Revivals: My Back Story

Where have all the Promise Keepers gone, especially the 50,000 who filled Fresno’s Bulldog Stadium in 1997?

If you relished profoundly public spiritual revivals, the Nineties were your decade, capped off with a humdinger national event.

October will mark the 25th anniversary of the “Stand in the Gap” rally in which several hundred thousand Christian men engulfed the National Mall in Washington, DC, under the Promise Keepers’ banner.

In the shadow of the Capitol building, the men fell to their knees, flung up their arms and professed faith, confessed failure and pledged to reclaim moral leadership of their families, churches and nation.

The decade’s kickoff event occurred in 1993. Roman Catholic young people from around the globe gathered for five days of World Youth Day celebrations in Denver, concluding with a fainting-filled outdoor papal Mass celebrated by John Paul II.

There were no official headcounts, but estimates were a half million participants at each event. Some called them a Catholic Woodstock or Billy Graham on steroids.

Such gatherings seem unimaginable now. We’re either infected or affected by pandemic and incivility. We stay within our tribes lest we solidify as salt licks. Truth-telling and curiosity that benefit all of society are as welcomed as paying for gasoline with pennies.

Revivals enabled people to temporarily leave safe harbors. They thrust themselves into the company of strangers similarly striving to fill God-shaped holes in their hearts. I’m still struck by the memory of people out-loud promising to cease being self-centered jerks, name badges and all.

My long marriage had just unraveled. I craved the spiritual and emotional head-straightening every bit as much as others who jammed stadiums, parks and churches. 

But I was a paid outsider, a religion reporter for the Fresno Bee and McClatchy Newspapers. Only years later did I grasp how full immersion in this assignment helped me regain personal footing.

I tracked religious mobilizations in Sacramento, Fresno, Seattle, Denver and DC.

If you needed lifting up, a hand wave would attract prayer counselors. There were sweaty hugs, steadying arms and the cement of tearful shared prayer.

Participants raised travel cash selling T-shirts and Portuguese pastries, holding car washes and stay-awake-a-thons. They fixed flats, scrubbed in public restrooms and danced barefoot in downtown Denver’s fountains.

They bantered chants of “JP2, we love you” and “I love Jesus, yes, I do. I love Jesus, how about you?” If you needed tribulation, you joined hours-long queues for water and outhouses.

The endurance, humility and harmony created a grand catharsis and ecstatic repurposing. The connectedness, while not universal or apolitical, was tangible and usually refreshing.

I wonder what’s become of World Youth Day and Promise Keepers participants, 25 to 30 years older, many at leadership position ages.  What ecstatic promises have they made real? How do they reconcile lies blessed as truth in public discourse? Have they become leaders or misleaders?

My personal reformation was much informed by reporting the experiences of those engulfed in intense spiritual self-assessment. It was the start of a happy ending, a marriage that will celebrate 25 years not long after the Promise Keepers anniversary in October.

John G. Taylor is a former Fresno Bee journalist and retired California hospital system executive. He lives in El Dorado Hills, CA. A version of this appeared as an op-ed in the July 23, 2022 Fresno Bee.

I'm Buying Into Truth, With Trust & Cash

ST. GEORGE, Utah -- I start with coffee, Cheerios and “the news.”

I transact with nine paid news sources daily. Most subscriptions are as satisfying as a stack of dirty dishes. I’m so hungry for a news relationship that I stop everything and beam when NBC newscaster José Díaz-Balart signs off with, “Thank you for the privilege of your time.”

So, I just donated the equivalent of three Denny’s Grand Slam breakfasts to the now-nonprofit Salt Lake Tribune, atop my annual subscription. It’s a starter gift that I hope gives neither of us indigestion.

The Trib is, dare I say, the closest thing I have to a news relationship – factual content, historical context and reader empowerment often wrapped in engaging writing. It’s an endearing, endangered marriage.

Columnist Robert Kirby pokes fun at his Mormon brethren the way Catholic altar boys in Brooklyn smiled after stealing a quick sip of sacramental wine when the sacristan was busy. (Yes, guilty.) Editorial page editor George Pyle regularly rams his compendium of elbows into clubby Statehouse conservatives hoping to rattle loose a filament of candor or conscience.

The sports staff loves the locals but recognizes stinky coaches and rank performances. The news side, bolstered by teams of outsiders including Report for America, uncovers grand-scale, and small-town, public hoodwinking and rule-twisting from Covid testing and zoning variances to voter registration.

But I know about fleeting news relationships and columnists, those creatures who give freshness to institutions. I’ve mourned the passings of Mike Royko in Chicago, Herb Caen on the San Francisco Chronicle’s Green Sheet, the Fresno Bee’s Eli Setencich, writing-as-sight-failed sports columnist Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times and New York’s earthy Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill.

I’m a hard-to-please news junkie. I’m ticked that the federal government has to fulfill my pension because McClatchy Newspapers, one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains where I invested 20 years as reporter and editor, sank into bankruptcy.

I’m not sure where the Salt Lake Tribune’s evolution will go. I’ve adapted to all-digital news the same way I learned to read backward and upside down while copy editing in the Hartford (CT) Times hot-type composing room of the 1970s.

