Monday, November 9, 2009

Searching for some bad guys . . .



Twenty years ago the Berlin wall tumbled. And I'd like to suggest left a sizable number of us discombobulated. Not openly discombobulated, of course. Just discombobulated in our heart of hearts. Who were the bad guys now? Or more importantly, what group allowed us to define ourselves as the good guys?

Before that day, we Boomers who like our politics black-and-white had never not had a clear-cut bad guy. You want bad? Look no further than the Communists. Any and all of them!

How well I remember a report I did in the sixth grade on Russia. In this report, I pointed out that the Communists had actually improved living conditions there for the average citizen--not hard to do when you're working with  a feudal system last updated in the Middle Ages.

When I finished I realized that my teacher was tight-lipped, terse-worded mad! At me! At a sixth grader, whose source was the World Book Encyclopedia, for daring to suggest that the Communists had done any good, anywhere. McCarthy was dead, but the clarity of his viewpoint persisted in 1959 among certain of the citizens of Greensboro, North Carolina.

When the Berlin wall tumbled, the stature of the current bad guys tumbled with it. Suddenly the Commies looked like pretty puny bad guys, which--in our rare moments of introspection--we realized made us look comparatively puny as good guys.

Ever since, those of us who need bad guys to make us feel like good guys have not really been able to settle. I won't bother to list the groups we've auditioned as  bad guys; just think of any group over the past twenty years stereotyped by shrill, mindless opposition. Omigod! the number is legion.

When I woke up this morning and realized that today was the 20th anniversary of the Wall's fall, I immediately thought of the current health care "debate" in this country. It has often seemed spectacularly shrill, uninformed and mendacious--all at the same time.

I'd  followed with interest Saturday's deliberations in the House of Representatives that ended with a late-evening vote to move health care reform forward. Dana Milbank's column on the day's often undignified activities (as well the undignified comments left by some of his readers from both sides of the political spectrum) made me wonder if  health care reformers haven't become a target for the bad-guy needers.

If that's what's happened, the really sad part of this is I don't know of anyone who's informed on health care who defends the status quo. But then, why would they? This, from a 2007 editorial in the New York Times.
Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th.
Our health care system obviously could use a little tweaking. And so surely uninformed, gratuitous, shrill opposition to the efforts of health care reformers from either side of the political aisle is about as wise as a fish eating its own tail. It may feel good at the moment, but it really does blight the future.

Personally, when I need to indulge in a little shrill, mindless opposition, I turn to sports!

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Should we bring the duel back?

I've been out of work four days this week with some kind of imitation flu. The downside of this has been missing my colleagues, the internal buzz I get from doing my job, my daily sacred gym time. The upside was that I had a lot of time to read for pleasure.


It was with great pleasure that I began reading The Southern Press, W&L professor Doug Cumming's just-out book on just what its title suggests--journalism in the South from Poe well into the last century.

The book is not history; it's more an exploration of a style of journalism that grew up without tightly-packed urban areas and without an indigenous publishing industry. I learned a lot, but I also had fun. Particularly from the bottom of page 62 to the top of page 63. As part of my self-assigned blog mission is to promote fun, I'm now going to transcribe the rather long, relevant passage. (I've bolded and italicized the juicy and most telling part, which is at the end.)
     John Moncure Daniel of the Richmond Examiner, who spiced his attacks on political enemies with such terms as jackass, hyena, sleek fat pony, and curly-headed poodle, is credited with fighting nine duels. He bequeathed his dueling pistols to his successor at the Examiner, H. Rives Pollard. A column Daniel wrote in 1847 somehow insulted the then famous [Edgar Allen] Poe, who happened to be back in Richmond and drinking again. When Poe barged into Daniel's office to challenge him to a duel, the Examiner editor managed to silence his friend by pointing to a set of large pistols waiting on the table.
     The aristocratic notion of honor was like a "reputation" in a libel suit, except that damages to honor could never be compensated with money or settled in court. That is why so many cities and town[s] in the South had a dueling ground as well as a courthouse, from the Oaks at the north end of Esplanade Street in New Orleans to Bloody Island in the former North River beside Lexington, Virginia. Duelists could even buy instruction manuals such as one published in 1838 by a former governor of South Carolina. Keeping in practice was always a good idea, especially for newspaper editors, "who are most of them very good shots," noted a British traveler in the 1830s. Like libel law, the code of the duel was said to be a force of restraint on a boisterous press. If only the North would adopt dueling, the novelist Simms wrote to an editor in Boston in 1841, "it would soon but a stop to the blackguardism of the press, the insolence of petty knaves, and the slanderous personalities of their writings."
I do wonder how an Opinion-ater -- my name for today's working "journalist" who, like those northern journalists referred to by novelist Simms, appear to think it his/her mission to inflame strong feelings in us rather than to impart accurate information -- would react if everyone who felt offended showed up with a couple of dueling pistols and started going on about "honor" and "reputation."

