At moments like this, with President-elect Donald Trump picking second-string TV personalities and other charlatans for cabinet positions, I think of Jim Mustard.
Trump offers America his contempt for the historic gravity of all previous presidents’ cabinet picks and mocks the importance of institutions that help hold the country together.
Mustard – who died in 1996 at age 51 — had more love of country, and more respect for America’s ideals, than almost anyone I’ve ever known. He kept his political leanings to himself, but I have no doubt he’d be raging at Trump for endangering the country.
Remember Jim?
He spent 23 years working as a reporter and editor at WBAL-TV. Skinny guy, sparse hair. In an era when TV news majored in great haircuts and glamor-puss personalities, Jim always made the story most important and not himself. And objectivity and fairness were always central.
He was the most unobtrusively passionate of men. He spent every Fourth of July reading the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
They were his way of reminding himself of the things that made this country great. If you started talking about that inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty, you reduced this man to tears.
Years ago, when I taught journalism at what was then known as Towson State University, I’d bring Jim out to talk to my classes. He’d say a few words of introduction and then ask for questions, to let the kids guide the conversation.
A hand would shoot into the air, but never a second one. Nobody got the chance. Filled with enthusiasm, he’d spend the entire hour answering the first question, free-associating from one point to another, trying to give these kids not only the nuts and bolts of journalism but the beating of a ferocious heart.
For Jim, journalism had the elements of a moral crusade. Let the people know the truth and they’ll figure out the right thing to do. But they had to know the truth.
We now live in a time when Donald Trump, who calls reporters “enemies of the people,” hints at penalties for journalists and opinion writers he would wish to silence. Watch who stands up to this and who shrinks into the shadows.
Jim Mustard was always a guy on the outside. He was a gay man living in a time when he had to keep that to himself. He wondered why people who live in a free society took pains to try to make other people feel like freaks.
“They talk of religion based on love and healing,” he said one afternoon, mentioning prominent people from the political religious right. “I have 24 friends with AIDS, and 11 of them have died. They were in their 20s and 30s. You want to tell me where the love and caring is?”
As we now live in a time when the country bares its knuckles, one side against another, and Trump orchestrates the antagonism, I can imagine how Mustard might have reacted.
He was a TV newsman with the emphasis on “news.” He’d have been appalled at Trump’s cabinet selections, so filled with TV types and other incompetents.
On Comedy Central the other night, “news anchor” Desi Lydic riffed on Trump’s cabinet picks this way: “His defense secretary [Pete Hegseth] is a guy from ‘Fox & Friends,’ his transportation secretary [Sean Duffy] is a guy from Fox Business, and his attorney general [Rep. Matt Gaetz, before he was forced to resign amid scandal] I’m pretty sure was on [the reality series] ‘To Catch A Predator.’”
And he picked TV talk show host Dr. Mehmet Oz to oversee Americans’ health care.
“OK, but hold on,” Lydic said. “It could be worse. At least Dr. Oz is an actual doctor. I’m impressed he didn’t pick Dr. Pepper.”
The laughter you just heard was Jim Mustard’s. He knew the real thing when it came along, and told it as it was.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home.”
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