Propaganda and fake news are poisoning the well, deluding and enraging citizens. Truth is now a niche alongside fabrication, prevarication and other news distortions. It’s like burying a Jersey Mike’s sandwich amid smelly, mismatched socks.

So, I’m investing the Trib with my authentic attention as a donor and subscriber. Maybe I can help sustain meat around its ribs.

Accurate news is an essential part of democracy’s connective tissue. But the news biz is now in its “Money Ball” era. Data drives dollars. Drivel -- “Madonna’s daughter shows off underarm hair at Mom’s birthday” -- competes with public service journalism. My old boss McClatchy recently considered basing employee performance reviews on the popularity of their stories as measured by story clicks.

Making a career out of screening out treacle, and discerning and conveying news, should be regarded as a profession on par with attorney and physician, requiring formal continuing education and a paycheck going further than a shot and a beer.

I still wear a stenciled 1990s T-shirt I bought while working in DC: “Trust Me. I’m a Reporter.” I might append the following: “I’m Now a Reader-Investor. Truth Still Matters.”

John G. Taylor, a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive, provides “Dateline: St. George” commentaries on Utah Public Radio.

(This first appeared as an op-ed in the Dec. 1, 2020 edition of the Salt Lake Tribune.)

Taking the initiative -- and the blows that come with it

St. George, Utah — I moved here last year admiring the pluck of grass-roots Utahns for securing statewide votes on expanding Medicaid and legalizing medical marijuana.

They dared. I voted with them. And I’ve quickly realized that Utah legislators engage with their citizens the way a jumping cactus regards a curious dog’s nose. Stray from tradition’s path and they’ll stick you — repeatedly.

Gov. Gary Herbert and the conservative Republican Legislature smacked us around first with the special legislative session to successfully restrict Proposition 2 (what became the Medical Cannabis Act). Then, during the regular 2019 session, they curtailed the Medicaid openings in Proposition 3.

Having mollified the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other critics, lawmakers devised a raft of “we know what’s best” legislation to devalue future initiatives.

Herbert stenciled his name onto several knots of red tape – delaying implementation of initiatives until after a subsequent general legislative session, changing the signature threshold and prohibiting the introduction of initiatives with similar content in back-to-back elections.

Another new thumb-screw — that “active voters” be counted in qualifying signatures rather that the simple number of voters who participated in the last presidential election. This hamstrings unaffiliated voters who may be attracted by a single controversial initiative but otherwise might not regularly vote.

Utah can be as paternalistically overbearing and dismissive of an involved citizenry as the other side of the political mirror – California. There, I spent nearly 40 years navigating a so-called professional legislature in which the Democratic Party is sovereign, ballasted by near-endless union dollars and wish lists.

One example of Golden State imperiousness. My Fresno-based hospital system was one of several troubled by people loitering in lobbies or trying to access maternity units to abduct newborns or young children. We secured passage in 2003 of AB 936, creating the crime of “infant stalking.”

But its gravity was diminished. California prisons were overcrowded, and Democratic leaders insisted they’d only consider adding misdemeanors – no new felonies – to state law. Don’t add a crime if there’s no space to do the time, was their reasoning, like the lyrics from the theme song of “Baretta,” the 1970s detective show.

Californians use initiatives so often you’d think they were Miracle-Gro, creating a separate legislative environment. That’s as bad as the quashing of a handful of initiatives in small-government states.

Initiatives are a necessary and appropriate response when the legislative process is too slow or politicized. At some point, attempts to aggregate and maintain political power, as done in the last Utah legislative session, will be seen as an anti-democratic strategy to diminish voter engagement and broad-based election turnout.

I’ve grown tired of the whipsaw between “mainstream party” extremists. I ended my lifelong Democratic Party affiliation and have joined United Utah Party, a refreshing group of moderates from all stripes seeking open and civil discourse and policymaking. A Gallup Poll of ideology shows that 40% of Utahns identify themselves not as conservatives or liberals, but as moderates.

In coming decades, growth and diversity will compel a transformation in Utah’s current part-time “people’s” legislative format. Like California, Utah must curb air and water pollution, invest in affordable housing, improve educational funding and refresh tax policies.

I’d like to think current legislators would revisit their hostility to the initiative process, choosing instead to welcome participants as well-intentioned, complementary efforts of committed public servants and confirmation of an educated, resourceful and motivated citizenry.

They show spine in the face of clubby politics.

John G. Taylor, a former journalist and retired California hospital system executive, lives in St. George, Utah. This was published as an op-ed in the April 14, 2019 edition of the Salt Lake Tribune.

Transparently bad, like a hospital gown

When you’re drowning in a pile of crap, the last thing you want rescuers to throw is toilet paper.

But that’s what the federal government did this year to consumers wanting to decipher their hospital medical costs.

The feds now require hospitals to publish online spreadsheets for thousands of five-digit common procedural terminology (CPT) codes showing their prices for such things as chest expanders, metal knees and ibuprofen suppositories.

