Chester A. Arthur: A Model for Ops and Others

Posted on June 28, 2002 in Courage & Activism

Chester A. Arthur: A Model for Ops and Others

When I think of my role model for op, this president comes to mind. I’ve seen a few bad ops in my time, mostly right wingers but not always, who favor their friends and use their position to harass people who hold opposite political views. Ops such as these think it is all right to invent rules on the spot or kick you for things that don’t make sense as violations. Or they bait you. Right after 9-11, I was called “a terrorist lover” by a CNN op. I told her to follow a particular diet suitable for those who lived in low places and she kicked me for it. Another op brought me back. This was shortly before CNN’s chat program collapsed utterly. Still another had such a reputation for baiting and kicking that when new channels were formed after the fall of CNN Chat, no one wanted him as an op.

There were those who assumed that given what I had gone through at the hands of these miscreants that I would use my own op position for similar purposes. Some minds think that everyone sees power like they do. You get it and exploit it.

This is where Chester A. Arthur makes a fine example. Arthur was a political ward boss out of upper New York state, a hack who used his unelected position to enrich himself and his friends. He had a particularly terrible reputation for graft. Backroom dealers put him on the Republican ticket as Vice President because of favors owed to the Republican Party of New York in securing the election of James A. Garfield. Arthur was expected to serve out his term snoozing in the President’s chair in the United States Senate.

Garfield’s assassination and death after a lengthy illness (his assassin, Charles Guiteau, argued rather aptly that he had not killed Garfield — his physicians had) put Arthur in the White House. Long time political allies were quick to gallop down to the District of Columbia. One dashed through the door of the Oval Office and shut the door. He immediately began explaining a plot he had to aggrandize Arthur and himself using the presidential office. Arthur stopped him and explained, flat out, that while in the old days he would have happily helped him, he could no longer do so because he was president. He had to do what was good for the country.

My first kick was of a friend who insulted a conservative. Two minutes later, the conservative, an long time enemy of mine, started up on me for telling the channel to keep things “nice”. His invective crossed the line and I banned him, which effectively drops the Cone of Silence over him for a few minutes. When he came back a few minutes later, he complained loudly that I was picking on conservatives. I merely pointed to the fact that my friend had been kicked not two minutes before he was. He spewed and sputtered, but I had the last laugh.

I often point to the ops that have been particularly ruthless in enforcing their own code of political correctness and say to my friends “Don’t expect me to be the liberal version of that guy.” I think the greatest political gift one can give to a channel is the gift of decent conversation. (I, for one, advocated and got some changes to what we kicked for. For example, I noted that there was a difference in using an expletive in a statement like “I feel like shit” which, though distasteful to some, is nonconfrontory. Telling someone to dine on their fecal droppings is a different matter. #news_garden now disciplines for the second, but no longer the first.) Chester A. Arthur taught me that I must keep this kind of thing before anything else. An op or any other person with power should not use that power for any purpose other than the good order of the organization which he serves.