Mother’s Day memories

By PAUL GIANNAMORE
Regular visitors to this space know that the political-analytical-argumentative half of my brain was exercised heavily by my mom, who was the regular reader, commentator and critic of things national, state and local.

She was a one-woman pundit squad, filled with well-read knowledge and proof that one doesn’t need a Harvard law degree to have the ability to understand issues and apply common sense.

To me, she was Eric Severeid, Tim Russert and George Will (without the $15 words) and a bit of Larry King and Mike Wallace, too.

So, perhaps this is a belated Mother’s Day card, though it really doesn’t matter that it’s late, given that Mom went to a better place a few years ago.

She had a saying that she’d recite every once in awhile that, as I recall, she attributed to late Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev: “We’ll defeat you without firing a shot.”

I’ve never checked the origin of the quote, and I don’t know if Kruschev really said it, nor do I plan on using the Internet to double-check the best political pundit I ever knew. Mom attributed it to Kruschev, and that was enough.

Of course, when I was younger, I would often dispute that. We’d have long arguments about everything from nuclear weapons to food exports, all at the height of the Cold War. And, even when the Berlin Wall fell, she repeated this mantra, “We’ll defeat you without firing a shot,” and she didn’t mean that the U.S. had won the Cold War by defeating the commies.

Nope. Mom always figured it would be an economic war that would level the United States because we were too fat, too happy, too focused on the bottom line.

That doesn’t, by the way, mean she didn’t enjoy living in a nice house or having nice things or was in any way un-American. That was clear from our arguments, her history lessons about how previous generations of our family became Americans and the general way she conducted herself. She was a big fan of the late Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, for example, and John Glenn, party affiliations not withstanding. She owned a copy of everything ever written about John Fitzgerald Kennedy and would pretty much slap me across the face if I ever criticized the sainted president. I’m probably the only kid who read the Warren Commission report before I got out of eighth grade, as well as “PT 109” and “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.”

I saved reading tales about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick for my college years, secretly for fear of the long hand of the Mom.

But she always came back to the premise that the United States could be brought to its knees without firing a single shot.

Welcome to life after Mom.

The Russians own hunks of the American steel industry that bought the nice house and put food on the nice table my Mom enjoyed having.

Gasoline prices are out of control and, I contend, not just because of Big Oil but because we never made headway in finding alternatives to Big Oil.

The nation is so divided that not only did we not really pick a president in the past two elections when choosing between Republicans and Democrats without a near national tie, now we can’t pick between two Democrats to run against the Republican.

Housing prices have imploded. The morning news features video of guys kissing on the courthouse steps in California.

The feds are trying to stimulate the economy by giving us a share of our money that they misspend back, hoping we’ll spend it to spur the economy while many folks are planning to simply burn the money — in their automobile’s engine.

People sitting in the same room with one another don’t talk. They text message one another.

Information has replaced real, durable goods, as a commodity to be bought and sold.

Somehow, the world was more stable when we had a common enemy, the commies. Everything was either Red, White and Blue or just Red, and it was easy to tell the difference.

I’m a week late with Mother’s Day thoughts for my mother this year.

But I never forget.



(Giannamore, a resident of Toronto, is business editor of the Herald-Star. His e-mail address is pgiannamore@heraldstaronline.com'>pgiannamore@heraldstaronline.com.)