Category Archives: In Our Time

Presidential resonance: One of my pet peeves

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Today, I received this release from the Obama campaign:

Obama Statement on the
Anniversary of the Virginia Tech Tragedy

CHICAGO, IL –
Today Senator Obama issued the following statement on the anniversary of the
tragedy at Virginia Tech. 

"One year after
the tragedy at Virginia Tech, families are still mourning, and our nation is
still healing. As Americans gather today in vigils and ‘lie-ins’ – or pray
silently alone – our thoughts are with those whose lives were forever changed by
the shootings. But one year later, it’s also time to reflect on how violence –
whether on campuses like Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University or on
the streets of Chicago and cities across this nation – can be prevented.
Clearly, our state and federal governments have to strengthen some laws and do a
better job enforcing others. But we all have a responsibility to do what we can
in our own lives and communities to end this kind of senseless violence. That is
still our task one year later, and it will be our ongoing task in the years to
come."

                ###

This statement brings to mind two objections. The first is, what is this national fascination with anniversaries? Just because something was news a year ago does not make it news now. It’s not happening now. It was happening then. Aside from the entirely artificial connection of occurring on the same date on this artificial thing we call a calendar, today and that day have nothing to do with each other.

But that’s just a minor peeve. Here’s the major one: Why do we expect presidents to make statements about things that have nothing to do with the job of being president — even to the extent that people applying for the job think that they have to make such statements?

This peeve is a very old peeve for me. Or maybe not all that old. I think it reached its peak during the Clinton years. Bill Clinton was really, really into resonating to the news, the more emotional the news the better.

Mind you, I’m not blaming Mr. Clinton himself for this. He just happened to be very good at it, and to come along at the moment in history when 24/7 TV "news" was coming into its own. Remember that the 1991 Gulf War was the first CNN war (as I recall, Saddam Hussein was a big fan of the network). That’s when Wolf Blitzer became a household name. The next year, Mr. Clinton was elected, and the man matched the moment.

By the end of the decade, the assumption that the president would resonate with news that had nothing to do with him had become so assumed that by the start of the next decade, serious political observers upbraided Mr. Clinton’s successor for failing to play along. That brings me to an interesting historical artifact — a column I wrote in April 2001, at the very start of the current Bush administration.

It may for that reason seem anachronistic — particularly where I speculate that Mr. Bush is "too isolationist for my taste." This was, of course, before 9/11, and before the Iraq invasion — although I would submit that perhaps one reason Mr. Bush botched the Iraq intervention in so many ways is that he remains at heart an isolationist rather than an interventionist. (In other words, if he actually believed in nation-building, perhaps he’d be better at it.) But that’s not my point here today.

My point is that this piece reminds me of one thing I did like about Mr. Bush (sometimes it can be hard to remember such things): The fact that he doesn’t do the presidential resonance thing. Of course, this may be due to something in his character that is exactly what so many others hate about him — and remember (in spite of current political commentary militating against your remembering it), Bush-haters hated him way before Iraq.

Anyway, here’s the column:

 

The State

April 25, 2001, Wednesday

The president should do his own job, not everybody else’s

BYLINE: By Brad Warthen

SECTION: COMMENTARY

LENGTH: 1133 words

Exactly two years ago as I write this, I found myself a
captive audience for CNN’s breaking coverage of the shootings at Columbine High
School. I was on the stair-climber in the workout room, and somebody else had
the remote. So I got a larger dose of television news than I would normally
subject myself to.

    At the time, I did a column on the nature of the coverage,
which was appallingly inaccurate and careless in the rush to tell everyone
right now what had happened, even though no one really knew at the time.

    I left out of that column one of the things that bothered me
most: Every few minutes, the announcer would cut in to say that the White House
would have a statement from the president on the incident shortly. The tone and
context implied that this was something everyone was anxiously awaiting. I got
the impression that everyone involved thought the president would be derelict
in his duty if he didn’t hurry up and say something.

    And all I could think was: Why? Why would the president say
anything about this, especially at this moment? The people on the scene, the
people who know more than anybody, don’t even know how many victims there are
yet, much less how or why this happened. What in the world is the president
going to be able to add that will be relevant or helpful? I wouldn’t presume to
say anything about it. Why would the president? It’s not his job to do so any
more than it’s mine. More importantly, why does anyone expect him to say
anything?

    The last part was what really got me. This was, after all,
happening in Littleton, Colo., and was the responsibility of the local
authorities there. No one had suggested that there was anything about this that
bore upon the powers and duties of the federal government.

    Yet the nation was presumably breathless to hear what the
president had to say about it. And you know what? Those announcers were
probably right. The truth is, the nation has increasingly come to expect the
president to weigh in on such things.