Would it serve to reign in the use of blatant untruth in argument? Sadly, nothing else seems to.

Note: The next time you're really, really annoyed at someone, I d-double-dare you to call that person a curly-headed poodle.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Friday, November 6, 2009

"The madness at rush hour . . ."


The title is lifted from Metro columnist Robert McCartney's 867-word challenge to Governor-elect Bob McDonnell published in yesterday's Washington Post. He's speaking, McCartney says, for the voters of Northern Virginia, who surprisingly (at least to me) went solidly Republican in Tuesday's election.

The challenge Mr. McCartney laid down to Mr. McDonnell is pretty basic: Do what you promised, and what you promised is that you will improve our roads without damaging our schools. And, after claiming you've moderated the extreme social views you espoused 20 years ago in your master's thesis for Regent University, don't "go Sarah Palin on us."
"McDonnell charted a model strategy for Republican success in the Obama era by focusing his campaign on pocketbook issues such as jobs and transportation rather than 'culture war' crusades over abortion and same-sex marriage. He did so despite his own roots in the Christian conservative movement. It's crucial for Northern Virginians, who are generally moderate to liberal on social issues, that McDonnell stick to that approach."
I'm sure Governor-elect McDonnell is well aware that Northern Virginians have all that time they're stuck in traffic to monitor his performance. If that isn't enough to make him jump on the traffic problem first thing, I don't know what is.

There was also an interesting poll out yesterday from Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling, suggesting voters thought Creigh Deeds spent too much time focused on McDonnell's 20-year-old thesis and not enough time communicating his own detailed and positive solutions to our state's impressive list of problems.

The shifting colors of the political map is ever fascinating, isn't it? To me, the James Carville phrase that helped Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush still rings true: It's the economy stupid. Our state's economy is a mess; and the easiest, most obvious way to attack a mess is to just clean house.

We did it in our last Presidential election; we did it again last Tuesday.

Which made me think of my husband Charlie's last big home project, which was to clean up the mess that was his home office. It took him a few hours of furious activity to empty the room--pull everything off shelves, out of drawers, and create lovely towering stacks of stuff in the hall. Then it took him days and days and days to sort, shift, weed-out and restart the office as a functional space.

I was struck with how emotionally cleansing it was for Charlie to empty out the room; and how much patience, creative problem-solving and simple hard work went into remaking it into a usable space.

In our last two elections, we Virginia voters have proved ourselves fans of the emotionally cleansing gesture. But could we have elected two more disparately visioned and minded men?

Which one's vision and mind, I wonder, will we be willing to stick with as we face the hard work of realistically facing the future?

Thursday, November 5, 2009

An invitation to think . . .

Charlottesville listener Marva Barnett sent me this reaction to Nina Totenberg's summation of Wednesday's oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case POTTAWATTAMIE COUNTY V. MCGHEE.

"What is just? What is legal?  They are all too often not the same thing.  Nina Totenberg’s recounting of the current Supreme Court case about prosecutorial immunity shines a spotlight on what Victor Hugo called “the quarrel between rights and law.”  Not until that quarrel is resolved, he wrote (in the preface to his collection of socially-conscious speeches), will society reach true civilization.
            In this case, attorneys for the Council Bluffs, Iowa, prosecutors argue explicitly, bluntly, that Americans have no constitutional right not to be framed for a crime they didn’t commit. Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee were imprisoned in 1977 for a murder they had no hand in.  Tenaciously stating his innocence, Mr. Harrington was finally released in 2003 after a case review in which eyewitnesses recanted their testimony.  Under Iowa law neither man has legal recourse to receive compensation for the 25 years lost because of fabricated evidence.  Their suit against the Council Bluffs police and prosecutor for violating of constitutional rights has reached the Supreme Court.  An objective case summary shows that the police and prosecutor ignored evidence pointing to another, well-connected suspect and accepted testimony against Mr. Harrington from a man with a criminal record who erred in his story about the murder location and weapon involved.
            Still, attorneys for the prosecutors, while hypothetically admitting that Mr. Harrington might have been framed, contend that such framing is legal, though perhaps not just.  Victor Hugo must be raging in his Paris Pantheon tomb!  Were he able to put pen to paper, he would this morning be dashing off a public letter.  Justice is divine, he would write, far above the laws that people create.  When everyone can see where justice lies in a cause, should we not choose what is just over what is legal?  Why are laws not written to promote justice?  Human rights come from God, and laws cannot morally overcome them.  Jean Valjean, after 19 years at hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread, learned this from a man of God.  The author of Les Misérables would be making the case for Mr. Harrington, human rights, and justice."
Marva Barnett, author of Victor Hugo on Things That Matter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
Marva Barnett's piece is not, of course, a discussion of the legal intricacies of procedure and precedence that will weigh heavily in the Supreme Court's decision. Instead it addressed the question--as WMRA's Tom DuVal, with whom I love to talk over these kinds of knotty questions, pointed out--"should anyone be allowed to get away with unjust acts just because a law says it's okay?"

