger from the swamps of Jim Crowe, and beyond.

I remain hopeful. Such a curative is clearly catching among the young. They tend to find the history of Jim Crowe America a foolishness they can scarcely believe could happen.

But it did. Its infections still float among us, a pandemic of minds.

We know better than ever how to be part of the cure.

That’s the great Lou Gehrig, July 4, 1939.

The day the Iron Horse melted down in front of a sold out Yankee Stadium. The day Gehrig stood taller and stronger than ever.

The mighty gifts behind the baseball magic were dimming. ALS, to become known as Lou Geherig’s disease, took his life just two years later.

“The luckiest man on the face of the earth” he called himself that 4th of July. The downpour of his tears came with the updrafts of praise and gratitude—Miller Huggins, his family, the grounds crew. He thanked them all. Thankful for a career too great for a billion lifetimes.

The speech itself is an icon. A many-faceted jewel on the cap of American exceptionalism. But why? What makes it so? What can we all learn from it?

Geherig’s speech informs the art of oratory and being nobly alive because it is — vulnerable.

He did not write it beforehand. He had no one compose some lofty address. The speech works because of what the misguided call weakness or “cheesy.” Gehrig simply and courageously lets himself be seen and heard.

Thankful. Heartbroken. Honest.

Such tears brace and ease and strengthen a man. Gehrig composed on his feet a spoken anthem of being utterly human. Only a cold machine would not be broken or afraid or grateful for what had come of him. If he were angry that day, he turned it into thanksgiving and a rare uplifting sadness that was happy enough to call itself lucky.

It is American nobility. True greatness. The stuff inside every woman and man who dares be seen, uncovered, unarmored, disarmed.

Empathy is the cape of all heroism. To feel another’s pain or joy and to let it show is to be good. Likewise, to feel our own, not hiding from ourselves. To govern the worst of emotions and reveal the best is to be like Gehrig.

Whether it’s about speaking publicly, or simply being human, in public and in private, what does all this have to say to you and me?

How on earth do we find ourselves in his words, and how he spoke them?

From Gerhig’s cleats on the 4th of July, 1939, to our wherever, here and now, there is luck to be made. Courage to be found.

Our very own.

Heroism, As Mistaken Identity

In every accomplished life, there is a tempest. An inner restlessness to matter. A drive toward heroism.

There is also fortitude—against failure, criticism, envy, the schadenfreude of others.

Fitzgerald said, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”

Among the greatest and most common of tragedies is squandering our inner tempest trying to become the hero of people who need to become a heroes to themselves.

Our true identity is not found there. Nor is true heroism.

To measure our accomplishments by how many people we save from themselves is a court jester’s errand.

There’s no leadership there.

Doing this enables people not to grow. It’s failure to matter disguised as leadership and compassion. A misappropriation of that innermost restlessness.

Wasted energy.

My great bosses and leaders never shamed me when I failed. They didn’t pick up the wreckage and make their own legacy of it. They simply encouraged, they taught what they knew, and compelled me back into the arena. Alone. They were resolute about it. THIS is how they saved me from myself.

They compelled me to let the restlessness show. They showed me the only permanent failure is a final effort at being better than last time.

Alongside them, fortitude was found.

I hope you find some here.

Score an F for Mocking the A’s

Some very fortunate people have been mocking the misfortunes of the Oakland A’s.

Yes, the A’s are in last place, attendance fit for a mausoleum, and the team soon headed east to Vegas. Oakland is losing the magic of Major League Baseball. The spell of the game is shattering there.

Polite sportsmanship should remain unbroken.

But it isn’t. Some gloating has gone on, fool’s errand that it is. Schadenfreude is a big word for a small set of values. Big falls often come of it.

This dark season of A’s baseball highlights a simple irony — we teach children to be polite, be good sports, while adults play hard ball with words, hurling pride at the head of a team on its knees.

I remember when no one believed in me, apart from my parents and a teacher or two. And they were cautious about the high aspirations of this working-class-rooted, small-town kid.

Everything turned out well, much to the surprise of all of us, even the one who worked and persisted and refused to make failure a complete sentence with a period at the end.

Mike Tyson said everybody’s got a plan until they get hit in the mouth. Every business, every career, gets hit in the professional teeth. It’ll happen to everyone. The best get up, battle through more days, counting their first-world advantages more than measuring blood loss.

But the truest greats never write a gloat in the blood of the knocked-down.

The ground, like the stratosphere, waits for us all. Only the worst believe it won’t bruise them, too.

The Oakland A’s are made up of players destined to play elsewhere. Next year, pitchers with live arms may face hitters with proud mouths today. Ardent fans can go cold, overnight, over a half inning. The bloodied can remember well.

Fortunes, like uniforms, are bound to change.
May the colors of goodwill get their vogue back on.