    If something happens somewhere in the nation that makes
headlines, we expect the president to do something about it _ or at least to
say something. If there’s a flood or an earthquake, there’s a demand for the
president to drop everything and go fly over it, to let us know he cares.

    This makes no sense, but then, it’s not supposed to. It’s
about emotion, not reason. But for my money, there are far too many actions and
decisions taken in the public sphere on the basis of emotion already. We don’t
need any more of it.

    What provoked this rant? A David Broder column in The
Washington Post. Mr. Broder doesn’t usually set me off like this. He is, in
fact, the columnist I admire most. He’s calm, rational and knowledgeable. But
when he argues that George W. Bush is falling short as president because he
doesn’t have something eloquent to say about every major news development
across the nation, I just have to break with him.

    Dubya has a lot of faults. He’s a mushmouth. He lacks what I
consider to be an adequate respect for the environment. To the extent that he
has an overarching foreign policy vision _ and I’m not sure yet whether he does
_ I suspect that it is too isolationist for my taste. For these and other
reasons, he was not my first choice to be president.

    But he has his virtues as well. He seems to be a pretty fair
manager. He knows how to assemble a team and let it do its job. Vision or no, he
seems to deal effectively with specific foreign policy issues as they arise _
the confrontation with China over our surveillance aircraft being an instance
that Mr. Broder rightly cites.

    But my very favorite thing about President Bush is that he
seems content to be the chief executive of the federal government, and feel
absolutely no obligation to be the nation’s Chief Empathizer. No urge at all to
go on television every day and bite his lip, give a thumbs-up, shed a tear and
let us know he feels our pain.

    I really, really appreciate that.

    And I’m not just saying this to put down Mr. Bush’s
predecessor. The greater problem lies with us _ the press and the public. We
simply expect things of a president that are not a legitimate function of the
job. After Hugo hit South Carolina in 1989, many complained indignantly that
Bush pere failed to rush right down here. Mind you, he had immediately declared
the state a disaster area.

    "This other stuff, like flying over the damaged area,
is largely PR, although I admit good PR. But what does that accomplish?"
one politico said in defending him. "What you’re asking me is, why didn’t
Bush have a photo op?" Exactly. Bill Clinton’s weakness in that regard was
that he enjoyed the photo ops too much.

    If it weren’t David Broder complaining about it, I’d say
this was a case of a Washington journalist feeling a loss of his own power
because the president refuses to use his bully pulpit to make everything that
happens anywhere a federal case, thereby making Washington _ and its vast media
army _ the center of attention. With the Cold War over, Washington has had to
look in previously unexamined boxes to find issues to justify its continued
paramount importance.

    But this is David Broder, and I know he seriously believes
that these matters should be on the president’s priority list. I just think
he’s wrong.

    Sure, there are national, non-Washington stories that are
very much the president’s business, and demand that he exercise leadership
before the nation _ the Oklahoma City bombing, for instance. But that was a
deliberate attack, not only upon a federal building and the people in it but
upon the entire notion of the federal government. The Colorado shootings, as
tragic and horrific as they were, lacked that feature.

    Similarly, the president’s failure to step to the fore
regarding the riots in Cincinnati is by no means a serious "leadership
omission," as Mr. Broder characterized it. As he further writes, "The
incident was local." He goes on to say that "the problem of police-minority
relations is national and important."

    Indeed. But it is national mainly in the sense that it is a
problem in local jurisdictions all over the country. If the riots were about
what the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had done, we’d be
talking federal interest. But we’re not in this case.

    At some point, there will be an issue that I, too, will want
Mr. Bush to care about more than he does. But for now, I find his reticence a
welcome relief.

Oh, and back to where I started — I don’t blame Mr. Obama for trying to resonate on the anniversary of the slaughter at Blacksburg. That’s what presidential candidates are expected to do these days, especially if they are Democrats, and most especially if they are falling behind among women (yes, I think there’s a gender gap in this issue somewhere). Maybe Hillary Clinton and even John McCain have put out similar releases, and I just haven’t seen them yet.

I just don’t think they should be expected to do it.

Omnipresent video is a brutal thing

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Anyone who has been to as many banquets and sat through as many ceremonial speeches as I have over the years has seen a dignitary or two fail to maintain a proper level of consciousness at the head table.

But for most of my career, that made for no more than a moment’s amusement to some in the audience, nudging each other to take note of the valiant, but losing, battle of someone trying to keep his/her dignity.

Now, in the YouTube era, with a higher and higher percentage of the public having video cameras in their very phones, there is no personal dignity. No one is allowed to be quietly human any more, and it’s a shame.

