To Forgive (But Not Forget) Is Divine

For many a year my favorite hangout in all of Saint Louis was a picturesque old pub, O’Connell’s, that felt like stepping back into time immemorial. For years they’d had an intriguingly-stocked antique shop upstairs during daytime hours, which eventually turned into an after-hours performance venue, and the dimly lit public house itself was lined with all sorts of evocative prints of wooden ships and 19^th century prizefighters and so forth. It was a classic and supremely atmospheric watering hole with flawless no-frills burgers and the best onion rings I’ve ever had, and a landmark I felt absolutely obliged to hit each and every time I made it back to town.

From that evening in my early 20s when my Dad first brought me there, through the years until the coming of the Covid era, O’Connell’s had to me always embodied a certain old-school workingman’s solidarity. But then, in late summer 2021, the institution suddenly posted a remarkably hostile declaration across social media that any and all unvaccinated people (save children under 12) were expressly banned from ever entering the pub again.

“We ask that you do not come to the pub if you have not been vaccinated. This is coming directly from the owner. We don't want you to come and sit outside and then send a server to go out and wait on the people who are not vaccinated. No way. Just don't come to the pub, ever. It's not safe for you to come now or at any point in the future. Even when 80% of the population is vaccinated it won't be safe. Not inside, not outside, not on the patio, nowhere. If you aren't vaccinated or don't plan to be vaccinated, don't come. Ever.”

My jaw literally dropped the first time I read that, and then the second time too. (And then yet again to see that, as of press time in 2025, they’ve still not deleted it!) While I certainly support the right of business owners to determine what makes the most sense for their establishments, the tone of the post was just so unnecessarily divisive, not to mention fundamentally contradictory to the O’Connell’s brand—perhaps comparable to Cracker Barrel pushing rainbow rocking chairs for Pride Month or Jaguar’s disastrous attempt at image reinvention.

Speaking as a former PR flack, the institution might easily and diplomatically have announced their new policy with something more like “Hey folks, for now we’ve decided that vaxxed-up only is what we and prob most establishments need to do during these scary times, and encourage everyone to get the jab ASAP so we can serve you again like tomorrow :) We’re all in this together!” But the official post was so jarringly discordant, and flagrantly contemptuous of customers who might happen to feel that the decision whether or not to receive an experimental shot should be privately “their body, their choice,” that I’d felt obliged to respect the owner’s request by continuing to boycott his business long after vaccine verification stopped being a thing.

And then a few weeks ago, waiting at La Guardia for a flight back to St. Louis, I happened upon a local news item that venerable old O’Connell’s was struggling to make payroll due to extensive construction making most customers’ usual route a nightmare during rush hour (it went unmentioned that the business had gone out of its way to alienate a big chunk of its clientele) and perhaps teetering toward closure, so the community was rallying to attempt to save the place. Sitting there in New York, on my way back to my good old hometown, I had to confront the hard binary of whether STL, battered hard in recent years by the Ferguson riots, the ignominious exit of the Rams NFL franchise, and most recently by horrific tornadoes that disproportionately wrecked many of the city’s neediest neighborhoods, would be better or worse off without scenic O’Connell’s still around.

Not to mention that I’d heard it through the grapevine that the owner was famous in certain circles for being an irascible character who’d managed to make an enemy of St. Louis’ sizeable punk rock community, and also that the particular offending social media post had been made in grief in the immediate wake of the Covid-involved passing of a well-liked O’Connell’s employee. Plus, the pandemic had been weirdly pregnant with all sorts of stark class implications in St. Louis, as a beleaguered blue enclave in a very red state, that I saw nowhere near as much in New York: in the big city different people felt how they felt about the virus, it was what it was, but in St. Louis the very most ostentatious praise of Saint Fauci, and pious following of each and every rule, and fiercest blaming of every single Covid death on Donald Trump, became a ubiquitous form of social one-upmanship.

And so, even before my plane landed, I’d decided that the time had come to bury the hatchet and let bygones be bygones. It seemed unlikely that I’d ever see eye to eye with the present owner of O’Connell’s, who’d happened to inherit the business from his father, but I’d heard he was in the process of selling off partial ownership to someone, anyone, who might be less objectionable to the public. Having missed breakfast, I headed straight to the pub from the airport to do the right thing for St. Louis, googling on the way to make sure I remembered how to get there. There’s no doubt in my mind that the city is better off with O’Connell’s than without, so I feel obliged to do my part to try to save it.

As I’d sat pondering at La Guardia, there was another St. Louis institution on my mind about which I’ve long had mixed feelings: our local PBS affiliate, KETC, aka the Nine Network, which has just lost a big chunk of its budget via the federal rescissions package zeroing out public funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I grew up watching Channel Nine, and still watch quite a bit of it when I’m in town as they produce a variety of outstanding local content and play an important role regionally. My family had always been dues-paying KETC members when I was growing up, but I’d cancelled my membership some years back in protest of the increasingly blatant ideological bias of PBS national programming, particularly in news content. Speaking as someone who started my career at a national news show on PBS, I now believe that PBS should exit the national news industry entirely.

I’ve been frustrated with PBS for many years, and its critics are absolutely right that some at PBS have time and again fundamentally betrayed the public trust by dismissing and outright demonizing nearly half the country. Heads need to roll, a lot of them, and I understand why so many conservatives are giddy to see the government funding yanked. But I don’t feel giddy—I feel sad that reckless and unprincipled abuse of the public trust from a relative handful of bad actors has brought PBS to the brink of destruction. KETC has irked me on occasion, but the vast majority of what I’ve found offensive about PBS over the years has come from its national news programming. When it comes to Channel Nine and other local stations around the country, there’s a whole lot of precious baby getting thrown out with the bathwater.

And so, ambivalently, I’m in the process of signing back up as a dues-paying member of KETC. Again I’ve found myself faced with the hard binary of whether St. Louis would be better or worse off without an institution that has done some wrong. As many times as KETC has aired inappropriate content, I cannot escape the conclusion that St. Louis is unambiguously better off with the station than without. I don’t like purple-haired librarians indoctrinating children, but the solution to that isn’t tearing down the libraries—it’s replacing bad apples with personnel capable of behaving professionally. St. Louis media is already bleeding; in just the past couple of years we lost our alt-weekly The Riverfront Times even as our fantastic independent radio station KDHX was deliberately run into the ground by malicious leadership. We simply cannot afford to lose KETC, too.

I can’t say I’m hugely optimistic about the long-term future of PBS. There’s little prospect of public funding being restored until Democrats score a trifecta in Washington, which seems unlikely for at least several years. Strategically, national PBS should take the crisis as a wake-up call to finally clean up its act to become more suitable for public funding, but the likelier scenario in my view is that it will instead plunge down the national NPR path of pandering ever harder to stridently progressive donors, becoming even more ideologically slanted, and thus making itself so irrelevant to the broader discourse that the system inexorably withers away. But just because that’s the likely scenario doesn’t mean it’s inevitable—“Nothing is written,” as Colonel Lawrence said, and perhaps if enough squeamish viewers reluctantly donate to their PBS stations as a gesture of good will while making it clear that the spigot will close if the programming does not reciprocate that good will, the grimmest eventuality might yet be averted. At very least, the promise of salvaging PBS is worth the attempt.

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I was pleased to appear on Mike Pesca’s Not Even Mad podcast with political consultant Zee Cohen-Sanchez to discuss the defunding of public broadcasting, the politics of immigration, and more.

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Next: Columbia’s Sweet Surrender

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