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Sun. March 10
The Wallace Element Episode One, 2/28/24
Part One
Hi there. Welcome to the Wallace Element. I’m your host Barry Wallace.
As I record this, it’s Monday, March the 10th. Daylight Savings Time is upon us again, and America is on the edge of an apocalypse. Otherwise, it’s a normal day here. The Academy Awards were last night, and I’m ambivalent about the whole thing. Your local billionaire cares not one single damn about working Americans other than how we can make them richer. The Republican party still cares more about its guns than it does about its children, while the Christian right campaigns for the rights of the unborn, while not giving a damn about a mother’s life or health. And Donald Trump is still a crook who plans to become America’s Hitler, a dictator without morality, conscience, remorse, or compassion. The great tragedy—and threat—is that so many Americans seem to want this.
I want to keep these episode to around ten minutes for easy listening and reading, so this first episode is divided into two parts. And I should start by telling you a little bit about myself.
Who is this Barry Wallace? Well, I’ve been around a while. I was born in 1943, and raised in southeastern Missouri, in a little town called Desloge, population just under 2000. My little hometown was located about 50 miles southeast of St. Louis, in an area called the lead belt, because it was at one time the largest lead producing region in the country. I was raised with traditional values, things like respect for my elders, respect for authority, respect for the police, and perhaps most important kindness toward others. Honesty was highly valued in my home. And when I say highly valued, it was taught and practiced. I remember walking back and forth to school, as long as there wasn’t snow on the ground or it was raining too hard. It was about a mile one-way, and in those days as many of you will remember it was safe for a youngster of seven or eight or nine years old to walk the streets of their small town. In elementary school we frequently wrote with India ink, which was in a bottle, and we dipped into the bottle with our India ink pen which was usually wrapped in cork as I recall, with a removable metal tip. We could buy these tips at the local five and dime right across from the school, at the rate of two for a nickel. One day I bought two of those pin tips, paid my nickel, walked home, opened the little paper bag, which as I recall also contained some candy, and discovered that the clerk had accidentally given me not two pin tips for a nickel but three. I immediately walked back to that little store across the street from the school to return the extra tip. One of the things we were taught about honesty in my household, was that you didn’t practice honesty because you are afraid of punishment. You did it because it was the right thing to do. That’s the way things were in the Wallace family. As far as religion, I was raised Southern Baptist, then Methodist, then back to Baptist.
My upbringing was pretty average, and I had the good fortune to proceed from elementary school all the way through high school with the same group of friends. Elementary was followed by junior high, then high school, junior college, and the University of Missouri, from which I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in education, and a major in speech and theater in 1966. Between 1966 and 2009, I taught high school for 40 years, specifically, writing, competitive speech and writing, debate, and particularly theater, including acting technical theater set construction and all the other things involved with creating and performing. During my college and career years, I also spent about 18 months as a radio news and sports director in Southwest Missouri, another 18 months as a manager in the hotel and motel industry, and part-time jobs that included professional movie projectionist and taxi driver, which I did in Kansas City, and am happy to say I survived.
Teaching took me to Kansas, back to Missouri, and finally to Southern California, where I spent my final 29 years, retiring from the profession in 2009. California also brought to me the pleasure of becoming one of the world-famous studio guides at Universal Studios in Hollywood. That was also a part-time occupation, and perhaps the most fun I ever had in a job, one which I spent about 10 years at, finally retiring in 2013.
I’ve taught almost 10,000 students, and directed around 150 plays., I’ve covered the news, and I’ve done sports play-by-play. I’ve directed and performed for community and regional theater, and had the honor of playing some of the best-known roles in theatre. But my life’s joy was teaching. During my forty years in the classroom, I was rewarded with the joy and rich memories of seeing my students perform and compete on a very high level, winning a number of awards in speech competition and theater performance; but the greatest reward was being able to help them all grow, achieve, and succeed in their lives; to always strive to be their very best and know in their heart that they could accomplish anything they wanted to.
As a teacher I applied the same values I was taught growing up; honesty, respect and consideration for others, whether human or animal, thoughtful consideration of issues, problem-solving, and always striving to be the best you can be. One of the first things I always told my students, was that I would never lie to them. And that’s the first thing that I’ll tell you. I may not always please you with what I say. I’ll probably do just the opposite. But you can trust that I will always tell you the truth and give you the facts as I have researched, evaluated, analyzed, and found them to be. And I’ll always be guided by the human values I was taught as I grew up in the little southeastern Missouri town.
So now that you know me better, let’s get to it.
I spent the first 30-40 ‘politically aware’ years of my life as a conservative, with some progressive leanings. I voted Republican and Democratic almost evenly. I voted Republican as recently as the elder George Bush, and the first term of George junior. I even voted for Nixon and, to my eternal regret, Reagan.
