Sheehy's firefighting proposal

By DARRELL EHRLICK | Editor-in-Chief

"I call it a military exercise because people would rather have it called that. It’s not a big war for us.” – President Donald J. Trump on Sunday, commenting on the war with Iran.

As if we needed more troubling news: Officials say that Social Security and the trust fund that distributes the monthly payment to millions of Americans of retirement age said that it will become insolvent sooner than had been anticipated. Now, that date has been projected to be in 2032. Yikes.

Congress finally passes the last part of the budget that had been stalled and caused a “partial government shutdown.” With no Democratic support and a few Republicans peeling off, too, the $70 billion funding package that will keep immigration operations through the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term is a done deal, but only by the smallest margins.

Even though Trump has been railing against mail-in voting while speaking about rigged elections with virtually no proof, the administration has begun to back off some of its demands. One of the largest sticking points was how voter data would be used, and the Department of Homeland Security backed off some of its plans to share information on Monday night.

An Apache helicopter was shot down by Iran in the war with that country, and President Trump vowed revenge and action after the strike that didn’t appear to kill or harm crew members.

As Congress considers increasing penalties for those accused of carjacking, critics say that the new legislation won’t necessarily solve the problem. Instead, they said that the new penalties and law will mean that those found guilty will spend longer in prison. And the average age of those convicted of carjacking tends to be young means that more people will spend a longer time behind bars when they may have better outcomes by rehabilitation and other programs.

Despite repeated messaging by the Trump administration warning pregnant women not to take the anti-inflammatory drug Tylenol, more scientific research shows that the drug is safe for those who are pregnant even as government leaders spread concern about the common over-the-counter medication.

I imagine if I said: “David Crisp rocks” to the recently departed David Crisp, he would stare for a moment, maybe harrrumph, and be unimpressed.  I knew David as one of the dozens of journalists at The Billings Gazette whom I grew up admiring and reading. David departed the statewide newspaper about the time I got started in the business. After his departure and remarkably ahead of his time, he thought about a weekly newspaper that would focus on local issues. He started and ran The Outpost for years, doing what weekly newspapers often did to stay afloat: He wrote, edited, composed, delivered the paper and probably cleaned the bathrooms, too.

Crisp died on May 16.

I can’t claim any special relationship with a man so many people credited with helping them to write better. He was, though, always kind, and we talked about an entire universe of subjects, all of which he seemed knowledgeable about. In so many ways, Crisp is what so many great editors should be — independent, humble, curmudgeonly, smart and clever.

In another not-so-distant time, Crisp’s passing would have drawn attention on the pages of newspapers, with a chorus of colleagues sharing stories about their journalism adventures and close-calls of deadlines.

That’s the ironic thing about being a journalist: Those who spend an entire career documenting the life of a community and others are often accidentally omitted from history as just another ink-stained wretch, or maybe an even worse fate, simply a footnote at the back of some book.

I’ll also take the words that fellow Gazette alumnus Ed Kemmick posted and has been recirculating on social media to memorialize Crisp:

I wonder how many readers of Yellowstone County News realized how lucky they were to have had David Crisp’s column for nearly the past four years.

David, who died May 16 at the age of 75, was recruited to represent the “progressive” point of view for Yellowstone County News. That he did, but unlike most everybody else who writes or talks about politics these days, David never sank to name-calling or invective, and his writing was elegantly simple and doggedly factual.

Week after week, he worked hard to produce columns that explained and contextualized the news and the passing scene. He wrote about state and national politics, the changing media landscape, First Amendment issues, Montana history and his two touchstones, Dostoevsky and Groucho Marx. The best of his columns could have appeared in any of the country’s major newspapers.

David also inspired countless letters to the editor, many of them less generous than his columns. My favorite, and I think it was David’s too, was the letter in which he was described as a “hippie hermit,” apparently based on the column mugshot that showed him in a tweed newsboy cap and long white beard. David laughed because he had no vanity to wound, and he knew that personal attacks were the last refuge of a person losing an argument.

