COLUMNISTS

Predictions of things to come

Dear Reader,

Season’s Greetings! This new year’s column comes with my apologies to the shade of the late, not altogether great Drew Pearson, a newster of another century who used to broadcast his Predictions of Things to Come in appropriately melodramatic fashion (“85 percent accurate!”) when he wasn’t advertising Bromo-Seltzer and such.

When it came to quality, he was still a few notches above Walter Winchell, gossip columnist turned Red-baiter of the more vulgar Joe McCarthy type, and all-around panderer to popular taste. In any ranking of broadcasters in radio’s golden age, Winchell would come in far below the highly educated, superbly informed, tireless HV. Kaltenborn, whose enunciation was so precise that many of us assumed he was foreign born. (He wasn’t.)

Mr. Kal-ten-borrn would become an historical footnote when his precise Teutonic pronunciation was parodied by a high-spirited Harry Truman after his surprising victory over Thomas E. Dewey in the presidential election of 1948. (Both men enjoyed a good joke.) Kaltenborn was the kind of news hawk who could spend all night tracing Herr Hitler’s footsteps at Munich and then deliver a prescient analysis of just what that conference and sell-out meant and would mean for the world. Off the cuff. With his grammar as flawless as his reporting. If only today’s anchorpersons were as elegant. . . .

Today’s column comes with wishes for a happy new year to readers who have charitably indulged my fancies on this page year after year. As for those less forgiving, here’s wishing a Happy and Healthy 2014 to all! Which may be the only thing sincere about these predictions of things to come in the new year:

Martha Shoffner

will take a gig advertising her favorite brand of apple pie, or at least the boxes in which it comes. The decidedly former state treasurer made headlines when she was accused of accepting bribes, including $6,000 in a pie box delivered right to her door. (“Um, ummm! Tastes good like money should!”) Her trial, scheduled for later this year, isn’t likely to be about anything as tasty as baked goods.

Bret Bielema

will accept awards from both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Teachers Association in the coming year. Why? For encouraging the de-emphasis of athletics in the public mind that inevitably follows the kind of football season the coach suffered through last year in Arkansas. Here’s hoping it’ll be followed by a new emphasis on academics at the U of A. And to think, he accomplished that feat almost single-handedly, with only a little help from his woebegone team. The Razorbacks fulfilled every expectation last year: Having been picked to finish last in the SEC, they did.

The university’s Fayetteville campus will become a subdivision of the University of Central Arkansas this year so it can be administered by UCA’s Tom Courtway and his executive team, who have acquired an enviable reputation as reformers, having cleared away the fiscal wreckage left in the wake of two disgraced predecessors and given that once scandal-plagued school a fresh start.

In other good news from UA-F, the Walton College of Business will take charge of the university’s bookkeeping, its Department of Education Reform will agree to oversee the state’s Department of Education, and its Fulbright College will be recognized as almost the equal of a good small liberal-arts school like Lyon College in Batesville or Hendrix in Conway.

The Arkansas Lottery will continue to reduce the amount of its take allotted to college scholarships till a wiser electorate realizes there are better ways to finance higher education, like through revenues raised by honest taxes. Instead of urging those who can least afford it to gamble away the food and rent money.

Her Honor Courtney Hudson Goodson of this state’s Supreme Court will head up a new committee on Judicial Ethics and Appearances sponsored by the Arkansas Bar Association-a fitting honor after she arranged to be introduced to Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court on the very day her husband, John Goodson, the class-action tycoon, was arguing his case before that court. He lost. But he would go on to deliver an equally impressive performance when he defended UA-F’s scandal-riddled administration at a legislative hearing, mainly by trying to change the subject to the accomplishments of the university’s faculty and students, who deserved much better of its administration. And still do.

Mark Darr will finally summon the grace to resign as lieutenant governor of Arkansas in order to accept a position in the top administrative echelons of the university’s Fayetteville campus. In light of his decidedly maculate record, he is expected to fit right in.

John Tyson, he of Tyson Foods, will continue to distance himself from the University of Arkansas’ board of trustees. He quietly resigned from the board last year as it mainly just watched as UA-F’s troubles mounted.

On the international scene, Secretary of State John Kerry will join his Iranian counterpart in a toast to the successful completion of that country’s nuclear-arms and long-range rocket program, explaining that it’s really a great victory for international arms control. Much like North Korea’s explosion of another nuclear bomb this coming year.

At some point in 2014, the first of Iran’s nuclear-tipped rockets will lift off. In reply to those critics who contend that American policy had been nothing but a green light for aggression, the secretary will claim that this administration’s approach to Iran would have been heartily applauded by leaders of the former state of Israel.

President Barack Obama will collect his second Nobel Peace Prize as the slaughter in Syria proceeds indefinitely. Not since the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, when the Nazis and Communists competed at wiping out that country’s civilian population, has the world had a clearer warning of the suffering yet to come if it continues to do little but watch Syria’s passion. What we may learn most from history is how little we learn from history.

Back home, Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act or the president’s Signature Accomplishment, will continue to be fixed or repaired daily, and need to be. The president will spend a lot of time in 2014 not talking about Obamacare in a futile attempt to erase his signature, indelible as it is, on his Signature Accomplishment.

Now that Harry Reid and partisan company in the U.S. Senate have done away with the filibuster as a way to keep some of the worst possible nominees out of some of the highest offices in the land, the rails have been greased. And a willful majority will lose no time confirming some of the president’s more dubious choices for powerful federal office. It’s already done so in at least one case. The new deputy secretary of Homeland Security, one Alejandro Mayorkas, is being investigated by that department’s own Inspector General, who raised concerns about his “alleged conflicts of interest, misuse of position, mismanagement of the EB-5 [visa] program,and an appearance of impropriety . . . .” That’s quite a dossier for someone who’s supposed to protect the security of the rest of us. But there’s no doubting the new deputy secretary’s close connections with the Democratic Party’s power elite.

The Robertsons of Duck Dynasty will run off with the Kardashians of High Society on a road trip that will be filmed in detail and billed as the ultimate in TV Reality Shows in a bid to outdraw Survivor and Real Husbands of Hollywood.

Edward Snowden, today’s Man Without a Country, will accept both the Alger Hiss Memorial Award from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Stalin Prize from Russia during the coming year, using those occasions to explain how oppressive the American government is-while continuing to enjoy the hospitality of Vladimir Putin, the not so ex-KGB man and current tsar of the not so new Russia.

In short, 2014 will be as rich in ironies as 2013 was. So rich it would take another H. L. Mencken to do it justice, rather than just another

Inky Wretch

———◊———

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 01/01/2014

Upcoming Events