What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends: Heartland Diary USA, #6

By Frank Miele

The essays by journalist Frank Miele in this collection span from 2003 to 2018. "What Matters Most" is Volume 6 of the Heartland Diary USA series. Most of these essays originally appeared in the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana, where Miele worked for 34 years, including 18 years as managing editor. Miele gained a wide following for his weekly conservative "Editor's 2 Cents" commentaries, which are now collected in the Heartland Diary series. The author, who is now a columnist for Real Clear Politics, is best known for his conservative commentary. but some of his best loved columns were written about the people he has known and loved. This collection includes many of those columns from his 18 years as managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana, plus others written to celebrate the great country we live in, the faith of our fathers and the spirit of kindness that characterizes all true Christians and all true Americans. A very few of the columns in this collection may touch upon political themes, but for the most part the book will appeal to those on the right and the left, and teach us how much we have in common at a time when the elites want to rip us apart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heartland Press
• Release date: Jul 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201036966

Book preview

The Heartland

Diaries

By FRANK MIELE

columnist, Real Clear Politics &

www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com

Previous

Volume 1: Why We Needed Trump, Part 1:

Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right

Volume 2: Why We Needed Trump, Part 2:

Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left

Volume 3: Why We Needed Trump, Part 3:

Trump’s American Vision: Just Right

Volume 4: The Media Matrix:

What If Everything You Know Is Fake

Volume 5: How We Got Here:

The Left’s Assault on the Constitution

Volume 6: What Matters Most:

God, Country, Family and Friends

Forthcoming

Volume 7: A Culture in Crisis:

Reviews and Reminders from the War Upstream

Collected from the author’s 18 years as managing editor

of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.

HEARTLAND DIARY VOLUME 6

What Matters Most

God, Country, Family and Friends

BY FRANK MIELE

Heartland Press

Kalispell Montana 2021

What Matters Most:

God, Country, Family and Friends

Copyright © 2021 by Frank Miele

All rights reserved

By agreement with

Hagadone Montana Publishing

Back cover photo: Meredith Miele

ISBN: 978-1-7329633-5-1

First Edition

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021915432

Heartland Press

Kalispell, Montana

Dedicated to

the American people,

whose hearts are as wide

as the Great Plains

and whose spirit is as tall

as the Rocky Mountains.

Never Forget who you are!

ON THE COVER:  The small face in the middle of the photo is yours truly, age 5, with my older brother Angelo at the reception following our mother Lorraine’s wedding to Carmen Joseph Miele in 1960.  Angelo and I got to join our mother and new dad on their honeymoon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City as we began the best 5 years of my childhood. Lorraine and Carmen both later succombed to debilitating illnesses, the stories of which you will find inside.

Author’s Note

The good stuff

Although I am known as a political columnist, some of my best loved columns were written about the people I have known and loved. This collection includes those columns, plus others written to celebrate the great country we live in, the faith of our fathers and the spirit of kindness that characterizes all true Christians and all true Americans. A very few of the columns in this collection may touch upon political themes, but for the most part I hope this book will appeal to those on the right and the left, and teach us how much we have in common at a time when the elites want to rip us apart. Let me know what you think.

Kalispell, Montana

July 2021

[e-mail]

What Matters Most

Patrick King made a difference

June 15, 2003

(The following was written more than a year before my first Editor’s Two Cents column, It was written on the occasion of former Inter Lake publisher Pat King being inducted into the Montana Newspaper Hall of. King, who died in 1996, was the first of six publishers that I worked for at the Daily Inter Lake.)

You didn't just get to know C. Patrick King. You got to like him.

Pat had a long career in newspapers, and a lot of people got to like him in a lot of places, but his favorite part by far was the 12 years he spent in Kalispell as publisher of the Daily Inter Lake. It had something to do with the location, of course. Kalispell is a wonderful place to work, but it also had something to do with Pat's natural affinity with the Montana lifestyle — the friendly, supportive community he came to call his own. He and his beloved wife, Chic, did everything they could to be part of that community — whether it was as simple as joining a golf foursome or as involved as heading up a project for the Chamber of Commerce or Rotary.

He was certainly well-liked by the public. They knew that he cared about them. He would help them to get a story in the paper about how their son or daughter had won a special honor, and he would also give a client full attention to make sure they got what they were paying for. He was well-liked by the public because he liked them... There was never any mistaking Pat's genuine caring and concern for people. His twinkling eyes told the story even before he smiled and took your hand. He had the greatest gift that any newspaperman needs to have — he could put you at ease immediately and let you see that he just wanted to help.