Duly enriched, consumers presumably could concoct a cost estimate for gallbladder removal or Tommy John shoulder surgery, matching hospital against hospital.

I suppose we are to think of the codes as Royal Doulton table settings instead of another episode of the chronic GERD that is the American health payment system. Hospital care is a mere $1 trillion a year, one-third of all health spending, says the U.S. Department of Health Services. How dare Byzantium be simplified?

Never mind that few people pay what’s listed on these “chargemasters” after factoring in government or private insurance, discounts for impoverishment or deals like one-third off for paying cash.

The government considers the chargemasters as starter kits toward empowering consumers. That suggests the feds truly want a role in educating the public – such advocacy was somewhat evident during the chaotic deployment of the Affordable Care Act enacted in 2010.  ultimate Trained navigators were hired to enroll the uninsured and under-insured.

But sustained public education is one of those safety-net strings that have been unraveled since the election of Donald Trump.

Hospitals can do more education if they desire, says Seema Verma, current administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.  Sounds like a shoulder shrug.

The health industry has nearly doubled its annual marketing spending from 1997 to 2016, to a total of $29.9 billion, according to a January study in JAMA. Atop that, the pharmaceutical industry’s top two trade associations spent a record nearly $38 million in lobbying in 2018.

Clearly, important somebodies are being targeted for big-time education.

“Hospitals have an incentive to do a CT exam, and taxi drivers have an incentive to take the long way home,” an American College of Emergency Physicians official told Kaiser News Service. “It’s not a perfect system.”

Nearly 60% of physicians blamed bureaucratic tasks for them feeling burned out, according to the 2019 Medscape Physicians Burnout & Depression Report.  Patients and pathological payment systems clog the bureaucracy, making doctor visits more like fiscal cattle drives than individual care plans steered toward safety, healing and cost containment.

At best, the publicizing of hospital chargemasters is a squishy step toward a Consumer Reports meets Yelp meets Expedia for patients – how many stars, dollar signs and emojis.

Consider the chargemaster postings as kind of a hotel rack rate for non-emergency care. You can match the charges with what you’re ultimately asked to pay after your insurance adjustments.

Not so if you enter through the emergency department.  There, you’ll encounter “dynamic prices,” like the above-average ticket costs when marquee teams like the Yankees and Red Sox play. You’ve lost pre-calamity negotiating.

I forecast another option that is largely fantasy now. Imagine hospitals and doctors doing elective surgeries on weekends. Imagine, too, your top-rated urologist doesn’t care for sports and has lined up surgery openings during the Super Bowl. Do you skip the party at your house to get your pesky prostate fixed? Now that’s transparent patient choice.

Sadly, the latest federal transparency order showcasing hospital pricing is as clear as an outhouse in the fog. And nearly as handy.

John G. Taylor, a former newspaper reporter and editor, and a retired California hospital executive, is owner of JT Communications Company. He lives in St. George, Utah. Write to him at communicatejt@gmail.com

Don't Duck This Rotary Puck

Marriages and mortgages. Gangs and gods, family and flag. And don’t forget sports teams.  We promise our love, fealty, credit rating and “good name” as though they were lottery scratchers, blind stabs at self-satisfaction and communalism.

Inevitably, our purposes, pursuits and passions take a detour. Commitments are tossed, consequences be damned.

My blue puck sits at this confetti crossroads. It’s a shredder paperweight. It’s also a life coach.

The puck isn’t slapshot material. It is a plastic memento of my Fresno Rotary service. Emblazoned within is the international community service group’s Four-Way Test, a set of expectations for how members should conduct themselves.

Millions of Rotarians worldwide have publicly promised to adhere to the following. That includes, presumably, one-time Rotarian Donald Trump:

“Of the things we think, say or do:

• “Is it the truth?

• “Is it fair to all concerned?

• “Will it build good will and better friendships?

• “Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”

Oddly, society now views honesty and honorable behavior as radical, risk-laden.

Maybe that’s why we assign them to heroic figures: Superman – truth, justice and the American way; and Robin Hood, brave, courageous and bold (truth, maybe, in his quiver).

The puck is an encourager, imposing neither penance nor a Pollyanna life view. Tipping off your true intentions – in politics, combat and business – can be deadly, illegal and, at the very least, imprudent. I recall the World War II mantra: loose lips sink ships.

But dousing moral benchmarks with a WD-40 of dishonesty and deception to limber facts and fairness more to our liking, that’s a swindler’s strategy.

The moral mud wrestling makes for memorable cinematic lines:

• “You can’t handle the truth.” -- A Few Good Men

• “The rules are there ain’t no rules.” – Grease

• “Pie crust promises. Easily made, easily broken.” -- Mary Poppins

It’s easy enough to relax good judgment.  Who doesn’t click “accept” to iPhone updates without reading the appended lawyer lingo? The same for “initial here” DocuSign electronic pledges on 30-year home loan documents.

Some take a deeper plunge to all-out weasel in word and deed, becoming smilingly vile and productively destructive.  There, we take our halves from the middle, skunk-spraying all else. We distort the truth until we’ve created plausible fantasy. Janus-faced, we become top hurlers on Rotten Tomatoes, downgrading benevolence, self-sacrifice and good Samaritan conduct as time-wasting flops.