But from the 1980’s onward, I started moving farther and faster away from the right. By 2008 I had left conservatism completely and forever. I have learned that conservatives, even moderately open-minded ones, lack the ability to look forward, are generally opposed to any kind of change or intellectual growth. They are mired in destructive prejudices — some of which are religiously motivated — that include racism, sexism, hatred of people who are different from themselves, particularly those who are of different sexualities, and literally anything that requires them to think deeply or question and evaluate the beliefs and societal status they are already comfortable with. To put it all into a few words, conservatives tend to think only as far as their front porch, fear any significant change more than having a root canal without anesthetic, are quick to hate anything they do not immediately understand, and are loath to learn much less research to learn anything which might indicate they were previously mistaken. The survival of any species, depends on its ability and willingness to evolve and change. Conservatives are to varying degrees unwilling and incapable of that very thing.
Everything I just said is evidenced by conservatives’ support of the last person who should ever be President of the United States. The possibility that he might somehow be elected to the Oval Office a second time creates the most dangerous situation, the greatest threat to our democracy itself, that we have faced since the Civil War, and actually worse than that event.
Like some of you, I grew up in the aftermath of World War II, lived through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the Cold War, Granada, operation desert storm, operation Iraqi freedom, Afghanistan. I watched the towers come down on 9/11. Now, as we approach the upcoming 2024 election, I’m terrified, as should we all be.
America’s democracy stands threatened by a uniquely evil but charismatic individual. His name is Donald Trump, and I am far from the only person sounding the warning about this.
An alarming number of Americans wish to re-elect this singularly destructive man who has been judged and found guilty of charity fraud, defamation of character, and banking crimes, resulting in fines of hundreds of millions of dollars; He has twice been impeached for misuse of the office of President and crimes against the Constitution. And at least eighteen women have accused him of sexual misconduct.
There is ample evidence of these crimes, yet the Republican party—some of whom are as bad as himself and many others who are cowed by his violent base followers—and his band of radical supporters that includes Neo Nazis, white supremacists, and religious radicals who would like to take America back to the days of the Salem witch trials, continue to support him. He is currently about to go on trial for stealing and hiding classified government documents ,and sharing the contents of top-secret documents with foreign citizens, likely including enemies of America; and he is also about to go on trial for creating and encouraging an insurrection, coup, in order to steal the 2020 election. But as I said, he is also charismatic, just like the snake potion doctors who roamed our old west, selling toxicity in a bottle for fifty cents or a dollar to people who were primed and willing to be taken for his magic potion guaranteed to do everything from removing warts to healing hemorrhoids to curing cancer. And he has found his flock of acolytes, by promising to honor their prejudices, racism, sexism, hatred of foreigners, religious ignorance, and determination to turn America into an Afghanistan-like theocracy.
This is a man who insults our armed services and the men and women who serve in them, a man who admires dictators—Vladimir Putin; Xi Jining of China, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and Adolf Hitler, the architect of World War II. He thinks he should be allowed to run America the way they run their countries, as a dictator, answerable to no constraint and no law, with total authority residing only in himself. If he succeeds, America loses, and our democracy, our grand experiment of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, will be lost. I’ll explain why in Part Two.
In the interest of keeping these episodes around ten minutes, that will do it for now. In the meantime, venture away from your front door, look at the world around you, open your mind wide, and do some deep thinking. Part two of this first episode will be along soon.
Before I go for now, there’s one last thing, the commercial. In retirement I’ve found a second pastime, as a writer. I’ve published several short stories, and my first novel is available at Amazon, in Kindle format. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can get a Kindle app for your computer, ,digital tablet, or phone, and it’s free.
The book is titled IN THE MATTER OF HUMANS. It’s a story of alien arrival. They are millennia ahead of us, and they are not happy with humans. They have come to either reform us or destroy us, and the story revolves around the interactions and growing relationships between the commander of the alien fleet, an American columnist and author he chooses to be his “one honest man,” and the author’s beautiful next-door neighbor who is also a brilliant lawyer. Yes, there are sparks. The tale takes place over a course of only four days, and includes an unbalanced NSA director, an American President who is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy, a doomsday asteroid, a second alien race intent on destroying humans, and the threat of WWIII. As a purely objective observer, of course, I think the book is exciting and adventurous, with memorable characters, some nail-biting suspense, humor, a bit of romance, and surprises around several corners. I’d love to have you read it and send a good review back to Amazon. I’ll give you candy. Actually, I can’t give you candy. But I’ll hope that someone does.
This is the Wallace Element, I’m Wallace, and I’m outta here until next time. If you’d like to see a print version of this podcast, you can find it at The Wallace Element- the Blog: www.musingsbw.com.
The Wallace Element 