In fact, when you think about Pat King what comes to mind is a trait we all should strive for — perhaps in the news business more than anyplace else — and that is decency. He was a man who genuinely cared about people from the minute he met them.

That decency and kindness showed up in a lot of ways. One of the most unusual was a gift he made to his employees in the mid-1980s toward the end of his career. As the result of a program he'd seen offered elsewhere in the Hagadone Corporation, he decided to make an offer to his employees that would show he not just cared about them but would help to save their lives. Each employee who had a smoking habit was offered $500 if they could quit smoking for one year, with an additional $500 available if they also didn't gain any weight as a result. Many employees took him up on the offer, or tried to, but the original 25 or so quickly dwindled, and by the end of the year there were only about half a dozen who actually completed the bargain.

One of the most grateful participants of Pat's wager was yours truly, who back then was a 30-year-old wire editor with a three-pack-a-day habit and the bad health to prove it. I had tried to quit a dozen times over the years, but had never stayed smoke free for more than six months. Knowing that Pat valued my life enough to pay me to stay healthy was all the inspiration I needed to kick the habit. Today I’ve been smoke-free for 18 years, and Pat deserves all the credit.

That's the kind of story you hear about Pat King mostly — not the kind of funny belly laughs that make a good anecdote, just a lifetime of kindnesses and caring about people. And certainly Montana played a big role in his life. After he left as publisher and returned to Coeur d'Alene, he visited the Inter Lake several times, and he made a point of searching out each employee he knew and shaking his or her hand. People would ask how he was doing back in Idaho, and he would smile and brush it off. Fine, fine, he'd say. But we miss Kalispell. We miss Montana. Our time here was the best in our life. And the staff at the Inter Lake was the best I ever worked with. This is a wonderful newspaper.

And C. Patrick King was a wonderful publisher. We still miss him.

History lesson

November 15, 2004

A while back, some anonymous soul dropped off a rolled-up copy of the Inter Lake from 1941 at our office, and I put it aside until I had time to really do it justice.

Now that the election season is just past, I decided to give my natural curiosity free rein and took the tissue-thin wrapping off the newspaper and began my investigation of days past.

First discovery: Newspapers from 63 years ago have a tendency to fall apart in one's hands. This particular edition, a complimentary weekly version of the Inter Lake from July 31, 1941, had turned brown and brittle and was rolled up like one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Fortunately, I did not have to worry about saving every jot and tittle for posterity, so I unwrapped it on my desk and watched letters fall onto the floor like a rain of dehydrated alphabet soup.

Then I dug in and discovered that there was enough on virtually every page to fill a column such as this one with interesting parallels to our own day — or with oddities that make us think the 1940's were lived on another planet altogether.

Second discovery: The printed word is like a treasure map always pointing us on to greater knowledge.

The seven-column headline across the top of Page 1 caught my eye immediately: Jap Apology Insufficient Says Welles. Turns out that months before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had bombed another of our ships, the tiny gunboat Tutuila which was stationed at Chunking in the middle of the so-called Sino-Japanese War. The aforementioned Welles was Sumner Welles, acting secretary of state. He was the architect of FDR's Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, and a few years later he was forced to resign in a scandal over his alleged homosexuality.

All this I would not know were it not for two things — that tattered old copy of the Weekly Inter Lake (for which I would like to thank the anonymous donor) and the Google search engine which allowed me to access the knowledge of the ages at hyperspeed.

The marriage of these two technologies leads me to a third discovery, one I am not particularly happy about. What will be lost on that day when books and newspapers are no longer stacked up in libraries because it is so much more convenient to consult a computer?

Part of the magic of learning is that it can begin anywhere and take you everywhere. A library is a place where you can access worlds and times far beyond your own — worlds that you would never dream of — and you can find them just by pulling down an unlikely looking volume, blowing off a little dust, and opening to a random page.

If you find a reference to the USS Tutuila, then you can start off on a search for more information on gunboats in China. A reference to Sumner Welles can start you looking up the history of U.S.-Latin America relations to find out where the Good Neighbor Policy fits into things or to the history of homosexuality and its oppression in U.S. public life.

