https://michaelcogdill.wordpress.com/

Michael Cogdill LLC, Greenville, SC (2026)

06/03/2026

How about a big shout out for Justice?

This man delivers on hair. I’ve had many a great stylist, especially when I was on the air. This man at Hawk and Fade, Greenville is an artist. His eye and hand for detail — virtuoso. Go see him underground just off main. He and all the guys there are true greats. 125 North Main, Greenville. (864) 867-0080

And yes, this is a welcome relief from the division of the day underneath here. My special thanks to everyone who understands what I’m talking about on Scott Pelley.

Justice, thank you!!

06/03/2026

This is beyond incompetence, this is the act of a foolish idealogue thundering through an iconic American institution of journalism. Bari Weiss believes her tenure is permanent. I can assure you, it is quite temporary, and her legacy through those halls will be brimstone that burns her worst.

As with Terry Moran, Scott Pelly, a great voice with a great audience and tremendous credibility, is now set free into the digital realm. His audience will go with him. He will not fade into the shadows, his voice will grow louder, his commitment to the truth more fierce.

The evisceration of CBS is a hallmark of tyranny, whose history of failure is clear. The woman running this network now is a managerial mountebank, a seller of snake-oil ideology when what is called for is journalism with due detachment. Celebrants of Pelly’s departure are naive. Misguided also to believe his voice has been muted.

06/02/2026

These, the words of my mother. I still seek to live up to them. And to her.

“I am proud of what he does, but I’m more proud of who he is.”

I could not be more proud of her, the memory of her, the enduring goodness of Miss Polly.

The day the years silenced her, I lost a voice worthwhile beyond words.

In an era of children divorcing their parents from themselves, even when the parent has been true and good, responsible and loving, I find myself longing for a conversation with my mom. Her wisdom and laughter, her strength — I long for these. IDanette Cogdilluce her to my precious wife, Danette Cogdill. I would give so much to see those two extraordinary mothers live in the company of one another.

I am reminded how precious is time with those we love and don’t get to keep nearly long enough.

May this serve as a reminder to all children who shed wonderful parents for selfish reasons — you will regret it. That lost time does not come back. You should not be pursued. You should be let go to fall on your own. That is not the absence of love, it is the presence of loving parenthood, accountability. Let your words, “I’m sorry” be heard.

I had to shed a parent when I was 17. My father was a drunk. I had to let him go. Only doing that brought him back to me, back to us. My mother, the powerful matriarch, oversaw the whole thing. She and my dad would forge a beautiful marriage out of that accountability. He became so very sorry, so very grateful, so regretful.

As with this, toxic children must be let go. Only by this do they have a chance to make good parents proud.

Divine is such surrender. Divine is the comfort given those who must let go. Divine, too, is the fall, the bruised knees of the rebellious young soul, and the lush welcome home of one who finally grows up.

Into the silence, let these words become worthwhile.

05/31/2026

A life of significance refuses an existence made of noise.

Social media thrive on confrontation. So much clack and steam. All just thoughts blown out and colliding all over.

Thoughts dissipate. Ideas take form.

The best are formed in quiet. History reminds us.

America’s founders debated. They also read and contemplated. They didn’t scroll for a stranger to beat down with ideology and a Bible. They stumbled upward into the ideas that formed this union.

It remains a shining hope in the world.

I believe we all have a responsibility to our own significance. How we navigate our own stumbling — without mocking the staggers of another — will determine whether we’re made mostly of thoughts or ideas. This determines our very decency.

My mother worked with a woman who walked with a pronounced limp. A fellow co-worker made sport of that woman’s way of walking. Laughed at her. A giggling depravity, unimaginable. An accident then befell the laughing woman, left her with nearly the same limp. I have always wondered whether the two women ever had a confrontation, a chat of revenge or schadenfreude, or did they simply carry on as best they could, finding their own way to overcome their shared limitations. My mom never said.