David landed in Billings in 1992, three years after I did, and we worked together at the Billings Gazette for five years, first as region editors on the 3-to-midnight shift. In that role, and even after he returned to reporting, David was an editor and mentor to the other reporters.

He was a thorough, patient and encouraging editor. Newsrooms can be tense places, given the difficulties of trying to produce perfection on a daily basis, but David never lost his cool, or his kindness. Though smart and well-read, he did not give condescending advice. I heard many reporters say he was the best editor they’d ever had. I know that some of his students at MSU Billings and Rocky Mountain College, where he taught part-time, were similarly appreciative.

Despite his calm, he could feel righteous anger. Once, the Gazette publisher, fussing about the freshly laid carpet in the newsroom, passed out plastic coffee cups with lids, basically adult sippy cups, and forbade the use of traditional mugs. The rest of us just laughed at the pettiness of the edict and went back to our mugs after a few days. Not David. An Army veteran who served in Germany during the Vietnam War, David wasn’t going to ignore a direct order. Instead, he left the sippy cup in its plastic wrap on his desk and gave up drinking coffee at work.

He left the Gazette in 1997 to start the Billings Outpost, a weekly newspaper to which he devoted most of his waking hours for the next 20 years. I got a chance to collaborate with him again after he shut down the Outpost and we worked together at Last Best News, an online newspaper I started after leaving the Gazette myself.

There, I got a close-up view of the pains he took even on seemingly simple columns. He was never satisfied with secondhand information and certainly not with repeating claims made by others. He might put in hours of research trying to nail down a single fact. Sometimes he’d send over a column with an apology for being late, explaining that he’d been up until 2 or 3 a.m. trying to sort out some question of political or social importance.

The key to David’s writing wasn’t that he was highly intelligent, which he was. The key was that he was, all his life, fundamentally a moralist. His father was a mail carrier and Bible-believing Church of Christ preacher in Texas. When David was still in high school, he and a friend spent an entire summer giving Sunday sermons at a nearby church that was temporarily without a pastor.

David told me years ago, with a rare flash of pride, about all the soul- and brain-wracking work that went into sermons on the Book of Job that he gave on two consecutive Sundays. He would later lose his faith in organized religion, if not in a divinity, but he stayed true to the old-fashioned morality he had absorbed in his youth.

In his political writing, as in all aspects of his life, David’s judgments were based on that morality, on the verities once recognized by most people. He made that truth-telling look so effortless that some readers may have overlooked his brilliance.

Now that he’s gone, I hope all David’s readers come to miss his clear, distinctive voice.

After reading recently that growing up I liked Metallica, one of our Hooksters asked: You liked metal?!?

Yes. Very much at one time. I can’t begin to tell you what it did to me when one of the “pop mix” music stations, which plays a variety of older songs, played, “Enter Sandman.” The song that followed it was from Air Supply. I nearly wept.

The origins of “heavy metal” are interesting because you have many groups like Steppenwolf and Black Sabbath who had elements, from dark lyrics to crunchy guitar work complete with distortion. Of course, there were bands like Twisted Sister and KISS, which helped establish the look that leaned into black leather and makeup. But like so many genres, it’s hard — bordering on impossible — to determine the precise moment it became a genre.

One of the bands that helped form what would become “heavy metal” was Black Oak Arkansas, which produced more than a dozen albums and was known for their edgy hard rock. You may recall their popular remake of the 1950s pop hit, “Jim Dandy.” The albums had longer cuts, which encouraged listening to the album because those long tracks weren’t often played on the radio. “Fancy Nancy” was from the group’s 1975 album, “Live Mutha,” which also helped continue to establish the genre as “bad boys” and rebels.

As I was listening to the entire album, I found myself thinking that it is one of several albums released in the late 1960s and 1970s that should be credited as being an early example — not just a song — of the sound that would move into the mainstream during the 1980s and large-venue arenas.

If you have a song that you’d like to share, or would like to get in touch with us, please send us a note at [email protected]

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