Quote of the day

One of my all-time favorite presidents is Harry S. Truman.

I used to hate the guy, taking literally that the "S" stood for nothing. I don't know. I thought he paled in comparison to FDR, that he was the little worm who fired MacArthur and once actually said, "If you vote for Nixon, then you ought to go to hell."

Then I read David McCollough's excellent biography, saw the fantastic Truman installment in the PBS Presidents series and watched that great HBO movie with Gary Sinise. And I realized that Truman was my kind of guy.

My friend Spencer Solomon, a former student of Dean Harned's at Gibbs High, posted a Truman quote on Facebook. And it reminded me of my all-time favorite Truman quote:

"Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it."

Heh, heh.

What would John Adams do?

Tonight I turned off the Yankees/Red Sox game to watch a few episodes of "John Adams," HBO's epic, excellent 2008 miniseries.

I needed to believe again, methinks. After watching the CBS Evening News, I was reminded of just how much of a joke our current government has become.

It seems President Obama and the Republicans in Congress are arguing over when, or whether, to hold a joint session of Congress the president has requested to talk about his jobs plan. The president wants to hold it next Wednesday night. Republicans don't like that because that's the night of the NBC GOP presidential candidates' debate. Speaker of the House John Boehner suggested the president wait until the following night. Some don't like that because it will conflict with -- I'm not making this up -- an NFL football game.

I first gained a greater appreciation for Adams after reading David McCullough's biography 10 years ago. His intelligence, his sacrifice, his steadfast morality -- if Jefferson was the river of independence, Adams was its rock.

If you haven't yet seen the HBO miniseries, get it on DVD and savor it. This is television at its finest -- smart, grand, beautifully shot and wonderfully acted.

It gives you such an appreciation for the sacrifices the Founding Fathers (and Mothers) underwent to make the American experiment a reality. It highlights the stirring love and abiding bond between John and Abigail Adams.

And, in its way, it's a reminder of just how petty -- and pathetic -- American politics has become.

(Oh, by the way, I peeked -- the Red Sox are winning 9-5.)

Borne back into the past

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby."

Sometimes it is an escape.

I love history. Hell, I should love it, since I majored in it during college and spend a good portion of my working life writing about it.

But it's more than a vocation. It's very much an avocation. It's a passion.

A few weeks ago, while checking out at a store, I noticed the clerk had been reading David McCullough's biography on John Adams. So, we struck up a conversation. And I realized, while talking about our nation's founders, that part of the appeal lies in the fact that so many of these great characters from history are exactly that -- characters.

No novelist, not even Shakespeare, could dream up the rise and fall of Richard Nixon. Horatio Alger has nothing on Harry Truman's ascent to the White House. Even Dickens couldn't come up with as colorful a character as Teddy Roosevelt.

The American Civil War? My goodness, what to say about that? And we haven't even mentioned European or Asian history yet.

For me, though, I think history is also an escape. To what I'm not exactly sure. I think it gives me an illusion that things were better once, more romantic, more noble. I sometimes get depressed because I look at our current era and its great challenges and fail to see the hero on the horizon who's going to help us fix the mess.

And so, like Fitzgerald's boat against the current, I escape back to the past, back to something I've never known, back to a time of great ideas, back to the interesting, flawed men and women who shaped the American experience.

I like what I find there. But, does it make me crazy if I tell you that sometimes I don't want to return to the present?