Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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A Leprechaun for Christmas (a short story)

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It was the worst Christmas ever.

Eight-year-old Chris Hunter was facing the first Christmas without the person he loved most in the world, his Grandpa Malcolm O’Brien. His grandfather had died two months before from a heart attack. 

His grandparents lived in a large, two-story stucco home on East Ardennes Avenue, one of the oldest streets in Stonegate, a close-in suburb of St. Louis. Built in the 1910s, the house had tall ceilings and Frank Lloyd Wright-type mantles, lighting, and overall design. It was utterly unlike the large, contemporary ranch home his own family occupied in Woodfield, a far western St. Louis suburb some 20 miles from Stonegate and 35 miles from downtown St. Louis.

Chris loved exploring his grandparents’ house. From the attic to the basement, the home was filled with boxes, trunks, and old wardrobes full of magic. At least, that’s what his grandfather always told him. Magic was everywhere. And he’d let Chris loose to search, and sometimes join him, for the leprechaun’s pot of gold. 

Since the time when Chris was old enough to listen, his grandfather had told him stories about the leprechauns, the small little people who loved to commit mischief and kept a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Together, Chris and Malcolm would search the lawn for shamrocks and especially the four-leaved clovers. His grandfather would read stories about leprechauns. 

Of the three Hunter children – Ross Jr., Emma, and Chris, the youngest – it was only Chris who would listen avidly. The two older Hunter children would roll their eyes and slip away, looking for something else to do. Chris alone would stay, grinning and laughing at the Irish accent his grandfather affected when reading the stories 

“This is our secret, Chris,” his grandfather would whisper. “You and I are the only leprechauns left in St. Louis, and we have to find our pot of gold that someone’s hidden from us.” 

In looking for the gold, they’d find old clothes, books, toys, and photographs from decades earlier. Each new find prompted new stories from Grandpa Malcolm. And Chris was captivated.

Ross Jr. was older by six years, and Emma by four. Ross Jr. was tall and blond, like their father. Emma and Chris looked more like their mother’s side of the family. His father often called Chris “Little Malcolm,” which Chris wouldn’t understand until years later. The youngest Hunter strongly resembled his grandfather, with black hair and brown eyes so dark and deep they looked almost black. He didn’t know why, but Chris knew that his father and his grandfather did not get along. The boy wasn’t quite sure what to make of his father’s regular references to “Little Malcolm,” but knew his father didn’t mean it in a nice way.

The annual Christmas feast was always held at the O’Brien’s house. Chris’s mother was an only child, so the celebration would usually be his grandparents and his family. The Hunters would arrive by noon, everyone would open presents, and then they’d eat at 2 p.m. sharp. Chris’s mother and Emma would help in the kitchen, Ross Sr. and Ross Jr. would head outside to throw a football or play basketball at the hoop Grandpa Malcolm had had installed for Ross Jr. in front of the garage. Chris had once asked to play with them, but his father said that he was too little, and he could watch them.

When his father had told Chris he could watch but not play, Grandpa Malcolm had frowned.  He took Chris by the hand and led him back inside the house. “I have a story to read to you,” he’d told the boy. And that started the leprechaun stories.

Grandpa O’Brien would read from the big book of Irish folklore he kept on the shelf in his study. Except at Christmas, when he would read an original leprechaun story he’d written himself, with the main characters being Chris the Leprechaun and his sidekick Old Malcolm. And every story was about Old Malcolm always getting them into trouble, and how Chris the Leprechaun would rescue them from a fate worse than death.

Whenever Chris was at their home in Stonegate, he and his grandfather managed to find the time to explore for that mythical pot of gold, which Grandpa O’Brien insisted was hidden somewhere in the house. They never found the gold, but they would often find peppermints, candy bars, and packs of gum. Once, on Chris’s seventh birthday, they found two silver dollar coins, which Grandpa O’Brien said meant they must be getting close to the gold. “And that’s one each for Chris the Leprechaun and Old Malcolm,” he’d said.

His parents thought his grandmother, still grieving her loss, might skip the Christmas feast this year. After the funeral, she spent several days with the Hunters at their home, usually with Chris by her side. He had her smiling and even laughing when he read the Christmas stories to her, using an Irish accent like his grandfather, and told her the stories of their escapades searching for the pot of gold. 

But she insisted that the Christmas feast at her house in Stonegate would continue. The only change was that they ate at 1 p.m. and would open presents afterward. 