All of that was brought to mind by this video of poor ol’ Bill Clinton, doing his best to be everywhere his wife can’t be, struggling to stay awake (and failing) during an MLK Day event. I may not want his wife to win, but I don’t consider it a major failing on his part that he just couldn’t make it through one… more… speech.

Cops and tattoos

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Coptattoo1

A letter on today’s page addressed an issue that we’re going to face more and more as today’s youth enter the job market:

Tattoos shouldn’t be taboo for troopers
    I am writing this in response to W.N. Kennedy’s letter, “Lawmakers should hire more troopers,”
    I agree 100 percent; however, some rules in the state trooper hiring regulations are outdated and therefore prohibit qualified individuals from obtaining a job.
    Around May 2006, I sat down for an informal interview with a state trooper to see if I should pursue a career with the Highway Patrol. I was a summer semester away from obtaining my associate’s degree and had five years of service with the Marines under my belt.
    The trooper liked what he saw; unfortunately, I have two inoffensive tattoos on my right forearm. And the rule for state troopers is that no tattoos will be showing while in uniform.
    He and another trooper suggested that I just get the tattoos removed. However, they were unaware of the cost and process of getting them removed. I told them I was willing to wear long sleeves year round, but that was against regulations.
    South Carolina really needs to get with the times. Tattoos are not taboo anymore. More and more people of all ages are getting them. If a person is qualified, tattoos should not be a factor in any hiring process. Tattoos do not inhibit a person’s ability to perform tasks and get his or her job done correctly.
KYLE OSTRANDER
Chapin

This reminds me of two things I noticed about the NYPD during the sweltering week I spent in the cityCoptatoo2
during the 2004 Republican Convention:

  • New York has more cops than I thought existed in the entire world.
  • A lot of them have major, in-your-face tattoos.

Sometimes, as with the officer depicted above and in the inset detail, they were decorated to the point that you noticed the tattoos more than the uniform. It was distracting until you got used to it. But I didn’t notice in impairing their ability to do their duty.

Oh, as a postscript I should probably point out that distracting images tend to multiply in our memories. While I know I saw more than one cop with tattoos that week, they were the exception. Looking back through all my images that week (and there are lots of cops in those pictures) most were not thus decorated where you could see it (and thereby probably less threatening to the older tourists):

Cops4

A bit of perspective on our place in the world, by the numbers

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Energy Party consultant Samuel sent me this, which figures. Samuel is the guy who came up with the idea for the endowed chairs program, which bore impressive fruit yet again this week. He’s still the most enthusiastic cheerleader of that program, even after our governor replaced him on the panel that oversees it:

This video — really, sort of a powerpoint presentation, only on YouTube, is worth watching. There are some figures in it that I find suspect (I’m always that way with attempts to quantify the unknowable, which in this case applies to prediction about the future), but others that are essentially beyond reproach, and ought to make us think.

What they ought to make us think is this: So much of what we base the selection of our next president on — party affiliation, ideological purity, our respective preferences on various cultural attitudes — is wildly irrelevant to the challenges of the world in which this person will attempt to be the leader of the planet’s foremost nation. Foremost nation for now, that is. If we don’t start thinking a lot more pragmatically, it won’t be for long.

Maya Angelou — when is HER show on?

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Poor Zac over at Clinton HQ sent this out today, with timing that invites (probably intentionally, but set me straight on that if I’m wrong, Zac) comparison to the Double-O show yesterday:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 10, 2007

Contact: Zac Wright

Dr. Maya Angelou Hits SC Airwaves for Hillary
‘My Girl’ Radio Spot Airs Statewide
(COLUMBIA) – Dr. Maya Angelou took her support of Hillary Clinton to the South Carolina airwaves as Clinton launched her fourth radio spot in the state, entitled “My Girl.”  The 60-second spot began playing on radio stations across the state over the weekend.

In the spot, Dr. Angelou describes her personal support of Hillary and focuses on Hillary’s experience as an advocate for families.

A complete transcript is included below.  The radio ad can be heard online at: www.hillaryclinton.com/hq/southcarolina.

Maya Angelou:   Hello South Carolina, this is Maya Angelou. Let me tell you about my girl… Hillary Clinton. 
    As a child, Hillary Clinton was taught that all God’s children are equal, so as a mother she understood that her child wasn’t safe unless all children were safe.
    I know what kind of president Hillary Clinton will be because I know who she is.  Hillary Clinton has always been a strong woman and a passionate protector of families.  For 35 years, that’s exactly what she has been doing.
    Each generation of African Americans stands on the shoulders of those who came before.  Today, the challenges facing us threaten the dreams we have had for our children.  We need a president with the experience and strength to meet those challenges.
    I am inspired by Hillary Clinton’s commitment and courage… a daughter, a wife, a mother… my girl.

