By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Apr 4, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET
My dad and I circa 1968
On this day in which we remember the tragic assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., we re-run this piece — in which the RP honored King, his father, and contributing RP Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s father — that first appeared at The Recovering Politician on April 4, 2011.
Today — as on every April 4 — as the nation commemorates the anniversary of one of the worst days in our history; as some of us celebrate the anniversary of the greatest speech of the 20th Century; my mind is on my father. And my memory focuses on a winter day in the mid 1970s, sitting shotgun in his tiny, tinny, navy blue Pinto.
I can still remember my father’s smile that day.
He didn’t smile that often. His usual expression was somber, serious—squinting toward some imperceptible horizon. He was famously perpetually lost in thought: an all-consuming inner debate, an hourly wrestling match between intellect and emotion. When he did occasion a smile, it was almost always of the taut, pursed “Nice to see you” variety.
But on occasion, his lips would part wide, his green eyes would dance in an energetic mix of chutzpah and child-like glee. Usually, it was because of something my sister or I had said or done.
But this day, this was a smile of self-contented pride. Through the smoky haze of my breath floating in the cold, dense air, I could see my father beaming from the driver’s seat, pointing at the AM radio, whispering words of deep satisfaction with a slow and steady nod of his head and that unfamiliar wide-open smile: “That’s my line…Yep, I wrote that one too…They’re using all my best ones.”
He preempted my typically hyper-curious question-and-answer session with a way-out-of-character boast: The new mayor had asked him—my dad!—to help pen his first, inaugural address. And my hero had drafted all of the lines that the radio was replaying.
This was about the time when our father-son chats had drifted from the Reds and the Wildcats to politics and doing what was right. My dad was never going to run for office. Perhaps he knew that a liberal Jew couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in 1970s Kentucky. But I think it was more because he was less interested in the performance of politics than in its preparation. Just as Degas focused on his dancers before and after they went on stage—the stretching, the yawning, the meditation—my father loved to study, and better yet, help prepare, the ingredients of a masterful political oration: A fistful of prose; a pinch of poetry; a smidgen of hyperbole; a dollop of humor; a dash of grace. When properly mixed, such words could propel a campaign, lance an enemy, or best yet, inspire a public to wrest itself from apathetic lethargy and change the world.
Now, for the first time, I realized that my father was in the middle of the action. And I was so damn proud.
– – –
Click above to watch my eulogy for my father
My dad’s passion for words struck me most clearly when I prepared his eulogy. For the past two years of his illness, I’d finally become acquainted with the real Robert Miller, stripped down of the mythology, taken off my childhood pedestal. And I was able to love the real human being more genuinely than ever before. The eulogy would be my final payment in return for his decades of one-sided devotion: Using the craft he had lovingly and laboriously helped me develop, I would weave prose and poetry, the Bible and Shakespeare, anecdotes and memories, to honor my fallen hero. In his final weeks of consciousness, he turned down my offer to share the speech with him. I will never know whether that was due to his refusal to acknowledge the inevitable, or his final act of passing the torch: The student was now the author.
While the final draft reflected many varied influences, ranging from the Rabbis to the Boss (Springsteen), the words were my own. Except for one passage in which I quoted my father’s favorite memorial tribute: read by Senator Edward Kennedy at his brother, Robert’s funeral:
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
Read the rest of… My Father, RFK & the Greatest Speech of the 20th Century
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Apr 4, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Basketball and bigger things
Our state’s greatest challenge –and why the UL Cards don’t get the same statewide love the Hilltoppers do?
There are 418 cities in Kentucky.
Citizens in 417 of them —when asked where they live–say Kentucky
Citizens from the 418th city–when asked where they live– say Louisville
… One day, it’s my hope, we’ll be one Kentucky. We have a lot more in common than we believe. A lot more.
It requires attitudes to change inside Louisville (no city is an island) and across the state (no state today can afford to marginalize its largest economic engine–or not feel connected to its only remaining team in the NCAA basketball tournament.
