Heroes on a train: `Let's go!' -- Aug. 27, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Three young Americans on vacation captivated the world last week when they risked their lives to save hundreds of train travelers in Europe from a terrorist attack.

“They are truly heroes,” said Jane Hartley, U.S. ambassador to France. “When most of us would run away, Spencer, Alek and Anthony ran into the line of fire, saying `Let’s go!’ Those words changed the fate of many.”

As we go about our ordinary days, celebrating the extraordinary acts of Spencer Stone, 23, Alek Skarlatos, 22, and Anthony Sadler, 23, a question arises: Would I do what they did?

“I hope I would,” my dentist said as he cleaned my teeth. Me too, although I hope never to find out.

Nobody wants to think what might have happened had the three buddies not been aboard that particular car on the high-speed train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris. The three acted instantly.

“It was either do something or die,” said Sadler, a student at Sacramento State University. The joyous news is that nobody died.  

Skarlatos, a specialist in the Oregon National Guard just back from nine months in Afghanistan, spotted the shirtless guy with an AK-47 rifle strapped to his chest.

“Let’s go!” he said. The three tackled the heavily armed Moroccan Ayoub El Khazzani, 25, who viciously slashed Stone, an airman first class in the U.S. Air Force, with a box cutter. British businessman Chris Norman, 62, an IT consultant, heard “Let’s go!” and joined the three Americans. He tied up El Khazzani. 

Stone nearly lost his left thumb and suffered other wounds, but he still saved the life of Mark Moogalian, 51, a French-American professor at the Sorbonne. Moogalian, originally from Midlothian, Va., is also a hero.

Moments earlier, Moogalian tried to wrest the rifle from the terrorist and was shot in the neck. Bleeding profusely, he could have died but for Stone, an EMT who used his uninjured hand to apply pressure to Moogalian’s neck to stop the bleeding until help arrived.

“Let’s go!” reminds many Americans of other heroes. On Sept. 11, 2001, “Let’s roll!” was the rallying cry of Todd Beamer and other passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who tried to storm the cockpit, where terrorists had taken over the plane, rather than allow the terrorists to fly it into the U.S. Capitol. The passengers sacrificed their lives to change the fate of many.

The American friends were just 9 or 10 years old on 9/11 and have grown up under the constant threat of terrorism. The military men said their training kicked in on the train.

“It was not really a conscious decision,” Skarlatos told reporters. “We just decided to act … It was gut instinct.”

French President Francois Hollande, who presented the Legion of Honor to the Americans and Norman, said: “We are still vulnerable. This is further evidence that we must prepare ourselves for more assaults, and thus we must protect ourselves.” Moogalian and a Frenchman who confronted the gunman will receive the honor later, authorities said.

Not only France needs to be watchful.

U.S. government reports have warned for years that America’s passenger rail system is vulnerable to terrorist attack. Whether Congress should pour billions into tightening passenger rail security and whether passengers would put up with the time and inconvenience required is open for debate.

The busiest U.S. train stations do have armed guards, plain-clothes officers who watch for suspicious behavior, random passenger and bag checks and bomb-sniffing dogs, but Amtrak carries about 32 million passengers a year to 500 destinations in 46 states. Every day, more than 86,000 passengers ride more than 300 Amtrak trains. Most stations have minimal security.

Three times as many passengers take the train as fly between Washington and New York. Between New York and Boston, trains carry more riders than all of the airlines combined, Amtrak says.

For the foreseeable future, it’s up to passengers to stay vigilant. “If you see something, say something” still applies. But in a rare, horrifying moment, ordinary people may have to do something extraordinary.  

British businessman Norman, who lives in France and travels frequently, had thought ahead about the nightmare scenario.

 “My position was, I’m not going to be the guy who dies sitting down,” he told CNN. “If you’re going to die, try to do something about it.”

© 2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Trump's gift to Hillary is born in the USA -- Aug. 20, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Here we go again. Donald Trump’s proposal to stop birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants is forcing Republicans into a debate they can’t win and should have ended decades ago.

