I had gone out for football in my senior year at Xavier. I could run and catch the ball but I think my lack of the killer instinct soured the coach on my overall value to the team. After three games on the pines, I decided to quit football and devote my senior year to my studies and getting into Holy Cross. It was the best decision I ever made because I would get home at six o’clock and by the time I got ready to study, I could hardly stay awake. I had the best academic year of my four years in high school.
I had also acquired a deep love of reading because my SAT score in the verbal section was a paltry 417 the first time I took it in December of my junior year. I read 50 books in the interim until I took it a year later. My 509 verbal was pedestrian but the Math shot up to 647, good enough for the Cross.
I found that reading books instilled in me a deeper need for conversation. I just wanted to talk about virtually anything. My mind was on fire, a smoking blaze that is still simmering over 60 years later. What was really at work was my deep need to share my thoughts with anyone who would dare listen to me.
I went out every weekend, usually with a different girl, and for three hours she became my captive audience. Though I did not realize it then, I think my die had been cast. My real goal and pleasure in life became my incessant need to say something or write something of interest…at least to me. In a word I wanted to communicate.
It was about this time that I dreamed of someday writing a memoir on my experiences on the track team and the New York Subway system. I think the most exciting thing that happened to me was when someone at the track where we trained had the effrontery to steal my underwear from my locker.
After Holy Cross, I had serious plans of being a teacher and thanks to my late wife, a college professor. But in truth none of that held any realistic future for me. Given the lack of conservative thinking people in virtually all of academia, I doubt if I would have lasted as long as the 10 years I did as a parttime adjunct professor of history.
After I finished my doctorate, including my dissertation, The American Merchant and the Genesis of Japanese-American Commercial Relation from 1790-1858, I landed my first real college job at Maryville College in 1973. The dark side of that was I found years later a forgotten letter from a reputable publishing company that was interested in publishing it. When I had received it, I was not in a position, what with teaching and a growing family to redo the format with regard to footnotes versus endnotes that could be done in a snap with today’s technology.
There are many ways of communicating. I have tried virtually all of them except the podcast. I have taught, written a number of books, had my own blog, and weekly radio talk show for 22 years. I have also been the guests on over 150 radio and TV shows and interviewed over 200 people myself. I tried poetry and fiction but failed dismally. I did have three plays produced but quickly ran out of ideas. All of these helped me sharpen my intellect as I think I learned how to think critically about what I had learned.
Of all the media, I enjoy writing most of all. Sound disappears seconds after my saying something. With the copy machine, the Cloud and Google, the written word has a kind of permanence. I think my best medium has been the personal essay.
Word limits are good for a writer’s self-discipline. When I wrote nearly 50 book reviews for the now defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat, my limit was 600 words. I also had written over 60 letters to the editor over the years. In one stint, I believe more than half of them were published, in the liberal St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I think their limit was 250 words. No essay should be longer than 2400 words, the maximum for when I wrote the Mindszenty Report.
By 1973 I had started writing about baseball history, which had always been my first love. I wrote the cover story for St. Louis Fan Magazine, called The Greening of a Cardinal Rookie, which paid me $75. The essay was about a new Cardinal player, Ken Reitz. To interview him, I was given a pass to the Press Box at Busch Stadium. I was now a professional writer.
Other articles followed. I published my history of the St. Louis Browns and later a book on Liberalism with two small presses. I also did a number of self-published books. I later wrote a blog I presumptively called The Gospel Truthand then the Mindszenty Foundation came calling. It was my writing for Eleanor Schlafly that later led to my tenure at the Catholic Journal, which has energized my writing genes since my initial essay A Nation of Frogs was published in August of 2016. 276 essays later, I am still here and enjoying every minute of it.
I have left out a couple writing stops. For three years I was one of four monthly essayists for the St. Louis Catholic Review, the Diocesan newspaper, then edited by the late Jim Rygelski, an old friend from my baseball days. Everyone of us belonged to the Church of the Annunziata. When Jim had a disagreement with someone only informally related to his position, he was terminated and the rest of us replaced by the new editor.
Before this, I had my own short-lived column for the St. Louis County Journal newspaper syndicate. After that ended, they advertised for a Readers Column. All their readers were invited to send in a sample column, which would be the first of our four publications, guaranteed for that year. They held that contest for 11 years. I was one of their 12 winners seven times. I tried to make entry essay, humorous in tone and save my serious essays for the other three. Not one was ever rejected, though I received some very angry fan mail from the readers.