But if that information is simply stuck inside the World Wide Web somewhere, without some book somewhere to pull down off a shelf, then how in the world will you — or, more to the point, your children — ever find it? What lever will they push to access things they do not already know?

It raises the possibility that knowledge in the computer age will be more and more a forward-looking knowledge, and that history will become less and less important as it becomes harder and harder to access. Which brings to mind what Santayana said about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it.

Makes me think I will study this crumbling newspaper a little more closely to see what else I can learn about days gone by. Just maybe there is some kernel of knowledge hidden in one of these cracked newsprint columns that will seem as valuable 20 centuries from now as those Dead Sea Scrolls do to us today.

Christmas pageantry, American tradition and a dose of common sense

December 19, 2004

That touch of red on the clown’s nose makes it look just right, doesn’t it, dear?

With those words, my theatrical career was launched in the third-grade Christmas play at North Garnerville Elementary School near where I grew up in Stony Point, N.Y.

I bring that up not because my theatrical career has been particularly distinguished, but because my participation in the play was a highlight of my childhood and made such an impact on me that I remember to this day that first line, spoken when the curtain opened as I dabbed a paintbrush on the nose of my best friend, David Cloer.

David played a toy clown, and I was the Toymaker. My recollection is that Barbara Matone played the Toymaker’s Wife, and Patty Shearer played the ballerina doll who fell in love with the clown, and thus we had the makings of a fine Christmas pageant.

I am reminded of all this because my own son, Carmen, himself now in third grade, recently appeared in Russell School’s Christmas program called A Martian Christmas. Carmen played one of the Martians, and he even got to eat a Christmas tree at one point, while his 5-year-old sister, Meredith, and I watched him with pride.

The show, adapted by music teacher Francie Lipp, gave a chance for dozens of second- and third-graders to shine on stage and to entertain their families and friends and create happy memories for one and all.

Except one and all were not happy.

Indeed, a few letter writers, who read about the play in the Inter Lake, sent their complaints to this editor, and no doubt to the school as well. It seems these gentle folk were unhappy that the Christmas pageant did not have any Christ in it, and they wondered whether this was more evidence of the secularization of America.

Well, I can answer them on both accounts.

Yes, this is evidence of the secularization of America, but that did not just start this month. We were founded as a secular nation — founded by Christians, but not to be a Christian nation. We want to be inclusive, not exclusive, and that is why our Constitution is written the way it is.

Back in North Garnerville Elementary School I was surrounded by many students who were Jewish as well as those who came from a variety of Christian backgrounds, including Catholic and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and while we had Christmas trees and carols in school, I don’t remember any preaching or proselytizing.

And the play we did that year, back in 1964, was not about Christ, or even about Santa; it was about a merry toymaker with a white beard who brought happiness to little boys and girls everywhere.

That, it seems to me, is the way it should be. Although we should never be afraid to teach schoolchildren about the role of religion in life and history, we should also not expect the schools to take the place of churches. It would be inappropriate to have a play for all the second- and third-graders if they were going to have to speak words of faith that they or their families might not believe in.

It would not be fair, and fairness is what America is all about.

On the other hand, I would also point out that the letter writers were not entirely right about the message of A Martian Christmas, because when you take the words Jesus Christ out of a play, you do not necessarily take out his spirit.

Indeed, the words of one song from the play seem to be a quite succinct capsulization of the teachings of our savior: It’s good to be good/It’s good to be kind/It’s good to be loving/With peace on your mind.

And when the Martians asked for a reason to celebrate the season, the Earthlings responded: How about love?

It’s a message that ought to be encouraged by Christians, who are asked to follow the example of the one who taught us to love one another.

And lest we forget, perhaps the best known Christmas story of all time, other than the Nativity, is one called A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. It should be noted that the name of Jesus Christ appears nowhere in that text either, yet his spirit is found throughout.

God works in mysterious ways, and we should not necessarily expect the public schools to be his instrument of salvation. From my reading of the Bible, I surmise he has already chosen the cross for that purpose.

Holiday thoughts

November 21, 2004

Well, here it is, the middle of November, and everyone is dividing up into teams.

No, not Cats and Griz. Not even football fans vs. football widows.

I'm talking about the division between the people who love the holidays and the people who hate them.

You may ask yourself how anyone could not like holiday traditions that include getting lots of gifts, eating lots of turkey and other delicious food, and seeing lots of kids, plus —in some families — imbibing generous portions of alcohol dressed up with names like merlot and burgundy and cognac and single malt scotch whisky.