In 1996, the Republican Party Platform called for a constitutional amendment to end automatic citizenship for children born to parents who are in the country illegally or are not long-term residents. The party's presidential and vice presidential nominees Bob Dole and Jack Kemp both rejected the plank. 

“Born in America, you’re an American,” Kemp declared.

But that wasn’t the last word.

Since 2007, as anti-immigrant sentiment has flowed, a few congressional Republicans have backed bills to stop birthright citizenship. A measure by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, has 27 cosponsors, all Republicans. 

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said at a hearing on birthright citizenship in April that he rarely has a conversation about immigration policy without someone asking about automatic citizenship. 

“The question of whether our forefathers meant for birthright citizenship in all circumstances to be the law of the land is far from settled. In any event we must still determine if it is the right policy for America today,” Goodlatte said.

But there’s little appetite for the issue in the Senate, even among Republicans. A bill introduced by Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana has zero cosponsors.

Now comes Trump and his extreme immigration plan released Sunday. He cited Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid as wanting to end birthright citizenship, which Reid did -- in 1993. By 1999 Reid called his own proposal an embarrassment, high on his “list of mistakes.”

“I didn’t understand the issue,” Reid explained, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in December 1999. “I’m embarrassed that I made such a proposal.”

Naturally, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was quick to criticize Trump’s plan.

“It is disturbing that Republican presidential candidates continue to embrace extreme anti-immigrant positions as core pieces of their immigration platform,” Lorella Praeli, Hillary for America Latino Outreach director, said in a statement.

If Democrats now are united behind birthright citizenship, Republicans are in disarray. Presidential hopefuls Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal support ending automatic citizenship. Others, including Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum have supported changing the law in the past.

Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush prefer sticking with the law.   

“Mr. Trump can say that he’s for this because people are frustrated that it’s abused. But we ought to fix the problem rather than take away rights,” Bush said on CBS. There must be ways short of a constitutional amendment to deal with the phenomenon of pregnant women entering the country to give birth so that their babies become citizens, Bush said.

Bush knows his brother George got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2004 presidential election, according to exit polls, a modern record for a Republican. In 2012, Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote, after his comment that undocumented immigrants should “self deport.”

The Constitution as originally written did not define citizenship, but since after the Civil War, anyone born in the United States has been a citizen. The 14^th Amendment in 1868, a Reconstruction measure pressed by Republicans, overturned the Supreme Court’s odious Dred Scott decision that no black persons who had been “imported into the country, and sold as slaves” or their descendants could ever become citizens.

The 14^th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.”

In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a citizen even though the parents could never become citizens because of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Changing the law would require passage of a constitutional amendment, a feat of bipartisanship nearly unimaginable in this era. Most legal scholars consider the 14^th amendment settled.

So do pragmatic Republicans, those who actually want to win in 2016 – and not merely make debating points.

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even be talking about immigration,” Trump bragged at the first Republican candidates' debate. He’s right. Most GOP candidates would prefer not to alienate a large swath of Hispanic and other immigrant voters with a plan that’s going nowhere.

But Trump might be making someone happy. Her name is Hillary.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Play ball! Hoping for Coolidge luck -- Aug. 13, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Novelist Henry James said the two most beautiful words in the English language are summer afternoon. I’d say that on any summer afternoon, the two words that bring joy and hope are “Play ball!”  

What better escape from the bizarre 2016 presidential race and assorted national and international crises than an afternoon or evening outside at the ball park? In August, we may dream about October but we don’t fret. Much.

In the nation’s capital, baseball comes with a side of presidential history. At other major league ballparks, sausages or pierogies are racing mascots, but in Washington it’s the Racing Presidents who compete in a fourth-inning sprint down the warning track and foul line. They are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and, as of last month, Calvin Coolidge.

Silent Cal seemed an odd addition to the presidents, but he did attend 10 baseball games while he was in office from 1923 to 1929. He was the first president to attend a World Series opener and the first to throw out a first pitch at a World Series game.

