Over the past few weeks, I have had to take stock and come up with a serious assessment of a career I have loved since I first punched the “on-air” button at WGAC way back in 1991 and delivered my first radio news report live.
I didn’t feel like I was breaking my pledge to “never give up,” by deciding to retire, but sometimes you find this when reviewing your writing notebook and all you can come up with is this:
“The birds are extra active this morning.
A little red cardinal flew in as the hummingbirds started divebombing each other over sips of nectar. Somewhere in the distance, a woodpecker was providing a constant rhythm as a hawk settled down on the canopy as if to watch the show happening somewhere deep within the forest, out of sight but not earshot.
Then the album ended.”
This sappiness, which could make for the compelling opening sequence of an old Southern Gothic penny novel, could have been meant to eventually be the opening of a news story. I really don’t know what I was thinking, other than just chronicling what was a lively morning on the front porch when I made those notations.
This was followed later by an email from Debbie letting me know that she was forced to edit out almost 50% of the column I had submitted earlier; something she has never done before. She said it looked like I was being intentionally cruel for no good reason, something that was totally out of character for me.
I was ready to bluster up and defend my writing simply as me being too clever for a retired, humorless academic.
How dare she gut my column because she can’t take a joke!
Then I re-read the original version of the column, and it was embarrassing. Perhaps a lesser editor might have taken pity on me and just slapped a disclaimer on it; but Debbie has never cut me any slack, so I can’t see her starting now.
In my defense, my doctors have changed up my medications, and I am just getting used to them and their side effects. That does not take away from the fact that what I wrote wasn’t clever, it wasn’t funny and it made me look like a petty little media tyrant with a Napoleonic Complex writing with all the authority and tact of Benito Mussolini.
It only takes one step to walk overboard into a sea roiling with sharks.
Former Augusta Commissioner Sean Frantom and I laugh now about how I somewhat unfairly counted his meeting absences like a school Marm looking over her glasses while taking the class roll. Yeah, I gave Sean hell, something I would not have done at the time had I known the full story, but I never attacked him personally just because I could.
Sean is a chum from high school. I know his family, and hurling flaming invective at him over something that is trivial at best would be somewhat traitorous on my behalf.
Some of my jokes have bombed from time to time, but I have never been known to be, nor would I seek out to be intentionally cruel or even borderline mean-spirited to anyone for a few laughs. So, reading the original draft of a piece that was commenting on someone I do not know and am not acquainted with at all, is to me an act just as, or even more so, evil.
Oh, if I really had wanted to, I could have let Hardie Davis have it lyrically, but I took into account that the man had a family who were completely innocent and never abetted his “wrongdoing.” Davis’ family didn’t deserve to be drug through his wake of sewage water.
Such writings may invite clicks, but I was trained in the era before “clicks.” We just told the truth and left it at that, sometimes with a dash of humor, but the unvarnished truth none-the-less. I guess my contribution to multimedia reporting was to add the circus music in the background to humorously point out that we voted for these people who provide little actual entertainment value when the costs are added up.
As such, I never would insinuate that voters, a large chunk which includes my readers, would cast their ballot based on their their own sheer stupidity or congenital insanity that rises to Olympic heights in their brains. Perhaps some of those late-night television hosts might learn that lesson.
After going through my archives, I determined that this was not the first time I had attempted to publish something that I would have felt terrible about later. I suppose on those occasions that Debbie found a way to artfully to blunt my bayonette without me getting defensive, which is what I was tempted to do.
I felt that maybe I had traded my edge in for some need to artificially remain relevant and perhaps lost my usefulness and, so, I thought I was no more “giving up” by calling it a day professionally than I was in surrendering my car keys and agreeing not to drive anymore. There comes a time in life where we simply have to recognize there are certain things we can no longer do properly or safely.
Debbie dutifully sent out a company memo announcing my retirement and then waited for the original week I had asked off for to expire. She called and asked something like, “I hope you liked the soup I sent over. So when are we going to get something from you?”
They weren’t letting me retire!
I got a little misty-eyed. I told her my reservations and she basically reminded me that, as my editor, she should be able to determine my usefulness as a writer, not me. After all, her name is on this newspaper too; I may have nothing to lose by letting my inner voice rant like it sometimes wants to, but my colleagues don’t have that luxury or “privilege” (LOL).
In reality, I suppose I haven’t lost my usefulness after all, but rather gained some if you look at it from the point that I can be at my most useful when my earlier work is validated and I believe we are about to see that happen. I am useful when I can remind everyone that we are only about to see the end of one political order and it is our responsibility to determine what that new order is going to look like.
There are questions I have had for the past decade that, I am told by multiple sources, are about to be answered and some people are not going to like where the path they have been on all this time is headed. Nope, and it is far too late to them to abort the mission they have been committed to for years.
At the dusk of his life, in battle with the same struggles as me, my father watched the rise of the televangelists with disdain and even fear. Tommy saw televangelists Bakker, Fallwell, Swaggart and don’t forget Oral Roberts as the charlatans that they were and he used every opportunity he had left to warn publicly of these false prophets.
Dad saw the downfall coming, and he also knew that plenty of little old ladies and homebound victims would end up being scammed out of their life saving before anyone intervened legally. He knew what took generations to create would not be changing overnight, so he simply tried to be as loud a voice as he possibly could, for him, it worked, he outlived his prognosis by five years and almost got to see Jimmy Swaggart’s snot-laden apology to his church for his “sins.”
Some of these same charlatans have gone from claiming they heal souls for profit to getting their hands on the much more lucrative public treasury. My usefulness now revolves around my ability to continue to point out examples of how political corruption rarely has a good ending for everybody involved. Hopefully, the conversations I have helped foster can prevent a few political charlatans from getting elected.
I am told by my sources that arrests at the Marble Palace are very likely coming soon. Word I have gotten from highly placed people who should be in the know tell me that I will be shocked at how deep and widespread this will eventually go. However, to a degree, I am not that shocked as the group of people I am referring to have egos the size of Mount Rushmore and some of them seem to think that they deserve to be on the monument itself, yet lack the self-awareness to think that someone might actually attempt to add up the numbers they provide and find them not to jive or even make any form of sense.
I haven’t been given many names, but the ones I have been given cast a wide net of people we know to be charlatans because they have basically been caught before, just not punished.
The FBI is not talking and they won’t until they are ready and that is going to be about 30 minutes after what I am told will happen, has already happened.
I can’t reliably relate anyone’s name or offer a timeline, but I can say this, the FBI knows about the gift cards. Yep, they know about the “untraceable” modern way of making money disappear and then reappear as if it moved from shell to shell by magic.
The FBI also knows about the land deals going back many, many years; deals that used federal grants to “borrow” money earmarked for one use, like rental assistance, to first pad quite a few pockets before going to where it was intended. What was left of it, that is.
So, I believe that a celebratory time is ahead. The malaise period in Augusta has come to its close and it is about time, in my opinion. My short-term goal for me is to hang around long enough to see the perp-walk happen!
Yet, we must be ever mindful that only one generation of dragon has been slain, there will be others who think they have found a new, “untraceable” method of grifting and launch it without much thought to how they could crash spectacularly. The FBI getting involved in a municipality’s business is rare, but when they do, they generally already know the answers to the questions before they ask them.
With the FBI, the notebook is already crammed full before the interviews begin.
As a community, we have to continue to fight on the side of common sense at the ballot box and argue for its use and determine what the most common sense options are over the back fence. We have to continue to inform each other and keep the conversation going until the thieves find themselves a new flock of pigeons, which, unfortunately, has not happened yet.
Reach Scott Hudson at scott@theaugustapress.com