It all distills to the meaninglessness of clanging confrontation. Even in political campaigns, voters crave solutions to challenges, not challengers drubbing the daylights out of one another. People turn from such noise toward the significance of how best to be with one another.

None of us gets out of here alive. We’d best get busier with livable ideas, less so with the waste of weaponized thoughts. Harry Truman had a great habit of writing the worst of his thoughts onto stationery, sealing them into envelopes he did not send. The man lived a life of staggering significance, humbly, quietly.

A long way from the noise.

05/30/2026

I very rarely block someone. Free flowing ideas turn us strong. New good ideas arrive that way

Spigots of ignorance, sanctimony and faux masculinity flood a place with malice and humiliation.

So, I blocked him. I had warned.

I won’t call his name. Only hatefulness shames a man.

My blocking him will protect him from more shaming of himself.

He is devoutly, blindly, feverishly political, convinced he has God in a box of Wheaties only his tribe knows how to open. He Googles a little to rail all the more. His doctrine is xenophobia. His manifestos of masculinity borrow from a 7th grader studying for a certificate in professional wrestling.

I gave him room and time here, then realized I wasted my time in civil debate while destroying his chances for silent dignity. He kept talking. The more he talked, the higher he climbed the tree of bare-ass jubilee.

He had to go. Show’s over.

It all comes down to this. We can best love some souls from afar. We show no compassion or respect by enabling their carrying on. Some cads get thrown from the stadium for stealing foul balls from little girls. I tossed this man simply for stealing time and befouling his own chance at self-respect. No malice here. I wish him well. But the reactionary will no longer get to react all over the place here.

We get nowhere trying to change people. I am blessed to have had great private conversations — recently — with fine people who disagree with me politically or theologically or entirely. We care for one another more than caring to spew through thin veils of feeling right about everything. As for the recently ejected here, I had caught myself trying to sow caring and reason and even change onto a concrete psyche. It had begun to harden my own, soul and all.

I prefer the strengths of a tender soul, a sounder mind and the wisdom of praying the best for those who keep trying to yank us up that tree of backside-show bluster. May his ideas find a more reliable pair of pants.

I am already enjoying no longer helping him look for them.

05/29/2026

I am going to attempt a touch of antidote to the hatefulness of it all.

Hate is a schoolyard word. Children will throw it at one another, sling it at their parents, having no idea what it really means. How many times across the ages has a son said to his father, I hate you, then sat for dinner that night at mother and father’s table. Hate tends to dim as one gets hungry for love in any form.

I believe this culture we live in is hungry for something other than hatred, for a change.

There is a restlessness out there. A growing intolerance for what is selfish and vicious, childish and foolish.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged us to let no one pull us so low that we hate one another. He said this in a season of feverish hatred. We look back up upon it and find how courage aroused great change.

Let that change — and the necessary courage — flourish within us all.

05/28/2026

Gracian states a new obvious with old simplicity.

This Jesuit who lived such a long time ago, reminds us how little has changed across generations.

There have been so many cults of personality. Every single one of them has fallen. Grandiosity leads to dust. Bravado turns to bones.

But faithfulness to God as Love is eternal. Rational. Smart.

It is character, tender and strong at once.

I am reminded this morning of Blaise Pascal — one of the most brilliant mathematicians across history. Despite his father forbidding his study of math — unimaginable — he did it anyway. Drawing with charcoal on a floor as a child, he carried out the complex with a fierce perfectionism. He was brilliant the way few have ever been.

And he devised what is still known as Pascal’s Wager. Sometimes called Pascal’s Reason. He was a spiritualist and a rationalist at once.

The wager goes like this — it is intelligent to believe in God, whether you can prove God or not. It is the rational choice that leads to the greatest potential outcome. If you believe in God, and God exists, you gain the promises of God. Mystic, yet grounded in earthly wisdom. It is a brilliance, old and new.