As a newspaper reporter, I once asked Fresno church leaders if lying were ever acceptable. A United Methodist pastor affirmed it was, such as when Nazis demanded captive populations reveal whether they were concealing Jews. “A lie to the liars is not a lie,” he said. Not everyone in his flock agreed.

Silence in the face of dark stars suggests fear, indifference or complicity.

Options include activating the poet Robert Frost’s option: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Or we may adopt the dark autopsy given by J.K. Rowling’s character, Voldemort: “There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.”

The Four-Way Test helps lift such selective blindness. The remedies always involve getting off your duff and staring into the mirror until one of you cracks. Next, assist others without serving your own self-interests.

Examples in the Rotary include worldwide programs to eliminate polio, reduce malaria, create human milk banks, provide job training for the needy, wheelchairs -- “the gift of mobility” -- for the disabled and solar-powered water purifiers to avert disease. Many nameless cogs empower these betterments.

There is no immaculate good. But the Rotary puck test is a useful Fitbit to strengthen moral character.

John G. Taylor, a former California journalist and retired hospital executive, is owner of JT Communications Company. He lives in St. George, Utah. Write to him at communicatejt@gmail.com

The Clout of One-Word Commercials

For TV ads, it tilted toward tedium, but I think #Volkswagen has given its scandal-ridden reputation a respectable nudge back into the marketplace with commercials hinging on a single word. Really. Check this out.

The impact reminded me of a #Geico insurance commercial, done in Civil War daguerreotype style, in which Mary Lincoln asks Honest Abe how attractive she looks in 1860s dress. From innocuous to memorable. Here’s a reminder.

But the all-time champ of to-the-point remarks remains Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe’s reply to the German demand for surrender at the Battle of the Bulge. Here’s a recollection from the US Army website.

John G. Taylor is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.

The Navy's vital, aging "bus"

Our seats faced backward, adding disorientation atop dread.  We were buckled into what proved to be a reliable rattling relic. The C-2 Greyhound ferried us sweating rookies from Coronado Naval Air Station to the floating high-tech projection of power called the USS Abraham Lincoln.

It was like riding a reeking dinosaur to a tightly orchestrated yet lurching dance floor of jet landings and launches.

The memories of 2011 were revived last Thanksgiving after hearing a similar C-2 Greyhound had crashed near Japan while delivering 11 passengers to the USS Ronald Reagan. Eight survivors, three missing and presumed dead.

The C-2 Greyhound is a workhorse, designed 50 years ago and in the air ever since in some form, with phaseout not beginning until 2020. Hard to imagine the Navy doing business without this bus.

Without doubt, the most white-knuckle moments in my two-day Lincoln visit were my C-2 flights and watching nighttime shipboard landings.

Mortal peril is a close companion to military service. Nothing can be taken lightly, one Lincoln sailor told me, any mistake or bad break and you’re done. I’d signed my permissions, waivers and a farewell note.

The Japan accident spurred me to track down a blog I wrote for Fresno’s Community Medical Centers, my employer during the Navy trip. Here’s what I wrote on the C-2 shuttle experience, and condolences to families in the recent crash.

“Layered like a mummy. Tucked into darkness. Awash in fumes of fuel and gusts of heated air.

“Welcome to the belly of a C-2 Greyhound -- you've been fed to the COD --"carrier on board delivery." You and 14 others are today's special meal, part of the Navy's Distinguished Visitors program, in this case social media writers, photographers, thought leaders who been invited to overnight aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

“But as the twin-engine COD lifts off from Naval Air Station North Island, Coronado, you are only socializing with yourself, your anxiety heightened and your excitement tempered having just heard news of the deaths of Navy SEALs and other American personnel in Afghanistan.

“When F/18s and other aircraft descend onto a carrier, it's often called a "controlled crash," as they measure angles at high speeds and aim their tail-hooks for one of four wires strung across the ship.

“But when your COD is trapped, it's called an "arrested landing," going from about 105 mph to zero in two seconds. And, a day later when they "cat" – catapult -- you off, you’ll be shot from zero to about 128 mph in three seconds.

“And you think of the 4,500 sailors, aviators and others you're going to eat and chat with, and marvel and watch and worry with as well, however briefly. Where does their day take them, how do they deal with separation, if there's something they want to world to know -- the Navy has imposed no limits, other than no flash photography during nighttime landing. Sure, it's a time-controlled snapshot but you want to be illuminating.

“And so, you sit there in the dark, waiting, as you've been warned, for the flight officers in the COD's belly to yell and wave their hands to alert you that the trap is imminent.

“In your horse collar, cranial, ear plugs, ear muffs, goggles and spin-buckle, four-strap seatbelt, you're sweating and maybe hyperventilating just a tad, as you head for the gentle violence of a landing atop 4.5 acres of sovereign U.S. territory about 90 nautical miles west of San Diego.”

The latest in a sad string of accidents involving the Seventh Fleet drew me to old photos and a souvenir badge purchased from the “Providers” VRC 30, the crew of my twin-propeller Greyhound flights.