The name of the contest was called, The Opinion Shaper. I adapted much of the following from one of my early submissions describing the idea of what an Opinion Shaper is. This idea has always been intriguing to me. Most people would dismiss it as elitist. They would also find it difficult to accept the idea that there existed an elite corps who would dare tamper with their information gathering process. It is hard to fathom that Americans could be so uninformed or naïve to have their opinions shaped by some pundit or talking head. It has been contrary to the American spirit since Alexis de Tocqueville.
On further reflection, I have found that there may be some truth to the idea. Americans are bombarded daily with ads, sound bites and editorials. Most people do not read serious non-fiction books anymore. They get most of their newsfrom social media. While most of them have their own opinions, all one has to do is skim the daily letters to the editor column to see just how vapid many of their opinions are. They are what many now call uninformed voters, who easily fall for slogans and empty promises.
Yet most are proud of their opinions, having tuned into the erroneous belief that, not only are all men and women created equal, but all their opinions are also equal. I have had callers to my radio program years ago that started out sounding open-minded when they would say, I have my opinions and you have yours…I would usually interrupt by saying, Yes, but mine are based on study, thought and fact, what are yours based on?
While there is a bias in everyone’s opinion, my bias is for reason, truth and honesty. I still express my opinions on these principles. Find a flaw in my essay and I will revisit it. I think every reader and writer should put both to the test of faith and reason, an idea I explored here in 2021.
It is this relativity of ideas that lends credence to the theme of this essay that others shape our ideas, whether we are aware or not. Most people stake out their territorial privilege with regard to their opinions. Yet their knowledge is not always intuitive or experiential. It happens as a result of having been exposed to a common idea promoted by media opinion shapers, whose main role has changed to attract, or frighten their readers, into accepting without question the conventional wisdom of the moment.
While this is an old example, it underscores what lays at the heart of opinion relativity and its veiled attack on truth standards. I was amazed at how many intelligent people fell for the millennium confusion which they celebrated in 2000. They were a year too early. 2000 was actually the last year of the 20th century and the second millennium. A short question I ask quickly proves the truth behind this almost universal mistake. I ask 2000 advocates why did they name the futuristic film, 2001, instead of 2000?
Yet most professional pundits, decried the purists who demanded that the mathematical definition of a millennium be strictly followed. The truth does not matter to them. It is as if these pundits wished to alter reality to fit their own preconceived notions of the truth. Reality is reality and truth is truth, and they should not be subjected to the emotional whims of the media. We have traveled several more miles, down this anti-intellectual path since I first wrote these words.
This notion was also at work during the bitter political controversy during the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The media repeated its mantras, such as the will of the people, and count every vote with such frequency that millions had a Pavlovian response, accepting these notions without question. Just what does the will of the people mean? Count every vote? Even dead people or in 2024, visitors, or residents that have not registered to vote or are not U. S. citizens? The media referred to the religious right with such anti-journalistic derision that it was as if Adolph Hitler loomed in the darkness, waiting to seize control of this country. Sound familiar?
Yet most people seldom seem to question nor demand rational arguments and factual citations to sustain the media’s choice of language. It is not un-American to think that many opinion shapers have personal agendas they want to foist on their readers. Everyone is selling something and the professional media is no different. I think they view their role as to skillfully condition the public into finding a comfort zone so that the mainstream media views can be accepted without scrutiny.
A comfortable, albeit non-thinking public will not tolerate any disruption that threatens their comfort zone. This exposes the serious flaw in the equality of all opinions. Only those views that the opinion shapers profess are to be accepted. All other ideas, no matter how reality-based they may be, are to be discarded down some Orwellian memory hole. Conflicting opinions on abortion, the death penalty or gun control are relegated to the back of the national bus, not to be debated, promoted or explored.
This is not to say that some vast left-wing conspiracy is at work. It is more the product of a century of progressive thought that has infiltrated virtually every major social and religious organization in the country. Repeated calls for diversity have nothing to do with ideas, only race, sexual preference, or national origin.
There is a word for this. I found it in evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad’s profound book, The Parasitic Mind. Polylogism was coined by logician and economist, Ludwig von Mises, who applied it to Nazism and Marxism. It is an ideological concept that holds that all who dissent from their thinking are nefarious and evil. American progressives adhere to this rigid way of thinking. Their progressive orthodoxy is a contradiction of the basics of Western Civilization.
According to the media, diversity of thought is as desirable as toxic waste. They want only total uniformity of their opinions. Today they call Trump divisive since he has upset their applecart of Woke ideas, which more than half the people find disruptive to peace and harmony, such as big government intrusions and attacks on children, high prices and violence on our city streets. This is the real threat to democracy.
We may all look different, but progressives want us all to think the same. This is even more prominent than when I first published it over two decades ago. As I told my caller on the radio: I have always shaped my opinions on reading books, newspapers and news TV outlets, thinking, and reflection. On what or whom do you shape your opinions?