To plunge into the mind of Pascal is to take simplistic religion, explore the complications of faith, and have it all come back down into genius simplicity. The absurdities of prosperity theologians, preening preachers on private jets, the God-talking pursuers of power fall silent in the face of Pascal.

Likewise, Grecian.

I once asked the Rev. Billy Graham what he thought of people who identify not as Christian, but as merely spiritual. He replied with his trademark humility, “Many of those people are Christians. They just don’t know it.” It was his way of saying, we all explore our Maker on our own path. And God loves us all, inescapably.

Someone will come here, swinging around the Bible, which I hold sacred, perhaps telling me I’m an apostate or I don’t know Jesus. And that’s OK. I do. I cherish the innermost kingdom.

Yes, I am betting with Pascal. I have done so since I was a young boy. This mystical faith, so enduring, so very good, makes more sense than ever before.

It is especially rational in the quiet, apart from showmanship, with some thoughtfulness going on.

05/27/2026

The very best of what can be — it demands a better being of you and me.

It is a playful little rhyme, just a tad overly precious, but it drills down to the often hidden gems of how best to be.

Father Richard Rohr is fond of saying we are human beings, not human doings. Just to be with ourselves is demanding. It compels a look at that ego, all that is material and mercenary, all our fallacies that confuse empathy with weakness, rage with strength, bravado with statesmanship.

A rearview mirror is best confined to an automobile. A human psyche does poorly with such a thing. Danette Cogdill and I get down in our humanity sometimes and start wondering all over the word — why.

Why did we not meet when we were in our 20s? Why did we not have children together? Why so much lost time?

We look back at the pain of old incompatibilities, the folly of codependency— that is, doing for others what they are more than capable of doing for themselves — and the stupendous mistake of trying to forge change up into the ways of others. Human doings reflect the human being. The being must change itself, by the hand of God. We are no one’s god.

Then, we shake this off, smile, take one another’s hand and carry on. We are grateful for the fine gift of now, and one another in it.

This has something to say about our current times and the brimstone falling all over our national conversation.

I believe America is breaking a fever. We have become divided, deeply riven, not just in our discourse, but by how we see one another. Many who had not the opportunity to go to places like Harvard or Stanford, Clemson, or whatever color you like — they look with suspicion upon those who did. There is a pedigree apartheid in America. A marginalized group looking upward. They see a pseudo-elite, looking downward.

This error is a relic of our past. It must not be a mistake of our future.

We stand on level ground, folks. As a democracy, as a people, our feet share the same dust.

If you come here at all, you know I am fond of talking about my dad, who was a miracle. Desperately shamed as a poor boy in Canton, North Carolina, raging alcoholic because shame cleaved to him like fly-laden molasses of the past. A male being letting it all go, becoming one of the finest sober men of God I will ever know. I miss him so terribly. He comes to life in this little narrative below.

Before my dad had to quit school to deliver pharmaceuticals on a bicycle in order to have something to eat during the Great Depression, he had a schoolhouse friend named Max Cogburn. My dad was the son of an unemployed railroad worker. Max was the son of a judge. Daddy went to work. Max carried on through school, ended up at Harvard. He became one of North Carolina’s most distinguished jurists, a country lawyer of city intellect and small town love of humanity.

He was my parents lawyer because he was my father’s friend, all their lives. The two men loved each other. Max never looked down at my father. Daddy never had to look up. They stood together as men who dared be friends across what is today a divide of suspicion and anger and mistrust. The wrong ways to be.

I would say to my dear mother, gesturing to Max Cogburn, there is my father at his fullest potential. But all the doings of education aside, the two men were beautiful human beings, who in this narrative teach us how to be with one another. How to live together. How to see and speak and carry on.

Yes, I’m looking back at what could’ve been, but also at what beautifully was, and remains. There was between two small town North Carolina boys only an abiding respect and understanding and love of one another. The two men died only months apart. Through my tears just now, what I would not give for 15 minutes with them in a room. How I crave the manhood of those two men who are part of the making of me.