Again, I could smell nauseating fuel, feel the carrier deck quiver as engines thunder through my ear mufflers and my knees seesaw. Again, I am sealed in a dank, muggy metal purgatory, compelled to re-experience scattered memories while hurtling toward “Apocalypse Now.” Eternity was real as the sweat trickling down my spine.

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.

The strangers we hire, then ignore

We invite scarcely vetted visitors into our house to revive air conditioners, exterminate critters. Expectation: Do the job right, right away and go away.

Some of us detest needs we can’t self-satisfy and revile waiting for the likes of a plumber’s snake. And thus, we shortchange ourselves from being a partner in our own material repairs and personal growth.

During a recent relocation, I decided to seize every chance to ask over-the-fence questions of haulers, installers, Lowe’s hardware staff, and customer service reps at Fresno and Clovis utilities.

No scripted secret shopper here, I’d chat sports, weather and then descend into silences long enough to watch corn grow. The hobnobbing positively refreshed my rationale as to why, although moving six times in nearly 40 years, I stay planted in the same Fresno bull’s-eye.

For one thing, I’m persuaded customer service is no longer a YouTube loop about what happens when stupid whacks a golf ball while standing on thin ice.

My wisdom came from vendors in their 20s to 60s, almost all men, of diverse ethnicity. Several started with a script, mostly from heavy-hitter outfits like Comcast and AT&T.  Smaller shops were more focused on tackling a task rather than replying to “but, what-if”?  And I discovered that the only people gifted enough to either instantly fix or irretrievably break something were handymen impaled on their cell phones. No asking them anything.

Virtually all were happy to call Fresno home, though some were surrendering hopes of snaring a decent home in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

The visitors told of honor-winning children who were on track for college scholarships. They also shared frustrated shrugs for kids who behaved like junkyard dogs. At the doorstep, some would slip shoes into protective booties. Others stifled sneezes employing the bat-wing technique.

One claimed he’d fallen from a multi-story roof. Two blamed workplace injuries for lost jobs and pain relievers. Mideast veterans talked around and sometimes through their PTSD.

One man’s big dream: Opening a downtown Fresno coffee shop offering Christian speakers and computer repairs. A sales rep said daily job satisfaction was critical because she carried home all unresolved stresses. A utility worker anxiously awaited news of a corrections job.

I was stunned that a window repairman commuted weekly to a Fresno job from his Monterey home until he persuaded his wife to move to the Valley. He liked the community’s ethics and friendliness, something the Central Coast lost to the affordable housing shortage.

Fresno is already souring, other vendors remarked. The same San Francisco and Los Angeles investments that are fueling steady work are fattening the ranks of obnoxious customers.

Not all vendors were civilized. One Monday dawned with a visitor’s eyes shot full of red, ill will and bad intent. Two evaluators should consider the role of Fagin in any Oliver Twist remake.

More often, we crossed paths with ethical home inspectors and Realtors, making a new friend and imposing red circles around the toxins.

Other rewards included tapping handymen for techniques and tricks to avoid bonehead troubles. And, especially, the encounters with phone/online reps who were lubricated with courtesy and occasionally heroic in problem-solving, while sharing a rich stew of “still-checking,” time-killing exchanges about Chinese family relationships, how aliens are watching and why Hershey, PA has lost its mystique.

Fact is, nobody wants strangers eyeballing their home or pawing possessions. But investing your time may address that anxiety. So, inspect the ID and invoice, but also consider reaching out to the stranger who’s trying to straighten your cockeyed world.

Consider the immortal Ferris Bueller: Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

(Also published as an op-ed in the Oct. 28, 2017 edition of The Fresno Bee.)

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.

Running for office? Audition on a cruise

If you’re thinking of running for public office, first book a week-long cruise. There is no better boot camp.

Politics and ocean cruising bring the promise of spectacle burdened by the weariness of process. It was never clearer than on our recent cruise through Alaska’s Inside Passage as to how voyaging has slipped into a scarcely muzzled dog fight mirroring American elections.

Cruises were once a petri dish for the refined. The slinkiness of Carole Lombard, the peregrinations of Agatha Christie, the skullduggery of Humphrey Bogart, the world reshaping of FDR and Churchill, all draped in waves of rhetorical or other inebriation.

The fancy people bathed in perfumes, Johnny Walker, winks, nods and Vaseline promises, and dirty deeds done (maybe not so) damn cheap.

On my first cruise, a 1972 honeymoon to Bermuda, the Holland America captain sat with us for dinner. Off the stern, you smacked golf balls into the Atlantic or shot-gunned clay pigeons. Earth Day had barely registered its arrival, and happy hour was a competitive sport.

Forty-five years, more voyages and uncounted elections later, cruises and politics are a fool’s gold of coarse ordinariness.

Cruise cities, as they are that, have become showcases of socioeconomic schmearing. Here, there is a forever high tide of pretension. Facts, like dollars, are shaken off like sudden salt spray. 

Here, you test regional humor -- “He stinks worse than a foggy outhouse.” Religion and sarcasm – “Bless her heart, she’d better save me than last slice of chocolate cake or there won’t be anything left to bless.”