Coolidge didn’t lose an election in 30 years in politics, so he was thought lucky. Fans credited the “Coolidge luck” with the Washington Senators’ winning two of their three pennants. They won the 1924 World Series and the American League championships in 1925, during his tenure. 

These days, a president who ventures into a stadium may get booed. That’s what happened when President Barack Obama threw out the first pitch of the season at Nationals Park in 2010. What did he expect when he put on a Chicago White Sox cap?

Coolidge wasn’t much of a baseball fan, but his wife, first lady Grace Coolidge, was.

Called the “first lady of baseball,” she kept a scorecard at games and when she couldn’t be there in person listened on the radio. The Coolidges were in the stands at the first game of the 1924 World Series, when the president decided it was time to go back to the White House. The score was 2-2 in the ninth inning.

“When he rose to leave, the first lady, resplendent in her `good luck’ necklace of seven ivory elephants, snapped, `Where do you think you’re going? You sit down,’ seizing his coattails to emphasize her point. Coolidge obeyed and stayed on to see the Giants win in extra innings,” William Bushong, chief historian of the White House Historical Association, writes in an essay. 

Grace Coolidge told a presidential historian that her husband never played baseball or any other sport, and “He did not share my enthusiasm for baseball,” John Sayle Watterson reports in his 2009 book, “The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency.”

Watterson knocks Coolidge as “athletically challenged,” the worst natural athlete in presidential history from 1901 to 2005.

The new focus on Coolidge and baseball is the result of an unusual partnership. For the first time, the historical association, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the White House and educating the public, has joined in a multi-year agreement with a sports team, the Nationals.   

The 30^th president is also the subject of the association’s 2015 official Christmas ornament, which celebrates Coolidge’s lighting in 1923 of the first national Christmas tree on the Ellipse. The ornament is itself a Christmas tree with 14 decorations that commemorate events in Coolidge’s life, including a baseball. An LED light is incorporated in the design, another first. 

Racing Presidents make personal appearances outside the ball park, and Coolidge likely will be in demand. While most historians rank him among our worst presidents, blaming his policies for the start of the Great Depression in 1929, Coolidge is the darling of Tea Partiers and right-wing talkers, who love his disaffection for big government and taxes.

Ronald Reagan put Coolidge’s portrait in the Oval Office and praised his policies, and several books recently have tried to put Coolidge’s policies in a better light.

Today’s Washington fans hope for a revival of the Coolidge luck when they hear those magic words: “Play ball!”

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30

. 

Readers have their say about new monuments -- column of Aug. 6, 2015

By MARSHA MERCER

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in this space about the opportunity cities and towns in the South have as they weigh moving Confederate monuments from streets and parks to museums.  

If cities relocate the statues, as I believe some will, they then can move on to consider new monuments that reflect modern sensibilities. Surely, 150 years after the Civil War we can think beyond the bronze hero on a horse and find other men – and women – whose accomplishments and stories we want to pass to future generations.

Traditionally in this country we have memorialized presidents, generals and victims of disasters. In the 21^st century we can widen our horizons and honor the artists, athletes, composers, entrepreneurs, explorers, scientists, writers and others who have contributed to America’s rich cultural history.

I asked readers to email me their answers to the question: To whom – or what – would you like to see a monument in your community? Today I share your ideas.

This is nothing close to a scientific sample, but several people who wrote me objected to my guess that a year from now we’ll find more Confederate statues in museums and fewer in streets and parks. They made it clear they want the Confederate statues to stay right where they are, thank you.

“We are remembering our Confederate ancestors who fought in a long and brutal war for a wide range of reasons – and not necessarily for slavery,” a reader from Richmond, Va. , wrote.

He insisted that Confederate memorials are no more backward-looking or divisive than memorials to black soldiers who fought for the Union.

“`Moving on,’ as you recommend, should not mean taking down or hiding away all things Confederate. Rather it should mean constructively adding to that national memory and narrative – not destructively subtracting from it,” he said.

Another reader wrote: “I don’t want to change my American history. For better or worse, it is what it is. You want to add to it, fine.”