They arrived at 11. Ross Sr. and Ross Jr. went straight to the basketball hoop outside. Chris followed and watched them for a time, but then went inside. Emma was helping his mother and grandmother prepare the meal, so he went exploring on his own. But it wasn’t the same without his grandfather. No new leprechaun story. No searching high and low and finding something sweet to eat. No pulling of pranks on the rest of the family. The boy felt almost desolate.

They ate their dinner, with dessert being the favorite of Grandpa O’Brien and Chris – mincemeat pie with a big dollop of whipped cream on top. Then it was on to the Christmas tree and opening presents.

Even that wasn’t the same without Grandpa O’Brien. Chris liked his presents, mostly toys and books, including a set of Hardy Boys mysteries. But he could remember sitting next to his grandfather, listening to him utter a smart quip about each present. And smelling the ever-present Old Spice aftershave. 

“Well,” Grandma O’Brien said, “we’re done. Anyone for coffee or tea?”

“Wait,” said Ross Jr., sitting closest to the tree. “There’s one more.” He reached underneath and retrieved a smallish present, wrapped in a dull green paper and green ribbon. “It’s for Chris. And there’s a message. It says, ‘Look Hard.’” He handed it to his brother.

“What on earth,” Grandma O’Brien said to their mother. “I don’t remember you handing it to me when I put the presents under the tree.”

Chris’s mother shook her head. “We didn’t bring it. I’ve never seen it before.”

“It wasn’t there,” Emma said, somewhat red-faced. “I looked at all the presents before we ate. It wasn’t there.”

Ross Jr. handed the present to Chris. “Well, open it up and see what it is.”

Chris looked at the present in his hands. He handed it to his grandmother, pointing to the gift sticker. 

Grandma O’Brien gasped. “That’s Malcolm’s handwriting. I’d recognize it anywhere.” She handed the present back to Chris.

The boy carefully removed the ribbon and paper, and then he opened the plain cardboard box. 

Inside was a small metal kettle with a lid. Chris lifted it out of the box and removed the lid.

The kettle contained several chocolate coins wrapped in the gold tinfoil. Chris stared in wonder, and then grinned. “It’s the pot of gold, the one Grandpa and I were always looking for.”

He looked closely at the candy coins. He pulled out one, and then he saw something else glinting among the pieces of candy. He pulled it out and held it up between his thumb and index finger. 

“It’s a gold coin,” he said. “A real one.”

“What?” his mother said.

“Let me see it,” Ross Sr. said, and Chris handed it to him.

“It’s a $2.50 gold coin,” his father said, “with a Liberty head, dated 1842.”

“There’s another one,” Chris said, extracting a second coin. He emptied the kettle on the floor, but no other coins were mixed with the candy. 

Ross Jr. was looking at his mobile. “I googled it. People are selling them for anywhere from $2,000 to almost $100,000, depending upon the condition and where it was minted.”

“Did you say 1842, Ross?” Grandma O’Brien said.

He nodded.

“That was the year the O’Brien family came to America, fleeing the potato famine.”

The family stared at each other.

“And there are only two coins?” Ross Sr. said.

Chris examined the coins again and looked at his father. “Just two.” And then he smiled, remembering. “One for Chris the Leprechaun, and one for Old Malcolm. They always split whatever they find.”

The worst Christmas ever had become one of the best Christmases ever.

Top photograph of a leprechaun via Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission. 

Photograph of shamrock by Amy Reed via Unsplash. Used with permission.

How Email Started a Revolution

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I’ve been reading Breaking the News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, the memoir published in 2018 by Alan Rusbridger. From 1995 to 2015, Rusbridger was editor of The Guardian, if not Britain’s largest newspaper, then perhaps its most influential. Part memoir, part newspaper history, the book is largely about how The Guardian recognized and then started coming to grips with the digital world.

Part of what fascinated me about the book is that it covers approximately my own experience with the digital world and how I helped (or tried to help) a corporation’s communications department come to grips with it. My journey started slightly earlier that Rusbridger’s – in 1993. But it ended the same year his did, in 2015, and for the same reason, retirement. What he was doing with The Guardian and digital communications is almost a mirror image of what we were doing in corporation communications. 

In1993, a colleague returned from a conference in Toronto and said she’d seen a presentation by AT&T on its email newsletter for employees. It sounds old hat and rather quaint today, but in 1993, not many people had email accounts. At our company, roughly 5,000 employees were on company email – out of a total of 30,000. We thought that 5,000 just might be enough to start our own email newsletter. We talked with AT&T and with a small insurance company in Canada, the only two companies which at the time had email newsletters for employees.

