Among the many curiosities in the Internet Archive we find the Edward R. Murrow papers. For readers who are not old enough to remember him, it may be necessary to explain that Murrow was probably the greatest broadcast journalist in American history. In his editorials and opinion programs he attacked Joe McCarthy and other resilient targets without fear, but in his news reporting Murrow combined ruthless objectivity with an engaging chattiness that made us trust him instantly.

Dr. Boli fondly recalls how, in one broadcast, Murrow had to report on Senator McCarthy’s latest tirade, in which McCarthy accused one Edward R. Murrow of being a Communist agent, building up a crescendo of batty assertions climaxing with the astounding charge that Murrow had been moonlighting as a professor at the Moscow University summer school. Murrow simply reported what McCarthy had said, without contradicting him. He ended with only one sentence of personal statement: “My own reactions, and possibly corrections, will have to wait for another time.”

That, young journalists, is how you build up trust.

Thousands of pages of typewritten radio scripts are in the Murrow papers, and they almost bring the man back to life. His typing is hasty, with capitals frequently out of alignment because he can’t wait for the shift key to do its job. Scribbled emendations show us how carefully Murrow crafted his message, marking the emphases and pauses, taking out what was superfluous or irrelevant, and leaving only what would communicate directly with the ordinary American.

All of which brings us to this story, which caught Dr. Boli’s eye as he was glancing over one of the three-thousand-page “volumes” of typescripts. Somehow Dr. Boli missed this news when it was news, but he wonders now what ever became of this case. Murrow’s treatment is chatty and personal, obviously meant for one of his opinion shows, so it brings out the full Murrow personality. If you want even more of the Murrow personality, read the original typescript, where you can see all of Murrow’s own scribbled marks to show how the expressions and the breaths are to be managed.

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June 1, 1951.—Another Court decision of some interest in Washington today. The Capital Transit Company had been piping broadcasts into its streetcars and busses. These broadcasts consisted of news, music and commercials. Today the Court of Appeals decided, unanimously, that that’s got to stop. The Court ruled that those who ride on streetcars and buses have a constitutional right not to listen. Such programs deprive passengers of liberty without due process of law; violate the Bill of Rights, (which is considerably older than radio). The three judges said the Bill of Rights “can keep up with anything an advertising man or electronics engineer can think of.” If the Transit Company obliged its passengers to read what it liked, or get off the car, invasion of their freedom would be obvious. The company now obliges them to hear what it likes, or get off the car. The Court held that the passengers’ loss of freedom not to listen is the more serious because many people have little time to read, consider, discuss what they like, or to relax.

The transit people, who wanted to keep on broadcasting, argued that the majority of their riders wanted the music, news and commercials; and said that the idea that buses and streetcars—with or without broadcasting reception—are sanctuaries for rest and thought is just as astounding a thesis, as the idea that the failure of the streetcar railway systems to provide such sanctuaries is a menace to our American way of life. So unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise there won’t be any more news or commercials in Washington’s buses and streetcars. But the question of music is still undecided, for Judge Edgerton reading the unanimous opinion said the Court was not compelled to decide whether occasional broadcasts of music alone infringe constitutional rights. It is to be hoped that some stouthearted citizen will test that one in the courts too; because to be forced to listen to music—at least some kinds of music—or get off the bus, may be just as distasteful as listening to news or commercials. I have heard certain types of music which do me serious injury, and prevent me from reading, discussing or relaxing.

This case will be appealed to the Supreme Court, and may provide the learned Justices with some diversion on a dull day. Disregarding the purely legal aspects of the case, Chief Justice Vinson might hold that it’s all right to subject a captive audience to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”; Mr. Justice Tom Clark would be reluctant to say that it’s unconstitutional to force anybody to listen to “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You”; Mr. Justice Frankfurter might well contend that a half-hour of Beethoven never hurt anybody, and so on.