Our nation craves what they represent. Our democracy demands it. A statesmanship, a responsibility to mutual admiration and respect and kindness. A way of loving one another across what deceives us as a divide.

It is good for a man to cry over such a past, apart from worshipping what should not be conserved. Shame. False pedigree. Ego.

I am blessed to journey forward with such a magnificent woman who understands.

05/26/2026

We descend from civilization when the dreadful becomes normal.

What led to the American Civil War became routine, ordinary, day after misbegotten day.

Same with world war, the Crusades, children across ages seeing violence at home.

When they hear screaming as domestic discourse, their normal twists like jagged metal into the ears. It cuts into the psyche. There is no forgetting.

The excruciating is never to be normalized.

I am an outlier. Witness to domestic violence as a child made me a man of devout peace. Children of violence tend toward normalizing violence. We as a civilization must disrupt the cycle. We must cultivate peace.

My precious Danette Cogdill and I cultivate boundless Eros love, affection, fun, the abundance of adoring one another. Our home is a sanctuary. She is my sanctuary, my normalization of all that is beautiful on earth.

We all have a responsibility to such peace.

My dear friend and a business partner Douglas J. Greenlaw is a highly decorated combat veteran. He is also a devout pacifist.

He recently asked of me what felt like the impossible.

Douglas wanted me to write a clarifying end of his TED talk.

This man who led boys in a battle in Vietnam despises any and all bravado of battle. He has no tolerance for the the human foolishness of war. He says it’s so well.

He is a man of peace. He is a pacifist. He is one of the strongest men any of us will ever know. He speaks strength into peace. It is his language. It is his very breath.

How old earth could I be any help to him? It seemed impossible for me to help normalize his devotion peace.

I delivered these words below to him this morning. These are not my words, even though they emerged somehow from my heart in mind. These words are his, for I would not have them without the inspiration of him.

These words form the foundation of his TED talk, the message of his memoir, the movie we will make of it. They are the summation of life for one of the most exceptional corporate leaders in America, the man who helped to build MTV and other media empires.

“There is no need to heal a wound that is prevented by peace.”

So there it is. I’m going to let it hang out there for a while here on this platform. But these words are animated by his voice, his mettle, the abiding grace this exceptional man.

I pray peace will become our normal.

Peace, our moment by moment.

05/24/2026

Memorial Day whispers from bones and absence to the heart and presence of all Americans.

All freedom loving people everywhere.

It demands of us — lay down the grill tools, the boat keys and the armaments of ideology, even for a moment.

Let the meanness of politics starve of oxygen.

Let the meaning of the day win the day.

That meaning is simple. The flecks of military headstones catch a light of reminder — those remains down there were real men and women, whose time and pulse and dreams bled out for our American experience. Our experiment in sacred democracy against evils of tyranny, imperialism, humanity’s terrible tendency to make war.

So I will stop talking here, giving this floor to Major Sullivan Ballou of Providence, Rhode Island. Major Ballou wrote the following letter to his sweetheart, his “very dear wife, Sarah,” just before going to battle in a war whose name I will not call. The names of wars lie academic here.

Memorial Day calls us to the sacrifices of the human lives.

In his letter, may we feel the animation of American patriotism, resolve, a deeply human heartbreak of sacrifice crossing all time.

“If it is necessary that I should fall on the battle-field for my country, I am ready," he wrote. "I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American civilization now leans upon the triumph of government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt."

"Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield.

"The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up, and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our boys grow up to honorable manhood around us."

Major Ballou died in battle.

The letter was his last.

Sarah never remarried.

Your image here arrives with my gratitude also to every sweetheart left to grieve above ground, to live with it what might have been below us.

May we all try to live up to it.

Research credit for the letter goes to historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose salutation reads simply …

“May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.”

Michael Cogdill LLC

06/03/2026

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