Neither offered any names for new monuments. One even defied me to find a leader “who doesn’t lie to us every other day. Someone who cares about this country and not his party. I cannot.”

Whoa.  The last thing we need is a monument to a living politician.  

But my correspondents raise an excellent point. Even if Confederate statues stay in place, this is a good time to consider adding to the mix of outdoor memorials.

A supporter of a proposed Fallen Heroes Monument in Richmond told me about a campaign by local veterans to honor on Monument Avenue the collective sacrifice of Richmond’s citizens in foreign wars. 

While many other communities have memorials commemorating the generations that have answered the call to military service overseas, Richmond does not.

First, though, supporters need funds and approval to build the monument.  

Most Confederate monuments were paid originally by private funds. In our time, too, individuals are stepping up to contribute.

For example, in New York’s Central Park, there are 22 statues honoring men but not one honors a woman. Instead, there are statues of fictional characters -- Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose, Juliet (with Romeo) and various nymphs and angels. A fundraising campaign is underway to build a monument to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, along with other pioneers of women’s rights. 

Several readers suggested a monument honoring Maggie L. Walker, the Virginia civil rights activist and entrepreneur. Walker was the first African-American woman to found and be president of a bank. Her childhood home in Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood is a National Historic Site operated by the National Park Service.

Walker deserves “a statue or some sort of memorial, if not on Monument Avenue, then in a prominent place,” wrote one woman, who called the Confederate statues along Richmond’s Monument Avenue “great examples of civic art of the times” they were built.

“I don’t want the city to spend any money removing them but if private groups want to do this, I’d enjoy a discussion of this idea,” she said.

And she proposed something we all may be able to agree on that could be done soon: Rename Jefferson Davis Highway, as parts of U.S. Route 1 through the South are called.  

“If another name is needed, how about Reconciliation Highway?” she said. It’s a good start. 

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

.

Giving the president the hook -- July 30, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Good news: Barack Obama will not subvert the Constitution and grab a third presidential term.  

Most Americans never imagined that he’d do such a thing, but oddball doomsayers have warned for years that Obama was angling for a presidency for life.   

“I actually think I’m a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t,” Obama said Tuesday in Ethiopia. “The law is the law.”

He was giving the hook to African leaders who sometimes govern for decades. In this country, though, his comments set off a Seinfeldian debate about nothing. Could he win a third term if he could run, which he can’t?

His comments about age and presidential term limits, though, are worth examining.

“I’m still a pretty young man, but I know that somebody with new energy and new insights will be good for my country,” said Obama, who will turn 54 Tuesday.

“In our world, old thinking can be a stubborn thing. That’s one of the reasons why we need term limits -- old people think old ways,” he said.

If Obama believes this country needs someone younger than he next time around, what does that say about the Democrats’ elderly team of rivals? Grandma Hillary, 67, the presumptive frontrunner, may have a golden resume but Clinton is hard to sell as a candidate of new energy and new insights.

Throngs of Democrats flock to hear Bernie Sanders, who has vinegar, but he is 73. Joe Biden’s humanity makes him the Democrats’ favorite potential presidential candidate who’s not in the race. He’s 72. It may take a Hillary implosion to bring him into the fray.  

Among Republican hopefuls, several are younger than Obama – and all can claim new energy and insight. Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz are 44, Scott Walker is 47, and Rand Paul is 52. But it’s an irrepressible old guy with no elective experience who’s leading the pack.

Donald Trump, 69, said he wished Obama could run again so Trump could beat him and everyone else. Trump has energy and unusual insights, all right, but he scares most Republicans. Also in their 60s: Jeb Bush, 62, Lindsey Graham, 60, John Kasich, 63, and Rick Perry, 65.

Setting aside the current competition, it’s worth asking: Do we need presidential term limits or should voters decide how long to keep a president?

"If they want to vote for someone, we shouldn’t have a rule that tells them they can’t.”