The Supreme Court probably won’t get around to hearing this vexed case until some time in the Autumn, but we’ll advise you of the outcome. The most eloquent testimony on this subject of captive audiences in transit was given by Harold Ross, the Editor of the New Yorker, when a similar situation arose here in New York, some time ago. He gave it as his opinion that the employees in the railroad station “must be slowly going nuts.” An attorney for the railroad asked Mr. Ross if his hearing was good. “I am thinking” snapped the editor “of having an eardrum punctured.” Another commuter said he’d lost a mother-in-law; he asked the station to page her on the loudspeaker system, but they wouldn’t interrupt the program, so he lost her. It is gratifying, in this complex world, where so few things seem to get settled, to know that eventually the Supreme Court will render a decision on this matter. Meanwhile, permit me to wish you a quiet week end.

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And now a question for readers. Dr. Boli’s own doctorate of laws is, you will recall, honoris causa, meaning that it does not make him an expert. Are any students of law out there who know how this case came out? Did the Supreme Court really hear the case, and how did it rule?

It is admittedly unlikely that the decision was not overturned, since the ubiquity of televisions in public places would be seriously curtailed by a strict application of this precedent. Nevertheless, just in case this does turn out to be valid precedent, we have sent a private message through the usual channels to Mr. Bozar the Clown.

On this day in 1913, Le Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky was first performed in Paris. The resulting audience riot is remembered fondly by historians and lovers of symphonic music as a relic of a lost time when audiences could be expected to have any strong opinion at all about the new music presented to them.

This is going to be a long essay, and most readers will probably want to skip it and go read the newspaper comics. It is provoked by a comment on a twelve-year-old article. The commenter thinks Dr. Boli is despicable, and if you are reading this Magazine, she does not think much of you, either. Because the article is so far back in the archive, because the commenter expresses herself clearly, and because she makes explicit the assumptions that are only implicit in many similar comments, it seemed worth bringing her comment to the front page and engaging with it, as the young folks say.

We mentioned that the article is twelve years old. Dr. Boli always leaves the comments open for every article, no matter how old. Many sites close comments after a week or so, but we would miss a lot if we did that. For example, the Free Blank Sheet of Paper is like flypaper for commenters, and we have learned much about the American mind from those comments.

The article in question was called “Popular Misconceptions About the Civil War,” and here is the comment in full:

There is nothing funny about this so-called “Celebrated Magazine.” I think the man who wrote it is the only one who is enthusiastic about it. To compare slavery with modern-day corporations is despicable and shows a lack of intelligence. For people to make excuses for what this man wrote and state that his comments were a joke or a parody is just as bad! How about we all stand up and say slavery was horrific and should never have happened? There aren’t many things in history to laugh about; instead, we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives. THINK: is it thoughtful, helpful, necessary or kind? If it isn’t, please don’t say anything.

Having read the last sentence, Dr. Boli went back to the sentence in which our commenter called him despicable and lacking in intelligence and tried to fit it into one of the four categories—thoughtful, helpful, necessary, or kind. Necessary was probably the one the comment was intended to fit.

But to Dr. Boli, the most interesting sentence in the whole comment was this one:

There aren’t many things in history to laugh about; instead, we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives.

This seems to be the implicit assumption in many arguments today, and our commenter has done us a great favor by articulating it clearly and expressing it economically.

Now, it is probably unfair to bring logic to a moral argument. There is, after all, no logical way to prove that something is funny, or that something is offensive.

However, if there is very little to laugh about in history, then there is very little to laugh about. All laughter is suspect, because we are living in history. This is the puritan ideal: laugh too much and you’ll find yourself in the stocks.

We can admit that it is logically possible to say that we are not living in history. You could in theory make a meaningful distinction between the present and the past, between current times and history. If you believe that the world was perfected at some point in our own lifetimes—if you believe that the Millennium has arrived, and we are the righteous who have inherited the earth—then you can draw a line at the point where the world became perfect, and say that history was what happened before that. After that line is goodness and joy and laughter; before that line is wickedness and misery and pain. To transport joy and laughter back into those miserable times would be a fallacy.

That would be a logically consistent belief. It would also be stupid; that probably goes without saying. To believe that everything in the modern world is fundamentally right would require a more-than-Panglossian optimism. So we are left with a simple syllogism: we are not permitted to laugh at history; history is our entire existence; therefore, we are not permitted to laugh at all.

