James M. Redwine

News Media

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Equal Justice Initiative National Memorial Montgomery, Alabama

 

There is no memorial on the Posey County, Indiana courthouse lawn to the seven Negroes murdered by a white mob on October 12, 1878. There is a modest stele naming those soldiers with Posey County connections who served in   the Revolutionary War and an impressive statue honoring all who served in the Civil War. There are bronze plaques on the lobby walls of the Posey County Coliseum commemorating many of those who served. The Coliseum houses one of Posey County’s two courts and the other court is located in the courthouse.

Because I was the elected Posey Circuit Court Judge and because our son, James David Redwine, was a West Point graduate who would later earn a Bronze Star for Service on the front lines of both the Gulf War 1990-1991 and the Iraq War of 2003-2011 I was asked to speak at both the War Memorial Re-Dedication on Sunday, October 21, 1990 and Re-Dedication of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on July 23, 2008. I was honored to do so and wrote the following poems for the occasions. The poems appeared in several newspapers after each commemoration:

 

WAR MEMORIAL RE-DEDICATION
(Sunday, October 21, 1990)

SUNDAY MORNING CHIMES

How dear it is to be alive:
To hear the peal of morning chimes;
To feel the invigorating sting of this autumn day;
To taste the rich and biting air;
To smell the acrid smoke of burning leaves;
To see the glory of Nature’s third act.

How satisfying to still be a player:
To know a child’s trust;
A family’s support;
A friend’s companionship; or
A lover’s caress.

How thrilling it is to learn,
To plan,
To strive
To serve,
To live!

These wondrous things:  These sensations;
These desires;
These dreams;
These visions.  This life,
Is what these heroes have sacrificed for us.

RE-DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS MONUMENT
(Wednesday, July 23, 2008)

WELL DONE!

At Lexington and Concord, the young blood began to flow.
At the Battle of New Orleans, muskets killed our cousins and our foes.

At the Alamo and Buena Vista, we stood to the last man.
At Shiloh, Chickamauga and Gettysburg, brothers’ blood soaked the sand.

At San Juan Hill and when the Maine went down, our soldiers never flinched.
At Verdun and by the Marne, a million men died in the trench.

At D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, after Hiroshima’s mushroom clouds,
At Incheon Landing the forgotten war brought many more funeral shrouds.

At Khe Sanh and during Tet, we held our own and more.
At the Battle of Medina Ridge, our Gulf War warriors upheld the Corps.

At Sinjar, Mosul, and places with strange names,
Our Iraqi War veterans now earn their fame.

In uniforms, our citizens have served well everyone.
Today, we here proclaim to them our solemn praise:  Well done!

 

It is fitting and proper that we honor those who serve and that we are permanently reminded of the horrors of war. Society needs to be constantly on guard and eternally grateful. Of course, the reasons that call for memorials about wars are much the same as why we need memorials to our collective evil done to some citizens by other citizens.

Since I first discovered, by accident, in 1990 the legal system’s long covered up murders of Daniel Harrison, Sr., Daniel Harrison, Jr., John Harrison, James Good, Ed Warner, William Chambers and Jeff Hopkins by, as the Mt. Vernon, Indiana Western Star Newspaper said on October 17, 1878, “two to three hundred of the county’s best white citizens” right on the Posey County, Indiana courthouse campus, I have called for accountability and a memorial to the victims. Society owes this atonement to the victims and we as a society need it for ourselves.

What the sign says. Pictures by Peg Redwine

Potsdam Revisited

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At the Potsdam Conference

Joseph Stalin (USSR), Winston Churchill (Great Britain) and Harry Truman (United States) met in Potsdam, Germany from July 17 to August 02, 1945 to “establish the post WWII order”. In 1945 the earth had 74 recognized countries. Some of the other 71 countries felt they should have been invited to the conference and have exhibited their displeasure from time to time since 1945.

When I turn on cable TV I sense that the heads of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC may have had their own Potsdam Conference and divided up the world’s news cycles. While it may appear to us viewers the news networks are competing, I suspect each is happy in its own sphere of influence. CNN regurgitates their favorite kicking boy Donald Trump whenever it wants to change the subject. For example, when they wish to ignore the question of whether Andrew Cuomo should lose his one-time COVID-19 sainthood. MSNBC has Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski vilify the conservatives in Congress whenever their ratings sag, which is often. And Fox News revels in finding stories of liberal policies run amok.

But I suspect the umbrage each cable news anchor evidences is more act than actuality. They all appear pretty well situated in their own tunnel vision. The problem for the rest of us is there are actual problems that need to be addressed other than whether some celebrity has fallen from their pedestal. We need news! What we don’t need are mere opinions in search of agendas.

I have a modest suggestion. I recommend every cable news executive and anchor read a book. I know it is a lot to ask but instead of just talking heads we need heads with something in them. This was apparently what my best friend, Dr. Walter Jordan of Martinsville, Indiana, thought about me. He sent me a book for my birthday entitled Think Again. He has known me long enough to know I need the advice.