From whatever city we hail, each has the same last name. Even my city’s full name, after all, is “Louisville, Kentucky”
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Apr 4, 2013 at 9:00 AM ET
It’s been more than a week since Ashley Judd announced that she would not be running against Mitch McConnell in 2014 for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky, but our celebrity-worshipping, click-hungry national media (and maybe a recovering politician or two) simply won’t let the story go away.
The latest entry is a piece from one of my favorite online news sources, The Atlantic Wire. (OK, I admit, it’s a “favorite” because a few years ago, it posted this piece about a Jeff Smithprison sex column published at this site, sending over 100,000 readers our way.)
This Monday, J.K. Trotter of the The Atlantic Wire, published a piece entitled “Was Ashley Judd’s Rape Comment Real?” (Sorry for the three day delay in responding to it — I just found it this morning in a Google search.)
For the uninitiated, here’s the background:
On March 9, Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post authored a piece entitled “Ashley Judd Senate Run: Actress, Activist Planning to Declare,” in the middle of which, appeared the following sentence:
Judd made her intentions clear at a private dinner last month at [philanthropist Christy] Brown’s Louisville home. Asked if she was tough enough to take on McConnell and the GOP national attack machine, Judd reportedly answered, “I have been raped twice, so I think I can handle Mitch McConnell.”
Judd’s apparently perverse comparison of a political campaign to rape spread like wildfire through the media, leading some to term Judd as the Democrat’s Todd Akin.
I was at that dinner and never heard that comment. I called a few of my fellow guests, and they hadn’t heard it either. I emailed Fineman; and after I didn’t hear back from him, I called a few reporters who’d been covering the race. No one was interested in my rebuttal. I considered writing my own piece, but determined that it would only add oxygen to a distracting fire while Judd was struggling to make her on whether or not to run.
Ultimately, a few days after Judd withdrew, The Daily Beast published my post mortem on the actress’ non-candidacy: “How Kentucky Democrats Duped the MSM and Helped Elbow Out Ashley Judd.” Exhibit A was the fictional “rape comment” story.
The problem is, it never happened. I was at that dinner and never heard her say anything remotely like that. What’s more, such a statement would have been completely inconsistent with the way I’ve heard Ashley discuss her horrifying experiences as the youthful victim of sexual assault—how they defined her in adulthood; how they propelled her to champion women’s empowerment across the globe.
I specifically did not call out Howard Fineman, because I didn’t blame him. I was 100% confident that someone told him this story, and it was that anonymous source who was either mistaken or lying, not Fineman. (Hence the headline of my piece.) I respect Fineman a great deal, and am always proud to see folks do so well who have strong Kentucky ties (Fineman went to law school and was a newspaper reporter in Louisville), especially if they are Jewish (there’s far too few of us in my old Kentucky home.)
That’s a pretty harsh charge leveled by a pretty biased source from inside a now pretty old-news story against Fineman, a decorated journalist (inside and out of Kentucky) who currently serves as Editorial Director at The Huffington Post, which closely tracked the preliminary movements of the Kentucky race.
Trotter then continued by reporting on an interview with Fineman:
“I doubled checked with my source, and I stand by the quote and the story,” Fineman told The Atlantic Wire over email. Fineman clarified that Judd didn’t announce this comment to the rest of the dinner’s guests, only his source.
“I don’t know who else heard it,” Fineman continued. “This [source] was a Judd supporter, by the way. The person told Judd what a tough and nasty campaigner McConnell was, and that is how Judd answered.” That could explain why Miller “never heard [Judd] say anything remotely like that,” in that Judd wasn’t speaking to everyone present when she said it.
Fineman admitted that his report was ambiguous about Judd’s delivery of the quote. “It was not in an event-wide moment, I don’t think, but I didn’t say it was,” he said. “The wording in the piece is ambiguous, though, and for that I apologize.”
Kudos to Fineman for apologizing. Too few people on any side of the political arena take responsibility when they’ve made a mistake, even a small one.
But his admission reveals a deep, underlying problem of today’s politics.
