Jonathan P. Baird

Hard for me to believe but it has been five years since my dad passed away. My dad, Donald Baird, died on May 4, 2009.

Memories of my dad remain vivid. He was a large presence and a big personality. He could be overwhelming. He did not countenance opposition easily and I gave him plenty of things to be upset about. Still we worked through much of the contention and reached a good place.

I do have memories from early childhood of hearing my parents arguing in their bedroom behind closed doors. My mom cried sometimes. My sister Lisa and I would nosily listen to their fights, straining to hear what we could. We moved to a listening post as close to their bedroom door as we thought we could safely stay.

It was hard to win arguments with my dad. He had an unfortunate tendency to equate loyalty with acquiescence. I think that was particularly hard for my mom.

I remain struck by the force of his personality, his drive and his optimism. He never stopped working. He lived to be 88 and he never retired. This was partly based on economic necessity but it was impossible to think of my dad living a retired life at home.

He probably would have driven my mom crazy. He was not the type to putter around his apartment, fixing things. Work gave him a profound sense of purpose. I think it was a source of passion and pride.

My dad built a very successful international textile trading business. He and my mom travelled all over the world many times, especially to Japan, Hong Kong, and Italy. I think he was something of a good will ambassador for America. He and my mom went off beaten tracks and they travelled to places Americans did not tend to go in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Dad went to Pakistan, Syria, India and especially the Far East. My parents made some very good international friends that way.

There is much I could say about my dad’s business career. He had his highs and lows. He made a lot of money but he also ended up going bankrupt twice. In the latter part of his career he was caught in a downward spiral and anxiety about money was a big part of his life. He got into the unenviable position of relying on credit cards, a disastrous course. He was typically using one credit card to pay off another credit card.

Dad tended to trust employees who were not trustworthy and he repeatedly was ripped off. For a guy with some degree of street smarts, he was seriously taken advantage of. He made mistakes in his judgment of people, erring on the side of undeserved trust.

I really wanted to write about his optimism. It was unrelenting and it carried him far. He had an amazing ability to persist even in dire and humiliating circumstances. Back in February, I read an article in the New Yorker about Diana Nyad, the 60 year plus swimmer who tried five times to swim from Cuba to the United States. She failed over and over but she never gave up. She finally succeeded. It is a great story.

The New Yorker story quoted Nyad saying, “A champion is someone who never gives up.” That is the way I look at my dad.

In the last 30 years of his life, I often wondered about the realism in his business efforts. He was barely keeping his head above water but he never quit. He had remarkable persistence and resilience. He was always optimistic, seeing the glass half full. He was also unfailingly generous, especially to family but not just family.

In retrospect, it is easy to look back and say he never realistically had a chance to turn things in his business around. The only thing is I believed maybe, just maybe, he could turn it around. My belief was based on his history and his will. He made me a believer because he didn’t quit.

Now it seems a little crazy to think Dad could have gotten his business back to a good place in his 80’s. It is just that he had massive experience, business connections, good will and he kept on. I guess my own belief in him is an indication of how far persistence can take you. I do believe it was William Blake who said, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”

When my dad died we got emails from business people around the world who knew Dad. Here is one I saved from a Pakistani friend:

To the Family of Donald Baird:

Greatly shocked to know Donald L. Baird passed away. I have lost a great friend. He was a role model and helped me to establish in business since 1955. I pray to almighty Lord his soul may rest in peace in paradise. I will try to attend memorial event in his honor on Sunday June 7th 2009 if my doctors allow me to travel as I am on medication for the last few years. Deena Baird take care you have good children to look after you.

Warm Personal Regards;

Riaz

My dad’s memory remains a great source of strength and personal pride. Life routinely dishes out unfairness and tragedy. I was blessed to have a dad with the qualities of Don Baird. I will forever be grateful to him for setting such a positive and loving example. He modeled a good way to live and love life.

Tonight Debra made me a vodka martini, shaken not stirred. Drinking that is a good way to honor my dad.