Adam Grant’s book suggests we all could be happier and more productive if we would approach life actively open-minded and instead of always searching for reasons we must be right search for reasons we might be wrong. Grant is an organizational psychology professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He’s a smart guy but his book is still actually useful and fun to read.

Grant posits that we have two general biases that impact our inability to see the fallacies in our extreme positions, such as, should we get a COVID vaccination or not? One is confirmation bias where we see or hear what we expect to see and hear. The other is desirability bias where we see and hear what we want to. Grant suggests we need to be more scientific in our approach to life and instead of analyzing issues by starting with what we want and expect, that is, starting with a set answer, we should lead with questions and look for all the evidence.

Of course, my particular experience as a judge leads me to believe that gathering all the relevant evidence on a topic before one reaches a conclusion is the best approach. First glean the facts, then decide. But I certainly have fallen short of this goal from time to time. What I find dangerous about cable news attempts to set our society’s agendas is that the cable news networks seem to have it as their talisman that their desired outcomes are the facts. They can and should do better and so must we.

The Sky’s Falling

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The national media push a highly addictive drug called paranoia. If one wants to get a reliable weather forecast or find out if a local kitten is not lost, local T.V. and regional newspapers are the best source. But if we are in need of a rush brought on by fear of catastrophe or schadenfreude, we flip the remote incessantly between CNN and FOX. CBS, NBC and ABC are available but boring. PBS can be interesting but is about as exciting as a library. No, if we want cataclysm or the satisfaction of seeing the rich and powerful fail, we must have cable. You might wonder about MSNBC but we can only take so much self-indulgent cynicism.

Gentle Reader, if you were awake, as I was at 4:00 a.m. staring at the peach-colored ceiling and wondering if I should use the restroom again or make a cup of coffee, you may have defaulted to cable T.V. That is where I saw the bobbleheads of CNN and FOX fervently seeking our advertising eyeballs by continually ratcheting up the partisan rhetoric. In between the machine gun fire of five minutes of adds were crammed five-minute exhortations camouflaged as news. Today, as usual, CNN was frothing about Donald Trump and FOX was exorcised about Cuba and communism, which FOX posited was one and the same.

CNN was giddy with the no-so-breaking story that former President Trump was unhappy about the last election, so much so that General Mark Milley, Trump’s choice for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military, was concerned about a peaceful transfer of power. FOX apparently either did not know who Milley was or did not care. FOX made no mention of this “bombshell” possibility. FOX was excitedly showing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign coozies which attacked Anthony Fauci as FOX repeatedly rolled film of protests in Cuba. CNN did not take note of Cuba nor communism as its commentators were busy extolling the virtues of giving away trillions of dollars of borrowed taxpayer money.

What came through quite clearly, even as I dozed in and out while desperately seeking facts hidden among the rushes of opinion, was that CNN and FOX both believed that Chicken Little was correct. Each of their favorite evil acorns that fall upon us is a harbinger of the sky’s collapse upon America. We must eliminate all vestiges of Trumpism, and now DeSantisism too, along with President Biden and any federal help for poor people. Of course, we can do this by buying the products hawked among the invective spewed by the incredulous news anchors. Just as grade school teachers emphasizing that we children should obey the crossing guards, cable news claims it is our best source for gospel; critical analysis is just too much trouble and no fun besides. Most importantly, run out and buy more stuff before prices rise again.

Mox Nix

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American soldiers stationed in Germany picked up the German saying “Macht nichts” and anglicized it to Mox Nix. Either way it means, it doesn’t matter, kind of short hand for don’t sweat the small stuff. If you read the Gavel Gamut entitled “Wheat from the Chaff” you might recall the general topic involved the American legal system’s treatment of high-profile cases such as the George Floyd/Derek Chauvin matter. Judge Cahill in that Minnesota jury trial was faced with several issues related to publicity about the case. The judge was asked to change the venue of the jury trial out of Hennepin County, MN; he refused. The judge was asked to sequester the jury; he refused. And he was asked to recuse himself as judge; he refused.

The basis for each of these requests from defendant Chauvin was imputed bias because the judge, jury, victim, defendant and witnesses were from Hennepin County and, there might be prejudice due to personal experiences with the local area and populace, or from the pervasive local media coverage. The defense asserted the judge and jury would perforce decide the case not based on the evidence but without regard to the proven facts, or worse in spite of them.

While I have no position as to the validity of such allegations in the Chauvin case, in general, it strikes me that such fears evince disdain for the character of judges and jurors. Do those who aver a trier of fact would find someone guilty or innocent based on personal bias in the face of admitted evidence proving the opposite really think so little of their fellow citizens? Haven’t we all had to make many difficult choices that often go counter to what we would prefer? Then why would we assume others are made of lesser stuff than we? If we were the judge or jury wouldn’t we swallow hard and decide the case as required by the law and the evidence in spite of what we might wish the facts to be? So why not afford our fellow citizens that same consideration?