The answer is simple.

The reason people don't like those traditions is because of a) buying all those gifts, b) cooking all that turkey and other delicious food, and c) being around a bunch of people who have imbibed large quantities of such alcohols. For politically correct reasons, I am not weighing in on whether or not anyone could possibly find being around lots of kids a problem.

One doesn't like to generalize, but in our society we generally feel sorry for people who are alone during the holidays. People with families go out of their way to round up strays and line them up around the holiday table like trophies. Of course, that just makes those loners even more determined to decline the invitation next year, so they don't ever have to go through that again!

Certainly, the folks who most flamboyantly enjoy the holidays seem to be happy, laughing, loving people — at least during the times when they are not crying, slamming the oven door, or telling Uncle John not to tell that horrible story again about the time he was out hunting the day before Thanksgiving and fell on his rifle and shot a hole in his shoulder and nearly bled to death on his way back home to enjoy his favorite green-bean casserole and all the trimmings.

And the ones who don't particularly like the holidays are oftentimes alone, watching the same old TV shows, and griping about the same things as usual.

So it might seem on the surface as though holidays have to be a family tradition in order to be thoroughly enjoyed.

But maybe we are looking at things wrong.

I've looked at the holidays from both sides now, from inside and outside the laughing living room, so to speak, and I'll admit there is something to be said for the full-throttle assembly-line Thanksgiving with one pie per hour and a knock on the door every 15 minutes.

But there is also something to be said for using the holidays for quiet time. It is somehow much easier to meditate on the blessings of life when you have had a chance to sleep in on a Thanksgiving Thursday, or to contemplate the special miracle of the baby Jesus when you don't have to worry about the competing miracle of Santa and his bountiful Christmas tree.

As everyone knows, the holidays are not just the hap-happiest time of the year, they are also the most stressful. So if some folks decline an invitation to join you for turkey dinner this Thursday, don't feel sorry for them.

They just might be thankful for the extra sleep, the quiet time, and the opportunity to get away from the hustle and the bustle for at least one day.

But however you spend Thanksgiving this year, here's a wish for a happy holiday.

A death that should happen to no one

January 9, 2005

It was two years ago this week my mother died.

I don't tell you that out of a prolonged sense of grieving or because I expect anyone to care unduly about my personal loss.

Face it, we have all lost loved ones, some of us much more recently than me, and we each carry very similar feelings of regret, acceptance, and anger. I miss my mother, but this column is not really about my mother; it is about how she died.

She came to visit me in Kalispell during Thanksgiving week of 2002. It was to have been a happy time for her, visiting her grandchildren, gloating about her new hip replacement, talking about her retirement plans now that she had reached the ripe old age of 74.

But instead it quickly became apparent to me that something was terribly wrong. My first clue was when I handed her a couple of Montana Life sections from the Sunday Inter Lake and told her I had saved them for her. Mom had gotten me hooked on crossword puzzles when I was still in grade school, and we used to like to do the Sunday New York Times puzzle together. When she came to visit, she expected a stack of puzzles to keep her busy.

But when I handed her the papers she just stared blankly and asked me why I had saved them. When I scolded her for forgetting about the puzzles, we laughed and probably thought she was just getting old, but it was much more than that.

When I returned from work that night, she had not only not done the puzzles, she had not moved from the couch where I had left her at lunch time. For the first of many times that week, I asked her if she was all right, and she insisted everything was fine, but each day revealed new gaps in her memory, new confusions, and more and more blank stares.

By the time I put her on plane back to Michigan a week later, I knew something was terribly wrong. I called my brother to check on her that night and it turned out she was missing. The police later found her about 100 miles from where she lived, lost and confused in her car. She had not known how to find her way home.

My brother and I compared notes, and he said she had been fine before taking her trip to Montana, so we thought at first she must have had a stroke or caught some sort of virus. She went into the hospital for a battery of tests, and each day she got more and more confused, and the doctors could tell us less and less as they eliminated one after the other possible cause of her dementia.

At last, after several weeks, I got the call from my brother telling me they had made a diagnosis. Although there was no specific test available to confirm it, her doctors were now sure that she had a rare terminal illness called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It was one in a million, struck mostly people in their sixties and older, and was absolutely fatal within a year, usually less.

What that meant was: My mother had the human form of Mad Cow Disease.