Tony Benn in 2008 (Regent’s University London/Flickr)

Ever since I learned that Tony Benn had passed away on March 14, I was looking for a good remembrance that would introduce the man and his life. The piece I am reprinting which was written by Norman Birnbaum was the best piece I found. It was on the website of the Nation Magazine. Benn who was described at the end of his life as a national treasure was one of England’s best known leftists.

My favorite Tony Benn story which is alluded to in the piece is about how Benn renounced his lordship. He had been a member of the House of Commons. When his father died in 1960, he became Viscount Stansgate. Benn then led a political struggle to change the British law so nobles could renounce their titles. He wanted to go back to serve in the House of Commons which he did. I liked his comment about the House of Lords: “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”

Gary Younge, who also wrote a fine piece about Benn, said that the two things that stood out about him were his optimism and his persistence. He was a long-time activist. Benn was also famous for his quotes. I will share one additional one I like:

“What is the final corruption in politics? Earlier, it was to get into cabinet, before that, to be popular, but, later on, the final corruption is this kindly, harmless old gentleman. I’m very aware of that. I take the praise as sceptically as I took the abuse. I asked myself some time ago: what do you do when you’re old? You don’t whinge, you don’t talk all the time about the past, you don’t try and manage anything, you try and encourage people.”

The piece by Norman Birnbaum is below:

Tony Benn’s wealthy family performed public service for generations. His father was a minister in the postwar reform Labour government of Clement Attlee. The father, Lord Stansgate, was a typical radical member of the educated gentry, of the same moral stuff as Bertrand Russell. The father made a familiar British journey from liberalism, with its concerns for the dignity and rights of ordinary citizens, its distrust of elite pretensions to superior knowledge and privilege, to Labour in company with many others. That gave Labour its very complex moral culture—a juxtaposition of near revolutionary vision, a perpetually outraged sense of justice and a resolve to construct piece by piece what the Labour hymn terms “a new Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.”

Tony Benn (Anthony Wedgwood Benn) died at age 88 last week—and was immediately and fulsomely praised by many well able to restrain their enthusiasm for him in his lifetime. He was a great parliamentary orator, an inspiring speaker at countless gatherings and meetings outside it, a tireless writer, and above all, a prophet who earned honor in his own country. Much in his background foretold a rather more conventional career, and he did indeed initially if ambivalently pursue one. He held senior cabinet posts in the Wilson and Callaghan governments of the sixties and seventies. He remained in Parliament, an increasingly acerbic and influential critic of both Thatcher and her successor John Major and of his own party’s supposed savior, Tony Blair, until 2001, when he retired “to devote more time to politics.”

British politics had changed immensely since Benn first entered Parliament in 1950. The class bound and locally rooted antagonists, Labour and Conservative, had to learn national media strategies in the television age. Imperial power was claimed, triumphantly, by the Americans, and the realistic British acknowledged, sorrowfully, that their nation was subordinate to its erstwhile cousins. The West Europeans (including old enemies Germany and Italy) had achieved more prosperity and successful welfare states administered by socialists and social Christians in alternation or alliance. Black and brown immigrants began to flow in from the Commonwealth. Harold Macmillan, a Tory Keynesian, won the 1959 general election with the slogan, “We are all workers now.” Labour argued endlessly about what a modern socialist project would entail.

Benn’s early career was chiefly conspicuous for his struggle to avoid having to move to the House of Lords after his father’s death in 1960. It took three years, but new legislation enabled him to renounce the Peerage. There were some signs of rebelliousness in a generally dutiful early political biography. He was one of the first parliamentarians to criticize South African apartheid, and—in opposition to the party leadership—voiced skepticism about Britain’s nuclear weaponry. Benn, unlike many of his Labour contemporaries, took seriously the more critical cultural and political currents in the larger society. These included, variously, the New Left, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a systematic disrespect for inherited patterns of deference and sobriety. When the New Left thought of profoundly altering Great Britain, we took the revolutionary step of opening The Partisan Café in Soho, central London. My memory is of Benn coming from time to time with his American wife, Caroline, a remarkably intelligent person utterly unsympathetic to the belief of many Britons (some in Labour) that nothing should ever be done for the first time.