The technology was available and functioning. The will to use the technology for an employee newsletter was not. It was an uphill slog, often steeply uphill. The people managing the computer systems predicted doom, as if an all-text newsletter would permanently crash the servers, cause the collapse of the global financial system, and usher in a new Dark Age. The communications bosses were skeptical, saying no one would care about company news from across all divisions. We plodded on, stymied at every step, until the day of a Eureka moment: No one could prevent us from doing it, short of shutting the email system down. So, we did a test. We sent the first issue to all communications people in the company worldwide, about 90 in all. 

The test was (unintentionally) brilliant. It crossed numerous kinds of operating systems and computer hardware. It crossed widely disparate commercial and manufacturing operations. It also crossed cultures, native languages, and time zones. And it crossed another potential barrier. Since it was just a test, and only with communications people, we decided we didn’t need legal or Human Resources approval. The plan was to publish twice a week for two weeks, and then consider what, if anything, happened. And we wanted to get some sense of how people responded to and interacted with a digital newsletter. 

We told the 90 communications what we were doing, and then we immediately launched the first issue, in case someone objected and tried to stop it.

Initially, we had no response. Then a colleague is Europe asked if he might forward it to a few people in his region. We said yes.

By the end of the first week, we’d received more than a thousand requests for adding a name to the distribution list. By the end of the first month, virtually everyone on the email system had requested addition to the distribution. The newsletter contained very basic items: news from the company, news about the company, and letters from employees. Yes, they wrote letters. We received them from all over the world, and we soon found ourselves moderating debates. It was a curating function, but we used a light hand. 

Something about our email newsletter had connected with people around the world. One employee explained it this way: “It’s cool to see it by email, but it’s cooler because of its voice. It respects its readers. It sugarcoats nothing. It allows employees to have their say, and we’re educating each other. It lets employees see the company as the world sees it, and we can see where the world is right and where it’s wrong.” Surprisingly, by crossing divisional lines, it allowed people to see what was happening commercially in other areas and even created sales opportunities. But the biggest surprise was to learn that sales reps, researchers, and others were forwarding the newsletter to customers, academics, trade associations, and other outside parties. (We kept that news to ourselves, but we had to be mindful of how outside people would react.)

Our twice-a-week newsletter, written to be read in at most five minutes, had opened the door to the digital revolution at my company. 

Next: Understanding what was happening, and here comes the worldwide web.

Top photograph by Online Printers via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

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I’m not going to offer any commentary on whether the jury verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case was right, wrong, or something in between.  But something struck me about the entire incident.

Virtually no one, other than a tiny handful of people, saw what happened on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Not one of the talking heads on the networks was there. Virtually no reporters were in the vicinity. Few police officers were in the area. The people who censor on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were (mostly) in California. Each of us who read, saw, or heard the story on Aug. 26 (and months afterward) were nowhere near Kenosha. 

And very few of us watched the televised proceedings of the trial. We can’t really speak firsthand to everything the judge said, the attorneys said, and the witnesses said, and what the jury heard. And no one except the jury was in the jury room. We used to trust the trial-by-jury process, and we still do – when they deliver the verdict that fits our politics.

Our knowledge of everything involved with Kyle Rittenhouse was mediated. It’s why the news media are called the media – they’re in the middle; they sit between the news and the people who consume the news. And the news is more mediated than you might think. The reporter writes it or records it; an editor edits it; sensitive stories are often edited by multiple people. And then someone places it on a page or in a newscast. The commentators mediate the news yet again, taking a news story and rewriting it in a personal commentary style. Sometimes the commentator does it directly, and sometimes staff writers do it for the commentator. 

The mediation is even deeper, framed by the particular technology the news medium is using – newspaper, television, radio, blog, social media, or whatever.

Deeper still is the narrative.

While we can’t say firsthand what happened in Kenosha, what we can say is that the media – liberal and conservative alike – didn’t report the news. Instead, their reported their particular narrative. The Kyle Rittenhouse case fell right into chasm between the racism / white supremacy narrative of the liberal media and the Second Amendment / self-defense narrative of conservative media. The liberal media narrative dominated because most of the media are liberal. 

While it will be some time before the smoke clears, what we do know is that the media in general got this story colossally wrong. The errors and mistakes weren’t just minor or simple typos; they were major and almost designed to inflame passion and anger. And I’m speaking about both sides. 