It was devastating news. We knew now that we would never again have back the bright, cheerful woman who had made so much out of her life from truly humble beginnings. Indeed, she became very scared and very fragile and quickly was reduced to a state of infancy as her personality was eaten up by the prions that now inhabited her brain. Seven weeks after she first became ill, she was dead.

It was these prions, sort of rogue infectious proteins, that caused my mother's death, and the same prions are also responsible for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the fancy name for Mad Cow Disease. It is also responsible for diseases among sheep (scrapie), mink (transmissible mink encephalopathy) elk (chronic wasting disease) and cannibals (kuru), among others. The common link between all of these diseases is that they are transmissible through mechanisms not yet understood and that once acquired the brain is slowly eaten away and left looking like a sponge.

The bottom line for me is no one really understands how the disease is acquired. That is why I am writing to express my concern about the decision of the United States Department of Agriculture to reopen the border to Canadian cattle imports despite the confirmation of a second case of Mad Cow Disease in Alberta.

I have watched someone die from the humiliating, crippling effects of a prion disease. No Americans should be put needlessly in danger of having to repeat the death my mother went through.

If Mad Cow Disease gets into the cattle supply in the United States, then there is no telling what the final toll would be. England and Europe have already seen the transmission of Mad Cow directly from cattle to humans, resulting in what is called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The victims tend to be younger, and so the tragedy of their deaths is even greater, but otherwise it is the same horror that my mother and her family experienced.

Sens. Baucus and Burns are both fighting to keep Canadian cattle out of the United States, and so are the Montana Stockgrowers Association and the Montana Farmers Union. On behalf of my mom, I wanted to say thanks to them and add my voice to those who think the health of the American people should come first.

This death should happen to no one.

Cold enough?

January 23, 2005

40 below keeps the riffraff out.

That was the slogan I was taught almost immediately upon arriving in Bismarck, N.D., in the late autumn of 1981, and one I was reminded of last week when Northwestern Montana saw temperatures fall almost that low for a couple of days.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not particularly fond of extreme cold weather, but I know what those old Norwegians and Welsh and Germans from Russia who inhabit the farmhouses of North Dakota are talking about. You can't live through a North Dakota winter without a certain pride that you lived through it.

40 below keeps the riffraff out.

There was probably some initial concern by my then-employer, the Bismarck Tribune, that I might be a member of that riffraff. After all, I was a native of New Jersey, a longtime resident of New York, and to make matters worse, I had moved to the Great Plains from the ungodly warm climes of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. How could I possibly weather the wet and windy arctic express that buried Bismarck every winter under a blanket of snow when I had been wearing shorts to walk to the grocery store a few weeks earlier?

It did not take long to find out that the question was not just rhetorical...

Indeed, that first winter in Bismarck turned out to be abysmally cold. During one particular stretch, we saw 40 straight days where the temperature fell below zero. And quite a few of those days saw the thermometer drop a couple of dozen degrees into the nether realm, not even counting the wind chill, and you really don't know the meaning of wind chill until you have lived north of the Missouri River on the Great Plains and faced the endless open horizon to Canada.

I had the foresight to lease an apartment that was just a quarter-mile from the brand-new offices of the Tribune, and there were many days I didn't even have to bother to try to start my 10-year-old Delta 88 to see if it was uselessly frozen. The waist-deep snow drifts had already made my decision for me.

In those days, when the Tribune was a p.m. newspaper, I would start my work day at 4:30 a.m., and with the wind chill down at 45 below and the powdery snow blowing in gusts of 30 miles an hour, I would take the time to dress in the recommended layers, wear a wool scarf and a pull-over knit cap, step into a pair of chest-high snowpants, snap up my insulated snowboots, check myself in the mirror to make sure there was no square inch of skin exposed, and then shuffle out the door like an arctic version of the mummy till I hit the first snowdrift when I started the hard work of plowing my own way down the middle of the street, walking past the occasional stranded car, smiling at the uncanny whiteness of the North Dakota winter, and wondering at what temperature the inside of the human lungs turns useless.

That was the longest quarter-mile of my life, but also the most memorable, and perhaps the most invigorating. It made my first job of the day — starting a pot of hot coffee — a pleasure that few subsequent jobs have ever been able to equal.

40 below keeps the riffraff out.