Shipboard as in American politicking, what matters is Hot ‘n Now. You vie to become Buzz Lightyear -- first in line for infinity. Acquaintances are played like party balloons: extend, fill and release. Test every water, set it afire, walk on it, bottle same.

This is a vetting of your political platform. On a recent Princess cruise, chance encounters offered these supporting-cast opportunities:

• A meat market manager from southeast Wisconsin was just back from trophy hunting in Africa. His seatmate was a Californian extolling the spread of state-legal marijuana. Jaws tensed in the cliché. A middle ground was brokered: both reveled in the joys of morel hunting. New office-seeker, these could be your regional campaign managers.

• A former teacher from Arizona wore a saggy, anti-Trump T-shirt. She also voiced disdain for teachers, students, administrators and her onetime union. She sampled and dismissed every purple gourmet cookie at a British Columbia tourist spot.  Her selective candor was refreshing and off-putting. Found, a potential high court nominee.

• A disembarking tour was delayed by bum directions from a ship bureaucrat. Another official, a young woman from South Africa, took to the theater loudspeaker, deflecting a peppering of nasty shouts. “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know how these mistakes were made but I know how to control a crowd. I will get you off the ship in a timely way but only if you listen to me.” Mmm, a potential chief of staff.

Your teething political chops might observe how tired hucksters and adventurers dive for the wallets of the bored. I tinker with the actual themes, but hear now sound of their lures: Art auctioneers, “Four hundred years in 40 minutes.”  Outdoorsmen, “Solo kayaking the Passage with breaks for beer and ice cream (but no sex).” And bartenders, “Mimosas and margaritas at dawn as glaciers die before your eyes!”

This is a PG-13 Las Vegas, leagues away from a Madison Square Garden balloon drop. Cruising is political training wheels, a gateway to yelling “Mouse!” in a Michelin-rated eatery. Nowhere will you likely eat worse Baked Alaska than offered on an Alaskan cruise – how better to serve a stump speech?

At journey’s end, I joined most bestowed with coffee-break fantasies explaining belt-buckle spillover.

But someone aboard this odyssey of the ordinary may have gleaned a recipe for earning a campaign check and a check mark on an absentee ballot. If I could only persuade two such newly minted visionaries to climb aboard, we’d create a killer reality show.

(Also published as an op-ed in the August 25, 2017 edition of The Fresno Bee.)

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner of JT Communications Company LLC. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net.

Truth serum: Daily dose required

Just before bed, I reach for truth serum. It’s a gift of nothingness, no flashing images or pulsing sounds – save for a vibrating ceiling fan, an aching ankle and the outlines of a spider web at a joist.

I tune out so I can get attuned to how I responded to the day. Often, about the only control in our hands is how we react to choices, both incidental and impactful.

This daily meditation, if that’s what you call it, is not purgatory. It begins with sensory fasting. Heeding the Scriptural “still silent voice.” It’s clearing the decks, taking stock of experiences, setting the stage for the next act.

Surgical teams call a “time out” to ensure they and their tools are aligned before operating. Yes, music is frequently played during medical procedures – but it’s not competing with everyone knowing their role and clarity of purpose.

Most of us breeze past self-reckoning. As the gag line goes, we all speak at least three languages – English, sarcasm and profanity. Did we choose wisely? Do we wish we had a do-over? Do we ever question ourselves?

One pastor’s homily included this suggested daily critique: What have I done today for which God would have said, “thank you”?

Consider what we ask our children. What happened at school? How did you spend your time? What kept you busy? We attach neglect or blame to the usual response: “Nothing.”

As adults, our good-soldier answers might raise eyebrows. Especially replies like “Nothing special” and “I don’t know where the day went.”

If we invest in second guessing, we may arrive at: Where did I screw up? Why did I yell at the dog rather than pay attention? Where did I give honor when none was expected – a smile?

All experiences are not of equal value. Holding a door open only matters when your arms are crammed with groceries. Cutting someone off on a roadway matters more if you’re required to jam on your brakes – unless, at some part of the day, you own up to making that reckless turn.

Some people fear being alone with their thoughts. Some have the experience foisted upon them.

The late Fresno Bishop John Steinbock injured an eye during seminary, requiring prolonged periods of total darkness. He used the time to learn Spanish from recordings.

Retired Yankees superstar reliever Mariano Rivera has had 60,000 people hurrahing or jeering at him. He routinely tuned it out and delivered. And when a hitter won the day, he took it as a lesson learned rather than a beating absorbed. A casual mindset does not get you to that crossroads.

Focus. Fasting. Pain. Deprivation. Isolation. Attached are such names as Cesar Chavez, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, John McCain and Aung San Suu Kyi.

We covet busy-ness as a blessing, the heartbeat of being goal-driven. And “nothingness,” if not fertile grounds for deviltry, is allocated the disdain accorded sloth, a purposeful disabling of God-given talents.

Taken as a whole, we know the price of very many things, but not the value of nothing.

Sleep provides distillation, but is not an active recollection. Showers relax, but are more reminders of our desperate need for more out-of-the-ordinary time. Our day needs an exceptional bookmark.