Does that mean no case should ever be venued or no judge should ever recuse? Absolutely not and I was neither the judge nor a juror in the Derek Chauvin case so I take no position on whether Judge Cahill erred or whether the jury based its verdicts on improper factors. Those issues are now going to be reviewed by the Minnesota appellate courts which will have the duty and ability to ascertain whether the trial was fairly conducted by the judge and proper verdicts returned by the jury.

Most judges and most jurors most of the time have the ability and character to recognize when their personal feelings and news accounts must be set aside if a just verdict is to be reached. In those circumstances where human frailty overcomes treating others in court the way we would expect and like to be treated, we do have appellate procedure as a safeguard. Most cases are decided in circumstances where extraneous matters could be influential on the outcome. However, America’s legal system and the citizens who are responsible for operating it have the ability to sift the wheat from the chaff and they have the character to know when to say Mox Nix.

The National Inquirers

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Investigative journalism that uncovers and publicizes official corruption has an American tradition going back to John Peter Zenger who was born in Germany in 1697 and died in New York in 1746. Zenger was a printer who wrote exposé articles about our English cousins’ ham-fisted governance of New York, especially by the Royal Governor William Cosby. Cosby took umbrage at these early efforts to inform Americans about government malfeasance. Cosby had Zenger charged with libel but in 1735 a jury refused to convict Zenger because the jury determined that what Zenger wrote about Cosby was the truth. What Zenger printed about Cosby related directly and only to Cosby’s actions as governor. Cosby’s personal life was not in issue. Such subjects as the state of his laundry or personal habits were not material to Cosby’s official actions. There was no “need to know” any salacious scatology.

The First Amendment is our best protection from bad government but it should not be cited in support of mere muckraking. Gossip is fun, if it is about others, but it is not germane to curing our body politic of corruption or bad decisions. And a bipartisan cooperation on matters of national importance would be most welcome. We have certainly been blessed many times before with such attitudes. For example, Republican President William Howard Taft appointed Republican Henry L. Stimson (1867-1950) as Secretary of war (now Secretary of Defense) in 1911-1913. Then later two Democratic presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, appointed Stimson for the same position (1940-1945). Stimson had the experience and knowledge America needed. His political party affiliation was irrelevant to understanding and meeting the threats to our country from Japan and Germany.

But even though Stimson was not naïve about foreign designs on American assets he famously eschewed delving into personal matters. Stimson’s most famous quote relates to secret Japanese dispatches. Stimson explained trust cannot be established by distrust. He succinctly posited: “Gentlemen do not read one another’s mail.”

As story after story and book after book come out about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and Mike Pence the muckraking inundates the investigative journalism. We do need to know our politicians’ philosophies, positions and past performances. But such information is sometimes obfuscated by “revelations” about their personal lives and peccadilloes.

Yea! Football Is Back!

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“The crisp autumn air. The dry brown grass. Sweaty pads and the exhilaration of combat without weapons. The kind of battle where one can experience the thrill of having been shot at and missed without even being shot at. Football. Ersatz war. Clashes of pride, power and cunning.”

Echoes Of Our Ancestors: The Secret Game, p. vii

James M. Redwine

Baseball may be America’s Pastime but football is America’s Passion. The only thing more endemic to the American psyche than football is politics and I am sick of politics. If, “politics ain’t bean bag”, it ought to be. Any sporting event from ballet to boxing is healthier for our country than political conventions and cable news. Heck, even a good old-fashioned fist fight often results in life-long friendship versus contemporary political campaigns in which social media is used much as small pox was allegedly used against Native Americans by the British colonial soldiers in 1763.

The difference between sporting contests of all types and modern national politics is glaring. When I think back to those times my erstwhile adversaries became my current friends via a skirmish over some forgotten controversy, I long for those days. My friends and I spent no time accusing one another of being a liar or a murderer or even a traitor to our country. We would just drop our baseball gloves or kick our opponent’s marbles out of the way and start the shoving process. Every now and then we would even throw a punch. I will not name those who bloodied my nose or tore off my T shirts but we buried our hypothetical hatchets immediately after each fray. Our politicians and news anchors could learn something.

Another thing we learn from sports versus politics is that the pain of physical injuries almost always goes away whereas the sickness of false comments can grow fatal to our body politic. There is something liberating from a sweaty fight or a sweaty game. But often permanent harm results from accusations of venality and planted stories of misdeeds.

Anyway, I am glad football and other games are coming back and I hope we will soon be able to engage in them and/or enjoy watching them in good health. I leave it up to each community and every individual to decide whether they feel comfortable participating in or watching in person any sporting event. Peg and I certainly want the right and ability to decide such highly personal matters for ourselves and we will afford the same right to others. However, the lessons from sports are easily learned and, unlike high school Algebra, one will always remember them. In fact, as I think of the fist fights and sporting contests I engaged in it now seems to me I never lost and I have gotten a lot faster, stronger and more talented as the years have transpired.