Lift a Glass to Mark Mitchell

Skip to main content Skip to footer Lift a Glass to Mark Mitchell Leave a comment to thank Mark. Add your good wishes to mine. He deserves them. Jason Peters December 15, 2025 More than 13 years ago Mark T. Mitchell did me a solid, as I believe the cool people like to say. Or maybe they don’t anymore. Inasmuch as I’m old enough to hear a scatological joke in that phrase, it’s possible that on this day, December 15, year of Our Lord 2025, the Idiom Train has once again left the station without me. What Mark did for me was publish a piece in these “pages” titled “Thanks to Jason Peters, aka The Bar Jester.” In it he acknowledged my many “contributions” to FPR. Or maybe it was my one contribution to FPR. That one contribution was to produce a piece every week (sometimes a near duplicate of another), over the course of almost four years, for this young website. I did this for two reasons: One is that at the launch of FPR in March of 2009 several of us agreed to write weekly essays to ensure that FPR would always have new material up every day and therefore keep the site meter spinning, or so we hoped. So in accordance with my vow I did yeoman’s work for each Wednesday, my day, the Bar Jester’s day, to the tune of about 155 “essays.” I once wrote a piece above the Atlantic just to keep the streak alive. My wife and kids knew to leave me alone on Tuesday nights. I was sort of like a drunk uncle cleaning his gun: everyone knew to stay clear of the trailer park. The second reason is that after a very short time the other promissories had fallen away. The hens quit laying. But I decided, by God, to keep on producing—doing a solid, you might say—just to shame them for wimping out. I did this until I came up for another sabbatical and felt obliged to spend my time fulfilling my promise to the institution that was paying me not to teach—sort of like all those universities (LSU and Michigan State come to mind) that are currently paying former coaches not to lose any more games. (The discrepancy in dollar amounts, I acknowledge, somewhat compromises the illusion of similitude here.) But now it is high time I return the favor to my friend—to our friend—Mark. For a few months shy of 16 years Mark has served as FPR’s president. He was at the headwaters of it all. For the most part FPR is his brainchild. (Jeremy Beer was also in on it, as was Patrick Deneen back when he was patrick deneen.) Mark tells the story in his preface to Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto , which he co-edited. Make sure you have a well-thumbed copy on one of your bookshelves. And now Mark is stepping down. Did you know that he was also...

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