So, before I surrender to night, I put aside my printed and digital stimuli. I dust off my memory and assess my soul. In my faulted scale of justice, have I left the world – my friends, the happenstance of those I’ve encountered – in a better or less kind condition than if I’d not drawn a single breath?

I’m often chagrined by my answers. Truth is a motivating mirror. But only when you pause to look.

(Also published as an op-ed in the Oct. 29, 2016 edition of The Fresno Bee.)

John G. Taylor, a former Fresno Bee reporter and editor, is owner/operator of The JT Communications Company LLC. Write to him at jtcommunicates@comcast.net

Elie Wiesel: No safety on the sidelines

Elie Wiesel lived in a world, the one here still, where gray ruled over black and white. And it was the gray that he fought relentlessly.

His spoken and written words were shorn of adjectives. Evil and good were nouns and verbs, his weapons. They needed no embellishment. He stood as exclamation point. Read “Night,” his riveting recollection of his existence in Nazi death camps. Listen to his presentations, interact with him as I did as a Fresno Bee reporter during his May 1990 visit to Fresno.

What he experienced in surviving the Holocaust suspended his belief in God and the value of memorializing his existence. Fortunately, he reawakened and never ceased shining a spotlight on the authenticity and invasiveness of evil until his death July 2 at age 87.

It is in the gray areas of our lives – the formative, the evolving, the dissolute – that good and evil forever vie. We take a turn. We shrug a shoulder. We respond to a message. A primal urge takes the lead. Instinct squares off with intellect – and the devil takes the hindmost.

The gray that leans toward evil is too easily excused by hormonal powers, bowing to rather than questioning illicit authority and the contrivance of waiting for evanescent better times to stand one’s moral ground.

The gray that bends toward good paradoxically has some of the same mettle as evil. Goodness requires the churning and fertilization that Wiesel wielded. He knew that it is in the gray that the good fight must be fought and won, and won again as though for an eternity of first times.

“We must always take sides,” he told the world in his 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”

He spoke before a crowd of 2,000 at a Fresno State lecture – “Building a Moral Society.” The world of 1990 is alien to many in the black, white and gray bubbles of today.

Iraq invaded Kuwait, setting the stage for the first US Persian Gulf War. Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa. East and West Germany had reunified. The World Wide Web had been born, and the Hubble Space Telescope launched. The Exxon Valdez tainted Alaska with its oil. The Baltic states declared independence from the Soviet Union amidst the era of “perestroika” or “openness” of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule. And tens of thousands of Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate to Israel, while some who remained were targeted by an anti-Semitic pogrom. The Soviet Union was a year away from collapse.

Wiesel saw the contradiction between the sudden freedom of Soviet Jews and the unvarnished remaining hatred.

“Does it mean that liberty, in a paradoxical way, could bequeath hatred? If so, what is the meaning of liberty?”

He had little stomach for religious fundamentalism of any stripe. “It is dangerous because fanatics believe that they possess the holy truth, that they possess God. They keep God prisoner. And I believe it is our duty and our privilege to free God from their prison.”

He joined scores of Nobel laureates in calling for an end to the political sidestepping and affirming that a genocide had indeed occurred to millions of Armenians at the turn of the 20th Century. Referring to Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic who oversaw the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, Wiesel said, “How can you ever adequately punish a man who is guilty of ordering the assassination of 8,000 human beings [in Srebrenica]?” Only last March was the longtime fugitive Karadzic sentenced to 40 years for the genocide that occurred in the early 1990s.

Freeing prisoners of conscience. Challenging “it’s not my fight” placidity.  Examining the word “tolerance” –  and finding in it a dangerous permissiveness, something that can be bestowed or revoked.

What would be his greatest fear on his deathbed, I asked. Society’s forgetfulness, he said. That all his efforts to bear witness had changed nothing.

That’s no less our fear now, lacking as we do the presence of this moral lightning rod.

A cancer ‘moonshot’ – making rhetoric real

Hyperbole is anesthetic of choice in political warfare. It feeds the craving for finality -- carpet bomb, build a wall, love it or leave it.   

But President Obama surprised me by what he tucked into his final “State of the Union” address this year -- exhorting that a cure for cancer be this generation’s “moonshot.” 

This was a reach. It was safe. But, as one of the countless millions touched by cancer, I also took it as a dare. 

It was a reach because many who heard Obama weren’t around to recall the nation’s rallying of resources and spirit that led to our initial manned landing on the Moon in 1969 – and, not inconveniently, abating massive political leveraging by the Soviet Union of its earlier successful space forays. It’s also a reach because it’s not a current campaign issue. And because some believe it’s impossible. 

It was safe because he assigned the task of champion to Vice President Joe Biden, a skilled political navigator still fresh from the loss of his son Beau to the disease. Though the opportunity for something politically meaningful to occur in Obama’s remaining months is slim, Biden needn’t be shy. 