It was not a belief congenial to Benn. His familial political inheritance was a doctrine of the necessity of continuous reform. Great social movements in modern Britain had solid textual inspiration—the prophetic books of the King James Bible. Speaking to The Spectator journalist Mary Whitfield not long before he died, Benn said:

My mother and father were both Congregationalists and Congregationalism is interesting because everyone has a hot line to the Almighty, you don’t need a Bishop to help you. So no hierarchies, just trust the people. We used to read the Bible every night and my mother told me that the Bible is the story of the conflict between the Kings who had power and the Prophets who preached righteousness. She taught me to support the Prophets against the Kings.

Benn’s path to the prophetic status he occupied for years took him through cabinet posts, profound political conflict, and internal exile in his own party. As minister and contender for party leadership posts he insisted on using the state to modernize Britain’s industry. Wilson and his rather more robust successor Callaghan were unwilling to undertake a total confrontation with the masters and ideologies of British financial capitalism, the City and Blair proudly declared that New Labour was the best ally of new (and old) money. Labour actually split in the early phases of the argument, a group led by Roy Jenkins and David Owen forming a new party. Thatcher in 1979 exploited these divisions to win an election and proceeded to total war on the trade unions and local and regional self government. Benn’s open intention of reconstructing Labour doctrine and practice in its entirety discountenanced and frightened many of his contemporaries in Labour, and he was relegated to the back benches.

Actually, his failure to remain in the party leadership (he sought the Deputy Leadership but was defeated in 1981) was liberating. Sufficient numbers of parliamentary colleagues agreed with him, or sympathized with him, to preclude his being completely excluded. He spoke for himself, or rather, for groups and ideas disregarded as Labour’s leaders flailed desperately in the effort to construct a coherent response to Thatcherism.

In December of 1980 he came to Washington as guest of the United Auto Workers and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (with the Democratic Socialists of America) to participate in a conference on Eurosocialism. The other guests included Willy Brandt, Felipe Gonzales, François Mitterrand and Olaf Palme. I spent some time with Tony on the occasion, and we talked of the imminence of Reaganism, our fears of the intensification of the Cold War, and the precarious position of the parties of reform. Tony had seen some of the Protestant fundamentalist television spectacles, with their calls for war on Communism and secularism, pluralism and the welfare state. To think, he said, that the origins of much of American democracy were the same as our own in Britain—the thoroughgoing democracy preached in Cromwell’s seventeenth-century revolution. I could offer very little consolation: the spiritual energy that had infused the New Deal and the Great Society, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam protests, had drained away. In both English-speaking nations, we were about to experience the woeful compromises, the retreats depicted as realistic advances, of the Third Way—to be incorporated later in the policies of Clinton and Blair.

I visited Tony occasionally, thereafter, on trips to London. I was struck by the quality of the younger people working in his parliamentary office. One of them was later to become a Nation intern, Ed Miliband. Upon Tony’s death, he issued a fine tribute to him, speaking as Labour’s leader, as an embodiment of conviction. Looking at Tony’s persistence in the past decades, the astonishing thing about it was indeed his unfailing moral generosity, his belief that the creative and communal potential of human nature could become actual, his sense that in total opposition he was custodian of treasures of national memory which ought not be allowed to dissipate.

No doubt, there was a good deal of his religious inheritance in it. There was also something enduringly solid in British culture, hard common sense. (Recall the Parliamentary debate after which the House of Commons rejected Cameron’s plans to intervene in Syria.) I recollect a talk by Tony in the London suburbs. A few hundred people came, plenty of seniors with a fair presence of younger persons. Tony looked around, began by estimating the average age of his auditors, and raised a question. “There are about twenty thousand years of life experience in this hall. Do you think our nation has taken full advantage of what you have to give?” Of course, Tony campaigned against the Iraq war, against the monetarization of British existence brought about by the sovereignty of the City, against the arrogance of elites. He will be remembered for something deeper, his respect for his fellow citizens as an expression of his belief in a national mission.