Well, I made it through that winter, and stayed another winter just to prove that it had not been a fluke. The simple, straightforward life of Bismarck appealed to something deep inside me, and I might well have stayed there the rest of my life were it not for a failed love that left me with much worse frostbite than any mere wind could ever do.

Then, six months later, I came to Montana to stay. And whenever I miss that sterilizing tranquility of whiteness and frozen breath, I know that I can drive past Essex and Marias Pass and come back to the Great Plains and the big chill just a hundred miles from here.

It is a surprisingly comforting thought.

Death with dignity

March 27, 2005

The nation has engaged this past week in a discussion about the morality of death.

Forgive me if I am unimpressed, but the nation seems to know as little about death as it knows about life.

What we have been talking about is whether Terri Schiavo should be allowed to die or not. At least that is what we have been pretending to talk about. The fact of the matter is that Terri Schiavo — the person, the consciousness, the individual — has long since left us. The parts of her brain that defined her personality and gave her intelligence have turned to liquid.

What we are really talking about is whether the body that once housed the person of Terri Schiavo should be kept alive, even though the essence that gave it meaning has long since fled to a better place.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not arguing for or against keeping the body of Terri Schiavo alive. I think a case could be made for either side. But I don't understand what the heck Congress is doing in the story. It is a story about Terri Schiavo and her family, and their pain and struggles. It is not a story about the public welfare, but about a private suffering. It is a story about family law, and family law is a matter of state law, not federal law. It is no business of Congress. All that has to be decided is whether or not a husband has the right to act as medical guardian of his disabled wife, and whether that right should ever revert to the wife's parents at some point.

Of course, the law is clear. Husbands do have the right to make such decisions, and with the supervision of a court, they make them every day. People are taken off feeding tubes every day. People die every day  who could have been kept alive indefinitely with medical assistance. And remarkably, Congress even minds its own business most days, and lets families make decisions about the fate of such people in private.

Forgive me if I am opinionated, but I speak out of personal experience, not political certainty.

As many of you know, it was just over two years ago when my mother was stricken with a disease that left her brain ravaged by the same prions that cause mad cow disease or chronic wasting disease. Within six weeks her personality was drained away from her, and her brain had been reduced to a few simple functions that did not hold out promise of any kind of meaningful life ever again.

But that did not mean she could not live longer. She could. Indeed, many people with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease survive for six months or even a year after being diagnosed. The key word, of course, is survive. They linger. They moan. They get bed sores. At times, they even smile, in a horrid tight-lipped parody of happiness.

But I can assure you there is no happiness in the hospital room of such a person.

My mother, however, was lucky. She had made it clear she did not want to be kept alive.

And when they tried to keep her alive, even though she had no chance of ever being restored to her life, my mother — who could not talk, who could not swallow, who could not escape — had enough strength to pull her feeding tubes and IVs out, and to clench her teeth shut and turn her face away from the spoon, the straw, the sponge. No food. No water. No thank you.

One congressman — who seemed so sure of himself the other day when he and his colleagues figuratively forced their way into Terri Schiavo's hospital room — said quite confidently that death by starvation was a death that no one would ever wish upon himself. But I can tell him that he is wrong.

My mother wished to die, and she felt strong enough about it to refuse food and water for almost 10 days. It was painful for us, and it must have been painful for her, but she never wavered. She could not speak words any longer, but she spoke powerfully to me and my brother as we watched her strength continue unabated even as her body atrophied and her brain disappeared. She was a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves. She was a voice for dignity.

And finally, she was proof that there are worse things than a horrible death.

One of them — much worse — is a horrible life.

Maybe Congress needs to think about that.

‘And you can quote me’

January 16, 2005

What exactly can you say about Mike Muri... that he hasn't already said about himself?

Brilliant painter? Great writer? Makes a wicked good mixed drink?

No, he's already said all of those.

But those aren't what make Mike unique anyway. Heck, anyone can paint a masterpiece — if they have enough talent, time and inclination. But not everyone can be an egomaniac and still have friends. Mike is one of those rarities — a legend in his own mind who people actually like.

And they like to talk to him, too.

Which is why he's made his living as a bartender for the past 30 years or so, most recently at the Bigfork Inn, where he holds court on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

It was in just such a place many years ago when Mike first had the inspiration to hear a customer make a comment so outrageous, and so funny, that it just had to be written down for posterity — on a bar napkin.