What we know and believe about Kyle Rittenhouse is a narrative, courtesy of our favorite news medium and commentator. You’ve heard and believed those reports within your own echo chamber, with your own set of suppositions and political inclinations. But that doesn’t mean that’s what happened in Kenosha.

There was a time when the media could help people sort through the news. But that time has passed.

The media also missed the larger story. What happened on Aug. 25, 2020, happened because society broke down. Nothing worked like it was supposed to work. Armed bands of people of both extreme persuasions were in the streets of Kenosha. Many were armed. And no one was there to stop them.

This is how drug cartels operate in Mexico. 

In this series:

A Conversation About Journalism.

The Rise of News Deserts.

Is the Lack of Local News Polarizing America?

The U.S. News Media and Russian Collusion

Photograph by William Topa via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

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In December of 2016, shortly before the presidential inauguration, a story appeared in the Washington Post about an electric utility in Vermont being hacked by Russians, threatening the entire U.S. electric grid. The version of the story that is now on the Post’s web site is different from the original. That’s because, over the course of a few weeks, the story was discovered to be largely wrong.

The electric grid was not threatened. The utility involved was not hacked; what was hacked was a laptop of a utility employee. The original story was even more unusual because it had no reference or comment by the utility itself, which had not been contacted by the reporter. It’s standard, basic reporting that all journalists are (supposedly) taught: you contact the victim and ask for a comment or response. If none is forthcoming, you say “the subject declined to comment.” 

You write a story about a utility being hacked by Russians, threatening the U.S. electric grid, and you don’t ask the utility for its explanation of what happened? And you heard about the story in the first place from an anonymous official in the outgoing presidential administration?

The story did fit the Russian collusion and election interference narrative that had rapidly taken hold in the U.S. news media. It went something like this: the 2016 presidential election had been stolen from Hillary Clinton; the Russians had subverted Facebook and flooded the site with fake news and advertising to make Donald Trump was elected. Over the course of next many months and years, this became one of the leading narrative strains in American journalism, fed by leaks all over Washington, including by Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who publicly claimed there was “incontrovertible proof” of Trump’s collusion with the Russians. 

Except there wasn’t. The Mueller investigation found no such evidence, despite headlines for months. The Steele Dossier, published in all its salacious glory by Buzzfeed, turns out to be fiction. The Washington Post has corrected and removed parts of two stories regarding the infamous Dossier. It now appears that the Dossier was paid for by operatives associated with the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign. 

To be fair to the media, it took a lot more than the press to keep this narrative fed and alive. Like an FBI that knew better. Like cheerleaders from the CIA and National Security Agency. And like a lot more.

You might hate or dislike Donald Trump for a lot of reasons, including those that are valid, but Russian collusion is no longer “operative.”

The news media put the United States through political and cultural upheaval for four years by advancing the collusion narrative. Trump Derangement Syndrome was and is not fiction; the national news media is Exhibit No. 1. The media was so besotted with its hatred of Trump that it abandoned its own standards of integrity. There were opportunities to do reality checks, and they were disregarded. The media took the brakes off and left them off, and now the vehicle has crashed.

Historians will likely spend decades sorting through the wreckage of trust. In my own case, there are columnists I now routinely ignore. I discount any news story with a Washington Post, New York Times, or Associated Press byline; if I read them, I deconstruct the sentences and phrases while I read to identify the bias. CNN and MSNBC pushed the collusion narrative harder than almost everyone, but they weren’t alone. 

In 2018, the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting was shared by The New York Times and Washington Post for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

How would you like to win a top prize for something that never happened? How would you like to be on the committee that determined who won that award? How would like to be among the millions or readers who followed those stories and trusted them?

In this series:

A Conversation About Journalism.

The Rise of News Deserts.

Is the Lack of Local News Polarizing America?

Photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

In Praise of the Writing Pack Rat

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I admit it. When it comes to writing, I’m a pack rat. 

I keep everything: blog posts that never saw the light of day, book reviews I write 13 years ago, ideas that I excitedly wrote down and then rejected later, emails I’ve sent to readers explaining something that might have been confusing, whole manuscripts, partial manuscripts, and fragments of stories that might (one day) become something more. I’ve kept scenes I’ve cut from my novels to shorten them or because they really added nothing to the story. I bookmark online articles that I want to read and refer to again. 

I don’t do these things in hopes of leaving my literary estate to a university. I do them because I’m a writer. Ideas and inspiration come from everywhere and all the time. I save, I file, and I hope I remember.