That’s not a wistful Bill Clinton. That’s conservative superhero President Ronald Reagan who said in 1987 that he hoped to “start a movement” after he left the White House to repeal the two-term limit on the presidency.  The change would not apply to him, Reagan said, but to his successors.

Since the 22^nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, people have been arguing about the wisdom of prohibiting someone from being elected to the presidency more than twice or serving more than 10 years. A vice president who serves more than two years of a previous president’s term and a full term may not run for re-election.  

For example, more than two years remained in Richard Nixon’s term when he resigned and Vice President Gerald Ford took over. Had Ford beat Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ford could have served only one full term and could not have run for re-election.

The Founders saw the presidency as a short-term gig. Delegates to the 1797 Constitutional Convention debated a six- or seven-year term and then agreed on four years. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson set the precedent of two terms, and the tradition stuck until the 1940s.

Only after Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won a fourth term did the rules change. Bills proposing a constitutional amendment to repeal the 22^nd Amendment have died in Congress over and over.  

As they should. The Founders who feared a restoration of the monarchy had the right idea. No one person should dominate our highest office indefinitely. We should keep the two-term limit. Even Obama is fine with it.     

“You can see my gray hair – I’m getting old,” he said.         

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30

A new era of monument men and women in the South -- July 23, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Walking in the Old Town section of Alexandria, Va., last week, I passed two young men, probably in their 20s.

“They’re talking about taking that down,” one said, pointing to a statue in the middle of the busy intersection of Prince and South Washington streets. The other fellow squinted into the morning sun at the bronze figure.

“Who is it – Eisenhower?” he asked.

I laughed. It’s worth remembering that not everyone follows the news closely.  

Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever suggested removing a statue of Dwight D.  Eisenhower. People may argue about what the national Eisenhower memorial in Washington should look like, but we all agree that our 34^th president is monument-worthy.

The American appetite for war memorials and monuments to presidents and generals seemed boundless -- until the killings last month of nine black church members in Charleston, S.C., prompted a reappraisal of Confederate symbols and monuments.

The prominent statue in Alexandria whose future is in question is a Confederate monument, but it’s not a tribute to a general. “Appomattox” – nicknamed “Appy” -- shows an unarmed Confederate soldier, head bowed, arms crossed over his chest, hat in hand, facing the battlefields to the South where his comrades fell.

Appy has lent its sorrowful presence to the intersection since 1889. Drivers occasionally crash into the statue, but Appy has always been restored to his perch.

As in countless other communities in the South, though, Alexandria is weighing whether to move the Confederate sculpture to a museum. City Council is expected to take up the issue in the fall.

Such decisions evoke strong emotions and protests. Vandals in several states have spray-painted the slogan, “Black Lives Matter,” on monuments, action that further divides communities when they need to be united.

My guess is that a year from now we’ll see fewer Confederate monuments on Southern streets, squares and parks and more in museums. That’s a step in the right direction, but we should do more.

Communities will miss the moment if they put Confederates in the attic, figuratively, but fail to think of all that’s happened in the 150 years since the end of the Civil War. Surely, we can find more recent heroes and stories to pass to future generations.    

Americans traditionally have focused on presidents, generals and victims of disasters for our memorials and monuments. We’ve slighted our rich and diverse cultural history – the artists, athletes, composers, explorers, inventors, musicians, scientists, writers and others who have contributed to the American spirit.

I read recently that there are 94 statues in Russia to literary giant Alexander Pushkin -- 94! Russians are not content with promoting Pushkin in Russia alone. A full-length statue of Pushkin is on the campus of The George Washington University – a gift in 2000 from the city of Moscow to the city of Washington.

You probably can count the statues to Mark Twain in this country on one hand.

The South has a strong literary history, and some cities have immortalized authors. In downtown Jackson, Miss., are statues of Eudora Welty, Richard Wright and William Faulkner. 

We can and should do more to recognize the contributions of women. The Virginia Women’s Monument Commission is raising money and seeking names of Virginia women for a monument on Capitol Square in Richmond. A dozen figures will be cast in bronze and names of other notable Virginia women will be inscribed on a Wall of Honor.