As the national media slurped up any tiny drop of news or gossip to slake its unquenchable thirst for Ashley Judd stories, it seized on a “quote,” attested to by only one anonymous source, made not in a televised debate (a la Akin), or at a public event (such as George Allen’s Macaca moment), or even before a group of people at a private forum (see Mitt Romney’s 47% line), but rather in an intimate one-on-one conversation.
For the reasons I outlined above, I still don’t think Judd made that comment — my assumption is that the anonymous source (who is probably a friend of mine, since it was a small dinner) mis-remembered it.
But even if she did, do we now hold public figures to such scrutiny that an off-color line whispered between two intimates can be seized as fodder for a national scandal? If we held all of our leaders to that exacting standard, where there is no zone of privacy, will there be anyone left to lead us?
Further, in this age of cell-phone cameras and tiny digital recorders, if there is no tangible proof, shouldn’t there be some journalistic standard that you need more than just the testimony of one anonymous source to publish something of substance, particularly something this controversial?
Ultimately, this affair is not about Judd’s candidacy; as I argued in The Daily Beast, I don’t believe any of these antics ultimately drove her from the race.
However, it does say a great deal about an endemic problem with our political system, and particularly news coverage of its players. It’s high time that the journalism community reflects on the rapidly changing dynamics of the new media, and develops a set of self-governing, ethical standards to ensure fairness, accuracy and context.
Sir Francis Bacon (ironically enough) once said, “Knowledge is power.” I firmly stand behind this statement, particularly since we, as trainers, are in an ever changing industry. As trainers, it is our duty to keep up on the newest trends and the latest research to better serve our clients and supply them with exemplary results. But does the learning stop there? Should we just read exercise science journals and acquire high level specializations and certifications? We would be best served to answer that question with a resounding ‘No.’ There is more information out there that is applicable to our journey as health professionals. Personal training encompasses so much that books from all different industries can apply to our jobs. Here a four of my favorites:
Motivational Interviewing by Miller and Rollnick
Motivational interviewing is a technique used by clinicians to overcome the ambivalence that keeps many people from making desired changes in their lives. Personal trainers can find this technique particularly useful in the first client interview and when clients are not getting the desired results, for one reason or another. Adding this to your repertoire adds another level of professionalism and expertise to make you a high class trainer.
Working with Emotional Intelligence by Goleman
Similar to motivational interviewing, emotional intelligence expands on psychological importance of being able to read emotions in clients and in our selves. Understanding our client’s emotions, day to day, is an important skill to realize and utilize because of the dynamic that most clients bring us every day. This book does a great job of explaining the concept and also how to implement it into everyday life.
Relationships 101 by Maxwell
John Maxwell is my favorite writer, regardless of industry classification. In this book, he details how to create long lasting relationships with people. Of any skill, relationship building is the most important. Personal training is relationships; how fast and how many we make determines our success or failure as a personal trainer.
21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by Maxwell As an educator, I would always tell my trainers that personal training is about leadership and most importantly about influence (John Maxwell’s definition of leadership). This book has shaped me as a professional, more so than any other. The lessons, or laws, Maxwell presents can be applicable in any client-to-trainer relationship. This book is a must-have for any fitness professional.