If you've got a few moments to devote to thinking about the distinctions between what is legal and what is moral, I'd suggest taking a look at Ms. Totenberg's summation and then re-read Marva Barnett's challenging reaction. I did both yesterday, and I'm still pondering the issues involved.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

An opinion post . . .

Listener Katrien Vance took me to task as the editor of WMRA's Civic Soapbox for airing Bob Boucheron's essay last week recounting his experience with Career Switcher, a government-sponsored program for already-educated adults who want to become public school teachers.

In case you missed it, here's a link to the text of that essay. And here's what Ms. Vance, who's a teacher herself, had to say.
"I enjoy Civic Soap Box and think it's a great opportunity for people to speak about issues that concern or delight them.  I was disappointed, though, with a recent program in which a Charlottesville architect used the Soap Box to denigrate the Career Switchers program at Blue Ridge Community College.  I am not associated with that program in any way; I have a colleague that is enrolled in it, but I know very little about it and have no vested interest in it.  As a teacher at a private school, I have taken no education courses myself, and I tend to look at them with suspicion if not my own snobbery.  But Mr. Boucheron's public complaining seemed an inappropriate use of the Soap Box. I agree that aspects of his program sounded frustrating.  But why was he given three minutes to publicly complain about a program he attended?  Will the Career Switchers program have equal time to respond?  Actually, I doubt they have time--they are teachers!

"I could go on to list things Mr. Boucheron said that seemed arrogant, snobbish, and completely closed-minded to the experience of learning to be a teacher, but it isn't really with him I have the argument.  My argument is with your choice to give him air time.  I didn't hear that he had any larger point to make except that he tried this program and it was bad. How does that serve the community?  Why didn't he air his grievances with the program itself, privately?

"I have no problem with your airing essays on things that are controversial or might spark arguments.  But if someone is going to publicly criticize and denigrate a school, a program, or a person--with no attempt to make something good come of it-- I hope you will think twice about having your Soap Box be his or her forum.

"Since I am someone who believes that you shouldn't complain unless you have a solution, I promise you that I am working on a Soap Box essay of my own.  Maybe it's harder than I think it is!"
I think Ms. Vance makes interesting point, one that's well worth discussing by the WMRA community. Which is exactly what this blog is for.

So, you got anything to say about either Mr. Boucheron's essay or Ms. Vance's reaction to it?  If so, I (and probably everyone who participates in this blog) would certainly like to hear it.

Lay on, Macduffs. . .

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Even cowgirls get the flu. . .

Of course, maybe what I have isn't The Flu, but, among other annoyances, I seem to have lost my voice. So I shall not be visiting polling places today as we had planned. It's bad enough to be sick, but for a reporter to be sick on election day is down-right humiliating.

I also don't seem to have much of a brain, today. At least not enough of a one to put together a proper post. So I'll say be sure to vote, and leave it at that.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Escaping escapism by Streetcar

Oh dear. This morning's  lead story in The New York Times (on-line) is: "Karzai Declared Re-elected in Afghanistan," but only because of the withdrawal from the race of his last challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. The Times goes on to opine that this leaves the U.S. in a real mess.

Next, we learn that Ford, the auto giant that didn't get bailed out, has managed to post a 1-billion dollar profit, and that Obama's strategy on health care legislation appears to be paying off. Go figure on both accounts.

It's all a bit much to grasp on a Monday morning, at least for this reporter, so, instead, I'll go back to thinking about this.



Yes, Cate Blanchett is Blanche DuBois, right now at the Kennedy Center.  "Blanchett fires 'Streetcar's eternal combustion engine" heads a story I want to read. Even on a Monday.


"If Cate Blanchett's nerve-shattering turn as Blanche DuBois doesn't knock the wind out of you," writes Peter Marks in The Washington Post, "then there is nothing on a stage that can blow you away. What Blanchett achieves in the Sydney Theatre Company's revelatory revival of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' amounts to a truly great portrayal -- certainly the most heartbreaking Blanche I've ever experienced."

We've all seen a production of Streetcar, haven't we? Tennessee Williams' nailing of a stubborn, alcoholic, fragile woman to the cross of her own pretensions and denial. On stage, we watched Blanche DuBois, a frail reminder of former beauty and charm, dying of her own inability to get real--real about who she is, where she came from, where she is.

If what you remember of your production of Streetcar is the set or even Stanley Kowolski, then please go to another one. A production of this play that cooks, in my opinion, belongs to Blanche, because she's one of those great theater creations that reaches something universal in each of us that we'd rather not face--our own ability to self-destruct by clinging to what we wish was real rather than what is real.

It's a good thing to think about on a Monday morning when world-wide reality seems particularly hard to come to terms with. Thinking about a great Blanche DuBois reminds us that the alternative to facing reality, is not facing it. And that that, eventually, makes everything much worse.

Too bad we can't organize a bus trip to go see Ms. Blanchett. Her Streetcar, it seems, is completely sold out.