After that, whenever a friend, customer or stranger said something that had the ring of truth, no matter how absurd, Mike would scribble it down and stuff it into his pocket. Eventually he wound up with bags and bags of sayings that tickled his funny bone or nudged his noggin.

This year, he decided to collect several hundred of the best and put them in book form, and so he created You're Just Like Me: If It Ain't About You, You Don't Care... And If You Didn't Say It, It Ain't Funny.

But the truth is, it is funny.

Mike brings out the best in people. His not inconsiderable raconteur skills get people telling their own stories, and his quick wit gets people in the mood to trade barbs. His huge ego provides plenty of target, but it is a rare hook that hits home. Mike is too quick to be caught often, but when someone actually manages to get the best of Mike in a battle of wits, you will never hear someone more delighted to laugh at himself.

I've known Mike pretty much from the time he started putting this book together in the early 1980s, and I've heard half the quotes in this book a dozen times or more, but they are still funny. Or sometimes not so much funny as just so darn painfully true that they make you laugh because you have never heard it put so well before.

Here are a few samples:

They thought I was a happy guy... who just kept talking about suicide all the time.

When you've been dead one million years, you're just beginning to be dead.

Being humble doesn't mean you think less of yourself... but less often.

If you can't change your mind, I don't see no sense in having one.

A pseudo-intellectual is someone who doesn't believe what I believe.

You may change your world, but you will never change the truth.

I've been all across the country, and I'm still chasing myself.

You got the living down, but ... you ain't doing the learning part.

This is just a smidgen of what's in the book, and they are all attributed by first name or nickname to the original inventor or plagiarist of the saying. Some of the funniest ones, of course, reflect their barroom origins with the occasional vulgarity, but there is also some high-toned philosophizing as well.

Mike tells me the book is selling nicely, although he'd like all his friends to each buy five or six copies so he can plan on his retirement sometime this century.

‘We all fall down’

February 20, 2005

Has anyone yet made the connection between the Internet and the Tower of Babel?

The Tower of Babel was built by the descendants of Noah at a time, we are told in Genesis, when the whole earth had one language and one speech. For reasons best known to themselves, some of these sons of Noah decided to build a tower whose top is in the heavens and to make a name for themselves.

This tower apparently was quite successful, and was well on its way to becoming the center of human industriousness after just a short time. Indeed, when God saw it, and thought of the ambitions of the people who had built it, he declared, ... the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.

It's a little fuzzy exactly why God was worried about the funny little humans and their brick tower, but suffice it to say that God in the Old Testament is known as a jealous God and he lives up to that reputation here.

Presumably angry at the presumptuousness of mankind, God confused the language so that all people could no longer understand one another, and he scattered them abroad all over the face of the earth.

Which is where we pick up the story nearly 3,000 years later.

We are indeed scattered abroad, but apparently the instincts of humankind have not changed too much in the intervening centuries. There is still an urge to build, to challenge and to make a name for ourselves, maybe even to measure up to God.

Here is man once again laboring to bring together all knowledge and all language so that nothing will be hidden from him. The Internet has become a kind of Alice's Restaurant of the soul in less than two decades. Just as in Arlo Guthrie's song about the hippie restaurant, it's also true that you can get anything you want within easy reach on the Internet. Philosophy, friendship, religion, science, love, literature, magic, mayhem, pornography, satanism, truth, lies. It's all there, for anyone to access, and it doesn't even necessarily cost a dime.

And certainly on the Internet the idea of a language barrier has been nearly obliterated just as it was before the Tower of Babel. Numerous sites such as Google allow users to translate diverse languages instantly. For instance, Potete ottenere qualche cosa che desideriate al ristorante della Alice explains why Arlo Guthrie did not write Alice's Restaurant in Italian.

So what's the point?

Simple. The Internet is a miracle of modern technology, built byte by byte instead of brick by brick. It's like one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in that it shows just how darn much the human mind can accomplish when it wants to. But let's remember that of those Seven Wonders, only one — the Great Pyramid — remains. The rest have been crushed by time just as the God of the Old Testament crushed the dreams of those sons of Noah who built the Tower of Babel.

We can marvel at the Internet, but let's not mistake it for omniscience. It can tell us everything that man knows, but nothing of what God knows. You can get anything you want except what matters the most — the truth. And though we can profit from our industriousness, we should take a lesson from that old tower, which is pointedly nowhere to be seen today.

Our handiwork is pretty good, but it's nothing compared to what comes from the hand of the Master. Only that endures.