Farther afield, so to speak, few of us might think an agricultural pest worthy of tribute, but the Boll Weevil Statue in downtown Enterprise, Ala., tells the story of the community’s resilience.

Local cotton farmers, their crops devastated by the boll weevil in 1915, turned to growing peanuts and thrived. The monument, dedicated in 1919, is a thank you to the pest for the lessons it taught.

Rather than focusing on the Civil War, Southern communities can use the opportunity of moving Confederate statues to tap the imagination of residents and find new heroes and stories to immortalize. It’s time we moved on.  

To whom -- or what -- would you like to see a monument in your community? Send me your ideas. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30    

Summer 2015 -- brought to you by the 1960s -- July 16, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

I have a word to describe the summer of 2015. It’s groovy. Make that neo-groovy.  

Yes, children, Groovy is now a programming language, but in the 1960s groovy -- lower case -- meant wonderful or cool. Simon and Garfunkel sang “Feelin’ Groovy” (“The 59^th Street Bridge Song”) on their 1966 album, “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.”

Over the last few weeks, nearly every major news event – whether it came from the heavens, the political mud or a cultural landmark between the two – has had ties to the 1960s. This may be the summer the Sixties built.

Everybody was feelin’ groovy when the New Horizons spacecraft finally flew by Pluto on Tuesday. After traveling nearly a decade and 3 billion miles, the spacecraft about the size of a baby grand piano made its one and only flyby of the former planet.

President Barack Obama tweeted his congratulations. 

Everybody loves Pluto. Images of the dwarf planet with its heart-shaped region charmed the world 50 years to the day after the first mission to Mars, Mariner 4, explored the red planet on July 14, 1965.

The space program didn’t just happen. President John F. Kennedy feared that the Soviets, having launched Sputnik and then the first human into space, would win the space race. On May 25, 1961, he addressed a joint session of Congress with a stunning proposal.   

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth,” JFK said.

Just eight years later, on July 20, 1969, the first two humans -- American astronauts -- walked on the moon. It took them 76 hours to travel the 240,000 miles.

To compare, when New Horizons launched Jan. 16, 2006, it passed the moon nine hours later.

In another sign of how the 1960s are informing our lives, Obama this week drew from Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address to argue in favor of a nuclear deal with Iran.

“It’s now more than 50 years since President Kennedy stood before the American people and said, `Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate,’” Obama said.

In politics, the big news this summer is a brash Republican candidate in the populist tradition. Some commentators liken real estate mogul Donald Trump to George Wallace “without the charm.” Wallace, a former Alabama governor and segregationist, ran for president four times from the 1960s to 1980s. 

Trump’s propensity for harsh rhetoric – he has called Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers -- and loose use of facts worries the GOP establishment. In early polls of likely Republican voters, though, he leads the pack of GOP presidential hopefuls.

The book of the summer is a novel written more than half a century ago. Readers dreamed for decades that Harper Lee would publish another novel after her perennial bestseller “To Kill a Mockingbird” came out in 1960. The 1962 movie based on the book starring Gregory Peck was a classic.

Lee finally released another novel this month, but it confounded readers. Written before Mockingbird but set 20 years after it, “Go Set a Watchman” altered the character of saintly Atticus Finch into a cranky, racist coot.

Readers will long debate the merits of Watchman and whether Lee, 89, should have allowed it to be published. Her “new” novel brought back the dark side of the 1960s – but this summer also saw South Carolina give the decade the boot symbolically.

After 54 years, the Confederate battle flag came down from the statehouse grounds in Columbia on July 10. Raised over the capitol dome in 1961 during the civil rights era, the flag had been moved to the grounds in 2000. It was taken down permanently after the murders last month of nine black worshippers at a prayer meeting in a Charleston church.

This summer we also saw the 1960s as a selling point. Jaguar has come out with a new Lightweight E-Type racer that only looks like it was built in 1964. It can be yours for a cool one million British pounds, or about $1.5 million.

That must be one groovy car.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

30