Love and Brimstone and Presidential Bromance

Having the audacity to persist in love, no matter the brimstone — this I deeply admire.

I grieve the hatefulness of so much of our national discourse.

During my career in television, I had the honor to cover four US Presidents: Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

People ask me, “What was it like? What are they like?”

The answers are simple. Each is iconic in his own way, having done one of the toughest jobs in the world just reaching the Oval Office. And each is just like you and me, human. Each one, mortal.

Many don’t know the special relationship that grew between Clinton and Bush. They became united by shared humanity. They grew a stout trunk of family between themselves.

Witness this from Bush to Clinton, left for the latter to find in a top desk drawer in the Oval:

In his note on January 20, 1993, President Bush wrote:

“You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.”

Bill Clinton would later call his friendship with George HW Bush one of the greatest gifts of his life.

Rivals, at one time. Ideologically and geographically different. Their upbringings were as about as similar as stones and dollar bills.

But the two men loved one another. A bromance, yes, but it became so much more. Their presidential kinship remains an academy of what’s possible.

President Bush’s letter to the incoming President Clinton is no mere artifact of grace. It harbors more than gentility. It is a calling of leadership to every one of us today. So is President Clinton’s reciprocated love, equal a son to a benevolent dad.

This begs of us to love one another. Rather than the rapacious rhetoric of today’s ideological civil warring, these men call us to center ourselves in a renewing of civilization. It becomes too easy to see the imperative of love as drivel — festooned in snowflakes and candyassery.

If you think so, hear the courage and strength of Nelson Mandela.

“Forgiveness liberates the soul, it removes fear. That’s why it’s such a powerful weapon.”

A weapon indeed. One that gives life instead of taking it. A refiner of men and women. The weapon that eventually took over America’s relationships with Germany and Japan.

It takes courage to love. Lasting hatred is the elixir of loneliness and cowardice.

We have within our grasp the power to end the national storm of brimstone, one chosen word at a time.

I pray we choose well, better than recently before.

Fear and Dirt and Misbegotten Magic

“Anytime you’re throwin’ dirt you’re losin’ ground.”

Cormack McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

McCarthy writes fiction, but deals in truth. It is the calling of all writers seeking the worthwhile.

Consider how correct he is in matters of just being alive in this human race.

As we commence a new year, all of us will do well with a reminder — all anger springs from fear. This is a fact of psychology. A truth unearthed by those who study the human psyche, across generations.

Fear turning to filth and blood is misbegotten magic of the human mind. A trick we’ll all do well to undo.

Perhaps one of our highest callings is to confront our fears and resolve them. Tame them, even annihilate them. Doing this tends to keep us from bleeding those fears upon others, who have not cut us, who do not deserve the bloodletting of anger. The dirt of fear in disguise.

This is my hope for this new year. A renewal of holding ourselves accountable toward making humanity more civilized, beginning with our innermost selves.

We have lived too much tolerance for the borderline personality that has become a hallmark of human discourse. Let us become intolerant of rage and uproar, fanaticism and conspiracy theorizing founded on human fear and hot thin air. However, with this caveat — reacting to reactionaries creates only scalded battleground. The cool Eden of zero reaction is the civilizing solution. This doesn’t mean zero opposition. It means not forging words into a knife fight and a shovel full of fuss.

Cormack McCarthy is known for writing violence, very clearly, in a way that pulps the page. I believe he does this to remind us not to live as uncivilized animals. Bulls love to kick and play in dirt. They are not known for their intelligence. They are known fools who mistake the slightest motion for a real threat.

We are a far higher evolition.

Harbors of ability to leave the dirt on the ground.

Mirror, Mirror, We’re Looking Away!

We’re beginning to remember that it’s fatal to fall in love with ourselves.

America’s long view is returning from its retirement into narcissism.

There. I said it. Narcissism, a word overused, sure. And one right on point of our recent years.

Oh we’re still in a season of people wearing a code phrase for school boy profanity. Some are still bemused by themselves. Can’t look away from notions of how damn-right they are.

But I know this great nation is far better than to perish while staring at the mythic “great I.” The pools of our identity politics are stagnant, stinking. We know this. We must shed the foolishness of this mirror.

This great county is finally looking up. Lifting its head from its own reflection. The long view of seeing others is clearing.

We know what caused the death of Narcissus. In the myth he dies alone, unable to stop adoring himself. Unable to hear or see the beauty of another. Narcissism is fatal, after all.

We know better than to let ourselves go down this way.

Let the code phrases of tin foil hats die instead. Let men be man enough to shun saying — or wearing — what they would not translate to their mothers, or a 5 year old. Be man enough to say it, then decent enough not to.

Statesmanship is not dead. It’s alive in the long view. It will not perish in the reflecting pools of falsehood. We are better than this. Far better than we have recently been. Our true greatness is yet to be.