But it may be that we are permitted to laugh at a few things, even in history. Laughter of approval is sometimes allowed by the more relaxed sort of puritan, though the purest puritan would renounce it. We might laugh, for example, at bad people getting the punishment they deserve.

That would put us on the side of the tyrants.

What will tyranny look like when it comes to your country? For most people, tyranny will look like bad people getting what they deserve. Dictatorship is democracy run rampant. It almost always begins as the majority getting what they want right now, without having to put up with delays like people filing lawsuits and courts deciding whether it’s actually legal and blah blah blah. If you are in that majority, then as the dictatorship takes root you will be cheering. At last you have freedom: you are free from the tyranny of laws and bills of rights and sour-faced judges telling you you can’t do that. As the secret police raid your neighbors’ houses, as people you didn’t like very much disappear, you will laugh. Bad people are getting what they deserve. It’s funny because it’s right.

But here is where our commenter’s suggestion about the use of history seems absolutely correct: “we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives.” If we remember that this is how the world looked to respectable Germans as the Nazi night was falling, then we can recognize the larval tyranny and squash it now. If we remember that fugitive slave laws made anyone who so much as helped a free Black citizen a suspect, let alone someone who gave aid and comfort to an escaping slave, then we may recognize similar laws when our legislators try to foist them on us today.

But this vigilance requires a certain assumption. It requires us to assume that we might, possibly, be just as bad as our ancestors. It requires us to look back at history and see the Holocaust, slavery, the Inquisition, the Crusades (looking at them from both sides), and every war and atrocity there ever was in the world, and think to ourselves, “I wonder what we’re doing now that will make our descendants curse us.”

If you are really so self-assured that you believe our age has figured it all out, that we are invariably the moral superiors of our antebellum ancestors, then you will not be on the alert for evil today. You will leave your door unlocked, and evil will walk right in. And you will not even recognize it for what it is, because you will believe that evil cannot possibly take up residence in your own home. Who is that fellow in the expensive suit who wears horns on his head and smells like brimstone? We don’t know; he just appeared in the parlor one day, and he seems very nice.

In other words, you will be in exactly the same position as your antebellum ancestors, who grew up in a world with slavery and for the most part simply accepted that this was the way the world worked. After all, they were living at the peak of human civilization. They had learned the lessons of history; they were better than their ancestors. And so they left the door open, and Satan walked right in.

One-third of the white population of the South before the Civil War owned slaves. (Mark Twain’s family was among them.) Were all those millions of people evil? Yes, without a question. But were they more evil than we are? That is the question we must constantly have before us. The answer at any given moment, just as a matter of statistics, is probably no. As it is written, There is none righteous, no not one.

But how do we exercise that vigilance most effectively? Well, we laugh. We laugh at evil, because the sin of Satan is pride, and laughter is the one thing he cannot endure. And while we are laughing at history, we are always on the alert for analogies to our own time. To laugh at history is not just permissible; it is our moral duty. To believe that we are capable of the same mistakes, and that we are probably making mistakes just as big right now, is the only sane way to apply the lessons of history to our own time. This implies, of course, that it is our moral duty to laugh at ourselves. And Dr. Boli takes that moral duty very seriously.

Photo from Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (photograph by Jeon Han), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Francis, the first Bishop of Rome of that name, will be remembered as the man who stood before the world for a dozen years as the smiling face of the Roman Catholic Church. He will probably not be remembered as the most notoriously dour face in the College of Cardinals, but that was his reputation before his election. Dr. Boli’s favorite picture of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires before he became pope was taken on the subway, where he was sitting with the rest of the commuters, looking as utterly glum as any assistant clerk on his way to the office.

In the coming days we shall doubtless hear many eulogies and not a few critical assessments of Francis, but Dr. Boli will remember him most for his smile. It was a deliberate act of heroism. It was not natural to him at all, but he realized that what the Catholic Church needed at this moment was a smiling face at the top. So he taught himself to smile. It had to be done, and he did it. Moreover, he managed to make it look natural, unlike his predecessor—a naturally pleasant and cheerful man who always looked slightly terrifying when he smiled.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the career of the late Pope Francis, then, let it be this: that pleasantness and good cheer can be a duty, and that the world cannot be improved without them—even if they come at great personal cost.