I have found that readings from other industries or specialties have made me a better fitness professional. Knowledge truly is power and what we do with that power is even more important.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Apr 3, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET
While we are admitted Nate Silver fan-boys here at The Recovering Politician, our favorite pollsters have to be Public Policy Polling’s Tom Jensen and Jim Williams. First came their poll that showed Congressional approval below that of Brussles sprouts and barely above root canals. Now comes their national survey about popular conspiracy theories (h/t Jim Higdon):
– 37% of voters believe global warming is a hoax, 51% do not. Republicans say global warming is a hoax by a 58-25 margin, Democrats disagree 11-77, and Independents are more split at 41-51. 61% of Romney voters believe global warming is a hoax
– 6% of voters believe Osama bin Laden is still alive
– 21% of voters say a UFO crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 and the US government covered it up. More Romney voters (27%) than Obama voters (16%) believe in a UFO coverup
– 28% of voters believe secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order. A plurality of Romney voters (38%) believe in the New World Order compared to 35% who don’t
– 28% of voters believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. 36% of Romney voters believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, 41% do not
– 20% of voters believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, 51% do not
– 7% of voters think the moon landing was faked
– 13% of voters think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, including 22% of Romney voters
– Voters are split 44%-45% on whether Bush intentionally misled about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. 72% of Democrats think Bush lied about WMDs, Independents agree 48-45, just 13% of Republicans think so
– 29% of voters believe aliens exist
– 14% of voters say the CIA was instrumental in creating the crack cocaine epidemic in America’s inner cities in the 1980’s
– 9% of voters think the government adds fluoride to our water supply for sinister reasons (not just dental health)
– 4% of voters say they believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power
– 51% of voters say a larger conspiracy was at work in the JFK assassination, just 25% say Oswald acted alone
– 14% of voters believe in Bigfoot
– 15% of voters say the government or the media adds mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals (the so-called Tinfoil Hat crowd)
– 5% believe exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons
– 15% of voters think the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry “invent” new diseases to make money
– Just 5% of voters believe that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966
– 11% of voters believe the US government allowed 9/11 to happen, 78% do not agree
Frankly, I do believe that Oswald did not act alone, although I find Oliver Ston-ian “the government did it” theorists to be way off.
And of course, I know that Paul is dead. Cuckoo-catchoo!
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Apr 3, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
I sometimes wonder to myself if HBOs Entourage would have been even better –and a little more believable –if there had been one additional member of the “Entourage.”
I’m thinking a middle-aged guy–forties, maybe even middle or late 40s–who hangs with the group as a sort of really cool and very wise (and physically fit) mentor and buddy.
I’m thinking someone from the Midwest or South. Who is street wise but hasn’t completely lost his innocence and maybe has wavy hair, to help him not stand out too much as the oldest member of the boys.
Not a lot of scenes for this character the first few seasons but a growing interest in the character to the point that by the final season of the series, people are thinking spin-off.
Hey, c’mon. I’m at a point in my life where I need my fantasies to help me come to grips with the harsh realities of, well, there never really being the realistic possibility of a spin-off if I somehow crazily ended up in a series like Entourage at this point in my life. Heck, I’m not crazy….just letting my mind wander a bit with what might have been.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Apr 3, 2013 at 9:00 AM ET
We celebrate this year the 20th anniversary of a very important, meaningful episode of Seinfeld — the “show about nothing.”
Watch a clip, and read an excerpt of my piece about “The Outing” from The Huffington Post below:
It was 1993.
Andrew Sullivan had only recently written The New Republic cover story introducing many Americans to the very idea of gay marriage; it would be nearly a decade before any state would legalize it. The notion of “marriage equality,” furiously debated before the Supreme Court and among the nation last week, was a wholly foreign concept.
Indeed, the gay rights debate that year had concerned President Bill Clinton’s campaign pledge to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. We all know how that ended: with a terribly flawed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that wouldn’t be repealed for another 17 years.
Along came Seinfeld, initially derided by critics, then ultimately embraced by the show’s writers, as a “show about nothing.”
Yet, in many instances, it mattered a whole lot more.
As I have argued in this space before, Seinfeld’s exposure of Judaism to Middle America — along with a handful of other TV shows such as Northern Exposure, Beverly Hills 90210, Friends — had a significant impact on Jewish Americans. We could now hold our heads up a little higher, feel a bit more comfortable to publicly pronounce our faith. We were now the tellers of Jewish jokes, alternatively wry and self-deprecating, instead of divisive and mean-spirited. It was a phenomenon that Jonathan Alter — in his famous 2000 Newsweek cover piece heralding Joe Lieberman’s history-making Vice-Presidential candidacy — labeled the “Seinfeldizing of America.”
And so too did the show help raise awareness of LGBT issues — and expose the toxicity of bigotry toward the gay and lesbian community. The most memorable example, the 1993 episode entitled “The Outing,” featured a young NYU reporter mistakenly thinking that Jerry Seinfeld and best friend George Costanza were actually gay lovers. It was a charge that both of them furiously denied, followed quickly with the disclaimer: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that…”
Click here if you want to read the whole piece. If you don’t, that’s your problem.
