1. It does mean that if I were to discuss team's playing in the NCAA men's basketball tournament, I would not be able to hold teams up to the eye test. Today, I didn't watch any games. I listened to two games on my Sirius/XM app. Listening to the University of Oregon Ducks steadily pull away from and defeat the South Carolina Gamecocks made my session at the Fitness Center all the more enjoyable. Back home, for a while, I tuned into Gonzaga's flattening of McNeese State.
At some point, I might turn on the Vizio and watch some action, but I enjoy listening on the radio a lot. I can put my ear buds in, have a private listening experience, and experience the drama with my ears and imagination, which is stimulating. Listening on the radio offers me more flexibility, too. I can exercise, work on other tasks, and, if I drive the Camry, enjoy the games while in the car.
2. Debbie and I have been listening to a fascinating podcast, Landslide. It chronicles the emergence of Ronald Reagan as the animating force of what was known in the mid-1970s as the New Right, a conservative political movement that Reagan helped energize with his appeals to law and order, his warnings that the United States was becoming a second-rate power in the world, and his steady admonitions that US citizens' freedoms were eroding, that the government was overreaching and needed to be reigned in. He seized upon U.S. plans to relinquish control of the Panama Canal as further proof of growing US weakness in international matters.
The episodes we listened to this evening focused on the 1976 Republican Party primaries. Early on, Gerald Ford looked like he would dispatch Reagan handily, but conservative organizations outside of Reagan's campaign team blitzed North Carolina with a blizzard of direct mail appeals and a repeated thirty minute Ronald Reagan television ad. The mailings and Reagan's ad were aggressive and emotional, focusing not so much on dry policy issues like the economy, but on grievances: the rise of the women's movement, gun control, school textbooks, racial integration (especially busing), school textbooks, and the fear that the United States was, as Reagan repeated, the number two power in the world.
Listening to these episodes took me back to my senior year at Whitworth. I was a member of a theme dorm. About eighteen of us lived together in a small dorm, all enrolled in a 20th Century History course that met in the lounge of our dorm late in the afternoon -- on Tuesdays and Thursdays, maybe? Professor Jim Hunt was the faculty member in charge of the course. We had a television in the lounge and we all watched the national nightly news together and discussed what was happening. Much of the news coverage focused on two things: the emergence of Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries and the very testy state primary battles between Reagan and Ford.
Our discussions after the newscasts, our further conversations in the dining hall and in and around our dorm rooms stuck with me and that summer I paid close attention, especially, to the GOP Convention. The wrangling that went on that week, the sharp divisions in the GOP, and the indelible mark Reagan put on the Republican Party, even as he lost the nomination, all came back to me this evening.
Most of all, I could see that what has happened and is happening politically in this period of time in which Donald Trump is so prominent is not history repeating itself, but is a continuation of a movement that gained strength and momentum when Ronald Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination in late 1975 and on through to the summer of 1976.
3. Debbie and I bought the Sube the last weekend in April in 2004. When I returned home from the Fitness Center today, I noticed that in twenty-five miles, the Sube's mileage will hit the 200,000 mile mark. I brought this up with Debbie this evening and we had a nostalgic conversation about what a great and reliable car the Sube has been and continues to be (fingers crossed). We've crossed the USA several times in the Sube. It has rocketed up and down the New Jersey Turnpike. It was a source of cool transportation, thanks to its air conditioning, when Molly suffered burns in the summer of 2004. That simple fact was a life saver. And, now, the Sube gets us around the Silver Valley, sometimes to CdA, and we hope it'll give us many more miles of reliability.
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