Reality Bites: So Does Ed Raymond’s “Gadfly”

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

“Gadfly - A fly that bites, or annoys cattle.” - Webster’s Dictionary

”...no society is good, whatever its intentions,...if the men and women who live in it are not free to speak their minds.” - I.F. Stone

“Teach Your Children Well…” - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

One of the hardest things for human beings to do, is to acknowledge our own screw ups. That’s why we often say that “denial” is not the name of a river in Egypt.

Hence the birth of the “Gadfly,” and his reality bites through the thick skin of our illusions.

What is even harder for some folks to do nowadays, is to acknowledge that we have been taken in by Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce con men, who have traded on our small time larceny in order to make their own big killings. There have been many past swindles, but the Great Depression of 1929 and Great Recession of 2008 are two of the most spectacular examples of how this country has gone so terribly wrong by exchanging the Sermon on the Mount for the Gospel of Wealth.

Of the really big swindlers to get caught, only Bernard Madoff has bitten the dust so far. He, apparently, was not too big to fail.

Also, American citizens, as soldiers and taxpayers, have borne the brunt of continuous warfare since Pearl Harbor.

Unfortunately, many of the very corporate giants and CEO’s who have contributed most to the economic debacles of 1929 and 2008, and who have made so much money from wars, cold and hot, since 1941, tend to control the major media which debate the origins and resolutions of these disasters.

There are some exceptions to the mouthpieces of controlling interests, however, and Ed Raymond’s “Gadfly” column is one of them.

Ed’s bold and weekly assaults on “sultans of blame,” are continuing antidotes to flaming poisons of resentment fanned by professional and amateur right wingers in this country, seeking to shift responsibility from perpetrators to victims.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, the Koch Brothers, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell,  John Boehner, and last but not least of this “toxic twelve,” former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.

These usual suspects, and other members of a reactionary rogue’s gallery, are intent upon appealing to the worst in us. They have, in turn, supplied Ed with unlimited material, due to their relentless campaign to tell Americans what to think, instead of how to think.

Well, not exactly what to think, but actually, not to think.

Hatred instead of tolerance. Savagery instead of civility. Greed instead of charity.  Cruelty instead of kindness. Ignorance instead of knowledge.

It takes the courage of a Marine, as well as the instincts and training of an educator to take on such nastiness each and every week. As his resumé indicates, Ed Raymond, always a Marine, always knows how to remain true to the powerful weaponry of candor and tenacity.

For example, Ed’s longevity as a respected school administrator in Fargo is proof of his staying power, thick skin and resilient stomach lining.

In the language of popular music, great teachers are like “gold” records, but great school administrators are like “platinum,” i.e. rarer. These administrators hire teachers who have high expectations of their students, and they back them up. Ed Raymond betrays his “platinum” talents when touting superiority in one of his columns of so called “fragile” female students to “burly” male students in matters of discipline in his years at Fargo South. As a Marine, he undoubtedly knows the value of internalized discipline, first from the outside by parents, mentors, and in schools, and then from within.

But times have changed, and not necessarily for the better.

What Ed Raymond’s “Gadfly” columns so often decry is the catastrophic lack of discipline in the contemporary adult world, as evidenced by the worship of the Golden Calf over the Golden Rule in the past thirty years since “Greed is Good” was enshrined nationally by Ronald Reagan and the Bush Dynasty, and locally by Ed Schafer in North Dakota and Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota.

I tremble for our children and grandchildren as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations set such bad examples in so many State Legislatures and the U.S. Congress. It is a consolation, however, that such charlatans also tremble before the sting of the “Gadfly.”

There have been major successes of the Democrats under President Barack Obama in the past two years in using reason and compassion to approach problems of the Great Recession, but the legacy of ignorance and arrogance, a generation in the making, has given the politics of fear and loathing a ferocious advantage.

When I read “Gadfly” I am reminded of I.F. Stone’s weekly newsletters, which I began to read in the 1960s, with a cartoon on the front page showing him lifting the dome of the National Capitol and finding all the dirty deals inside.   

Ed finds them on C-Span and lets us know what is really going on, so that we don’t have to rely wholly upon the filters of sensationalism and pablum provided by the major networks and the Fargo Forum.

We are thus treated to a treatise on the agility of squirrels in woodlands Minnesota, and their ability to steal half of Ed’s sunflower seeds from the trough of his bird feeder, while his two dogs go zero for 15 years in nailing any of them. This bemused essay on disrespectful rodents is sandwiched in between columns on other “squirrels” in Washington, D.C., St. Paul and Bismarck, who plunder the public trough, while mocking State and Federal watchdogs, whose barks are all too often unaccompanied by serious bites.

As George Orwell pointed out in 1946, freedom of speech is still protected in countries like England and America for the most part, but freedom of the press is often overrated, because of the ability of press barons like Lord Beaverbrook in his day, and Rupert Murdoch in our own, to control ownership of media outlets. Such monopolistic ownership acts as a censorship as effective as in many dictatorships, all the more so because of illusions of freedom provided by such press barons with their “telling all” about matters that don’t really matter.

The biggest problem with writers in a society that tolerates free speech, according to Orwell, is self-censorship - the fear that someone may be offended by what one deems to be the truth, one’s friends and family, or professional colleagues, as much or more than one’s immediate bosses.

If the facts are offensive, however, they need to be faced. It is the job of the writer to face them in print.

Ed Raymond does that job well, and the High Plains Reader and Duluth Reader Weekly do well to print him.

There are publications like the High Plains Reader in the United States whose ownership believe as fervently in freedom of the press, and what is written there, as in freedom of speech.

They are rare.

They always have been.

Writers for main stream papers in North Dakota, Minnesota, and around the country are dying to write what they really want to say, as opposed to what they know their ownership will not tolerate their saying.

No such problems with the folks who publish “The Gadfly.”

I am honored to be listed as a staff writer with Ed Raymond.

May he continue to sting for years to come.

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