I’ve been lulled to sleep for two nights by the constant thrum of the sea meeting shoreline outside my cabana. This morning when my daughter Abby awoke after 11 hours of sleep, she said, “How is it only 6:30am?”
Welcome to vacation where time expands!
I think that “vacation” is misunderstood. There is typically no more obvious time in life when we are more present, aware, and happy. It’s here, away from the rigors of usual demands (and ironically the reliable comforts of home) that we come home to ourselves–act in accordance with the natural rhythm of our internal needs and desires.
Vacation implies that everything is left behind: work, school, bills, responsibilities, relationships, routine. But, is all that stuff really the everything of our lives, or is it just the stuff we’re in the habit of thinking of as everything?
Abby is nearly 17, a junior in high school and feeling the pressure of looming AP finals, end of year exams, and ACT testing (dinosaurs, the ACT is the new SAT). So stressed and controlled by these things, she believed she didn’t have “enough time” for spring break this year.
So one of us kept a clear head and here we are. We’re just over two days into our beachside vacation and she has easily retained more study knowledge than she usually manages (painfully) in three days. And, she’s most definitely taking breaks to sun herself, swim, shop, swing in the hammock, walk along the beach, eat, read fiction, and nap.
This excursion to Mexico with said previously stressed teenager was actually a little experiment in faith, for me. I knew in my heart that if she could study at home, she could do so here while drinking from a coconut and looking at the water each time she lifts her head. I wanted her to experience this combination of daily integrated, rest/play/work, because this stress-less integration is what I want for her for the rest of her life.
Read the rest of… Lisa Miller: It Turns out that Vacation is not Just a State in Mexico
There are occasional moments when I feel so confused by an aspect of our culture, it’s like being an anthropologist studying an obscure tribe, or Jane Goodall observing chimps. Usually those moments have to do with my teenagers – a joke they think is hysterical which goes completely over my head, or my 16-year-old trying to explain what makes a video go viral. (He discovered Gangnam Style before it had a million hits, which gives him some authority as being ahead of the pop culture curve.) When one of my videos topped 8,000 hits, his reaction was, “Well, mom, that’s viral for old people.”
But my most recent “I feel like Jane Goodall” moment was in a supermarket check-out line, behind someone who definitely had more than 15 items; to keep from glaring at her, I started reading the magazine and tabloid covers. I pride myself on being fairly well-informed about both politics and entertainment, so it was rather dismaying to realize I hadn’t heard of a single name in those headlines. Every single one of them was from some reality TV show, although I couldn’t tell you which ones were from The Bachelor, which from Survivor, etc. I felt like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, bemoaning the end of true celebrity as a result of some artistic accomplishment. (“I’m still big, it’s the reality shows that have gotten bigger . . . “)
I used to say I wanted the kind of fame that was celebrated by those American Express ads, where talented-but-not-totally-famous people would say, “You know my name, but you probably wouldn’t recognize me.” You know, I’d be acknowledged for my artistry but not hounded or bothered in private. But apparently that type of fame has been eradicated by a stream of Snookis and octomoms, and the worse the behavior, the bigger the celebrity. So this week’s song is a musical musing on life, fame, and what makes someone truly noteworthy.
This was about the time when our father-son chats had drifted from the Reds and the Wildcats to politics and doing what was right. My dad was never going to run for office. Perhaps he knew that a liberal Jew couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in 1970s Kentucky. But I think it was more because he was less interested in the performance of politics than in its preparation. Just as Degas focused on his dancers before and after they went on stage—the stretching, the yawning, the meditation—my father loved to study, and better yet, help prepare, the ingredients of a masterful political oration: A fistful of prose; a pinch of poetry; a smidgen of hyperbole; a dollop of humor; a dash of grace. When properly mixed, such words could propel a campaign, lance an enemy, or best yet, inspire a public to wrest itself from apathetic lethargy and change the world.