But I also took it as a challenge to rewrite the narrative of how cancer will be fought. Curing cancer is a universal want. It is that implacable beast, actually hundreds of beasts, for whom a single defining moment has proven unreachable. Presidents of both parties have dangled it in their crosshairs over the decades. Biden would do well to craft a game plan where accomplishments and obstacles are identified and measureable benchmarks established. And where moonshot is not the buzzword. 

There are few moments of magnificence in life, author-evangelist Chuck Swindoll told this year’s Fresno/Clovis Prayer Breakfast. Much of life is maintenance. Doing the same thing and striving to do it well. We need to recognize the power of incrementalism – as with fighting cancer, I would say -- and remove needless ankle weights. 

We have cancer successes. For the last two decades, the nation’s lung cancer death rate has steadily declined. Fewer people smoke, thanks to education, science and a soaring product price point. The American Cancer Society reports declines in the rates of colon and prostate cancer as well.  

The strides are not evenly distributed among various ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Other cancers are on the rise. Poverty and gaps in education and access to care also are factors in why cancer remains the leading killer of Americans. 

We have impediments. Key among them: 

• The chaotic and fragile healthcare system. We pay too much for care inconsistent in quality and availability and superabundant in complexity. 

• Costly government regulations that restrict data sharing, delay testing, waste resources and dissuade both investors and scientists. Science is inherently trial and error, returning scant spendable headline-making capital. 

• Education and advocacy on prevention of illness, the maintenance of healthy lifestyles, the value of hospice and palliative care.  They require a daily grind – school nurse, telemedicine, home health at the door -- to become hard wired. They are costly in the short run and the antithesis of a sexy stump speech. 

Many cancer-fighting groups use tiered strategies – what we hope to do by when. Biden might consider a multiplier, a Marshall Plan. Quick refresher: With Western Europe in ruins following World War II, the United States invested billions to rebuild roads, bridges and infrastructure across international boundaries between 1948 and 1952. The Marshall Plan brought about the fastest period of growth in European history.  

Money and moonshot proclamations may not lead where you need to go. In 2003, the head of the National Cancer Institute was quoted in the New York Times as saying his group’s goal was to end suffering and death caused by cancer by 2015. Sen. Arlen Specter asked Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach if a budget of $600 million a year would advance that date to 2010. His reply was yes. Not sure if he got his funding, but, in 2012, Specter died of cancer. 

I’m reminded of a challenge that then-Fresno Bee Editor George Gruner posed to his editors in the 1980s: Produce a daily front-page “reason to live” story detailing a person’s success in a tough life situation. He didn’t view this as an ultimate immunization against cancer or any darkness. Just an encouraging snapshot of how people deal with what life presents. 

We have an inventory of the benefits of painful relentlessness in remedying cancer. We need a coherent national Marshall Plan – a scorecard of strengths, weaknesses and opportunities – if a cancer “moonshot” is to go beyond rhetorical artifact.

(Also published as an op-ed in the March 19, 2016 edition of The Fresno Bee)

Wonderfully (Dys)functional California!

Mandatory condoms in porn movies. Legalized marijuana. Electronic cigarettes, taxed. Plastics carryout bags at convenience stores, protected by law. Same kind of disposable bags, prohibited by law, except if you pay a 10-cent usage tax. Ah, another election year approaches in the fully functional/dysfunctional citizens’ democracy of California.

More than a hundred potential ballot initiatives have been filed so far with the California Attorney General’s Office for the 2016 ballot. It only costs $200 to file each of them. Proponents must gather signatures equal to 5% of votes cast for Office of Governor in the last election. And, because so few eligible voters among California’s estimated 38 million residents bother to vote anymore, that means only 365,880 valid signatures are needed to qualify for the ballot. Maybe 15 to 20 will get on the ballot. Still, a ton of work and expenses for signature gatherers, state fiscal analysts, rule writers and polling workers.

And a bonanza for professional fund raisers. They will feed marketing campaigns and ad purchasers – especially on the still-somewhat-limited space called commercial radio and television. Beware the geyser of online popups!

Woven into this richness of general bizarre theater is some context – a cause and effect. Californians elect 80 folks for the state Assembly and 40 for the Senate. And in their two-year legislative session, they cumulatively introduce roughly 3,000 bills. They’ll beget, maybe, a thousand new laws annually.

Clearly, many believe the elected legislature doesn’t do enough ofthe people’s work, hence the endless tide of ballot initiatives – designed to reward or punish, diminish or enlarge government, correct, negate or exaggerate existing laws. One of the sacred hallmarks of government by ballot, the property-tax limiting Prop. 13, became a constitutional amendment nearly 40 years ago – a virtual artifact, unknown to many homebuyers who benefit from it but who are oblivious as to what California looked like pre-1978.

Important initiatives – to support hospitals, to create revenue for innovations in mental healthcare – can easily be buried by competing ballots, bonehead stuff and jargon-laden doubletalk. When a voter encounters streams of briny prose separated only by a string of numbers, the easiest option is to skip it or tread heavily down the “no” boxes.

Sadly, as a writer in the Economist magazine noted in 2011, the direct-democracy tool of ballot initiatives has gone from being a safety valve to being an engine of policy making. And another California "Twilight Zone" episode.

(This blog originally appeared at www.communitymedical.org)