Recently, I went through a file that I hadn’t looked at in more than three years. It concerns a manuscript that I worked on rather erratically from about 2007 to 2018, and then set aside.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.

Photograph by Wesley Tingey via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Is the Lack of Local News Polarizing America?

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When we moved to St. Louis in 1979, the city had two daily newspapers – the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. The Post-Dispatch leaned left editorially, and the Globe-Democrat leaned right. Both papers did a good job of local news coverage; generally, opinion and editorializing were confined to the editorial and op-ed pages, or an opinion columnist featured on the first or second page. Another source of local news were the weekly suburban newspapers, like the West County Journal and South County Journal. Along with local TV news, St. Louis was well-served with local news coverage. 

Fast forward 40 years. The Globe-Democrat disappeared for good in 1987. The Post-Dispatch acquired the Suburban Journals, and they, too, disappeared. TV news usually covers what it’s always covered – shootings, car wrecks, and other highly visual news stories. The Pulitzer family sold the Post-Dispatch to Lee Enterprises. 

The Post-Dispatch still sat atop the news in St. Louis, but it was a much-diminished position. From about 2005 onward, the news editorial staff (and presumably other staffs on the paper) shrank. The newspaper closed its Washington bureau. While the number of pages dropped, what was left was increasingly filled with wire service copy. Today, a reader typically finds more stories about national news, provided by Associated Press and the Washington Post. Local music reviews are still written by local reporters, but many movie and book reviews come from syndicated sources. 

St. Louis is not atypical. For most other metropolitan areas, one newspaper has survived. In some places, like New Orleans, the daily paper is not printed every day but is available online. 

Three communications academics have been studying what’s been happening. Joshua Darr is at LSU, Matthew Hitt is at Colorado State University, and Johanna Dunaway is at Texas A&M. The three have been studying the state of journalism for some time. One day, Darr discovered a reference to some of their work. The editor of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, had made a rather startling announcement. The editor has seen the work the three academics were doing, and she was intrigued enough to try an experiment. For the month of July in 2019, the Sun would publish nothing about national news on its editorial and op-ed pages. No op-ed columns, no editorials, no editorial cartoons, and no letters to the editor would be printed if they concerned national news. Instead, the focus would be local news.

The three academics swung into action; this was an unexpected opportunity to test their theories in a real-world situation. They set up a study, with another regional newspaper serving as the comparison. 

The Sun focused its opinion pages on local issues. And what happened? Readers engaged with local issues. People started listening to each other. People respectfully disagreed and debated with each other.

And what was happening in July of 2019 on the national scene? Robert Mueller testified to Congress about his report on the Russian collusion investigation. Democratic primary debates were held near the beginning and end of the month. President Trump was holding rallies. But the opinion pages of the sun focused on local news. One indication of what happened: references to Trump went from about one third of all editorials, letters, and columns to zero. 

You can read a short summary of the study’s findings at Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. The study itself, Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, is available at Amazon. 

What The Desert Sun showed, lending evidence to the theories of the three academics, was that focusing on local news reduced political polarization. Now consider all those news deserts – places with no news media or newspapers (which are growing in number) and those, like St. Louis, where national news dominates the opinion pages. A focus on national news may be great for the bottom lines of The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, and The Wall Street Journal, but it’s impoverishing local communities and adding to political polarization. 

I thought about what the Post-Dispatch’s editorial and op-ed pages, and various opinion columns in other parts of the newspaper, would look like if they focused on local news. No more snarky editorial cartoons about Republicans, Trump, and conservatives in general. No more Leonard Pitts and Eugene Robinson wringing their hands over anything remotely conservative and championing anything the Democrats might do, no matter how ridiculous or damaging. No more Dana Milbank, the columnist who coordinated his 2016 articles with the Clinton Campaign and got caught doing it. No Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, with his screeching hysteria about Republicans, Trump, and evangelicals who won’t listen to him. No more local editorial writer Kevin McDermott aiming for the National Snark Writing Award. 

Instead, we might see people writing about how to grow St. Louis. We might participate in discussions and debates about crime, our dysfunctional county government, redistricting of wards in the City of St. Louis, and how some schools managed to function during the COVID-19 pandemic when so many closed. We could take a hard look at how public education is organized and funded. We might find out why so many communities (like my own) allowed street maintenance to fall way down the priority list.

In other words, we might learn about and participate in the things that really matter in our day-to-day lives. 

In this series:

A Conversation About Journalism.

The Rise of News Deserts.

Top photograph by Waldemar Brandt via Unsplash. Used with permission.