                        I’m Hillary Clinton and I approve this message.

                        ###

So, how does that match-up play out? Oprah vs. Maya? I think I’d choose the endorsement that Obama got, if I were running for the Democratic nomination.

What’s YOUR martial status?

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You know those pop-up ads you get sometimes asking for your opinion? I generally ignore them, using the excuse that I gave at the office.

But yesterday I gave in to one that hit me when I went to the WSJ site to find a link for this post. I thought it would be about some heavy political matter that I might enlarge upon in this forum. And I was right: It wanted to know what kind of SUV I might want to buy (which puts me in mind of one of my favorite Bugs Bunny quotes — "he don’t know me very well, do he?").

I tried to mess with it, to see what would happen. For instance, when it asked, "When thinking of luxury sport utility vehicles, what brand or manufacturer comes to mind FIRST?," I answered, "Unconscionable Waste." But there was no reaction.

My favorite part was when it asked, "What is your martial status?" I wanted to answer, "Total readiness, sir! Just let the bloody Hun try to take us on now!" Or maybe, since I was suffering a mild case of indigestion, "Combat ineffective." But that one was multiple-choice, and those weren’t included among the options.

Am I the only one who remembers the time BEFORE Kenny’s?

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Today, we have a couple of letters, and our newsroom had a section-front story, that discuss what is to happen with the former Kenny’s Auto Supply site in Five Points, behind Yesterday’s.

And I find myself thinking, as I often do — am I the only one who thinks of that property as where the Winn-Dixie used to be? I still think of Kenny’s as the new thing. I’m like, way disoriented, as the young folks might say.

Or — and this would be worse — am I dreaming this? Did I never go there to buy my groceries, then walk with them all the back uphill on Blossom to the Honeycombs, which, come to think of it, also don’t exist any more?

And if not, where was I really back in the fall of 1971? Somebody give me a reality check here…

John1

Ron Paul, wild and crazy fun guy

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Had to laugh at this passage in this WashPost story about the Ron Paul phenomenon, which was brought to my attention by an e-mail from a libertarian organization:

    More than at any other time over the past two decades, Americans are
hungering for the politics and freewheeling fun of libertarianism…

It really said that. Go look. "Freewheeling fun." Maybe that’s why I don’t get libertarianism. I look at it and see a gray, dull, monotonous, seething, dispiriting resentment. Gripe, bitch, moan, especially about taxes — that’s libertarianism to me. That is, if you don’t mind my using the "b-word" in its verb form.

I don’t go to politics looking for a good time, but if I did, I’d probably pick the liberal Democrats. If I were looking to start a business, I’d hang with the Republicans. If I were looking to be an ideologically rigid, antisocial grouch who constantly told the rest of the world to go (expletive) itself, I’d be a libertarian. Not to cast aspersions or anything, or deal in flat stereotypes. I’m sure there’s much more to libertarians than that, just as there is to everyone. But "freewheeling fun?" That cracked me up.

The elves are restless

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On Thanksgiving, after the turkey, I accompanied my family — or the portion able to join us to visit my youngest up in Pennsylvania — to see "Fred Claus." (Vince Vaughan cracks me up, OK?) Anyway, we enjoyed it for the light entertainment it was.

The next day, we bopped up to NYC because my youngest had never been there. Yes, we visited the shopping capital of the world on the busiest shopping day of the year. We weren’t buying; looking was overwhelming enough. And it turns out that, while "Fred Claus" exposed certain problems with Santa’s toy production process, it failed to reflect the deep unrest among some of the elves — or at least, the elves we found on the sidewalk outside Macy’s. (Like an explorer drawn into the heart of darkness, I couldn’t resist leading the kids that way in awe and fascination, after we got off the New Jersey Transit train across the street at Penn Station.)

They were very angry — and unexpectedly tall, I found. Maybe they were Middle Earth elves, rather than the kind from the North Pole. In any case, they didn’t seem to have the ol’ Santa spirit.

In case you went shopping on Friday and think it was hectic, I share with you this video, which still doesn’t quite show what it was really like to be in that bedlam. As one of my daughters said looking over my shoulder at the portion of the video inside Macy’s (the part right after the angry elves), "You had to be there." A very different scene from during the parade the day before, but just about as crowded.

I really spoiled the hectic effect by throwing in some restful parts — the skaters at Rockefeller Center, for instance — because I’m a big believer in giving The Full Picture.

Christians as folk

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A bunch of stuff crossed quickly through my hands last week when I was too busy — either working on getting the week’s pages out while shorthanded, or traveling to Pennsylvania and New York and back — to take note of them, and a couple of them are blogworthy. Here’s one, which came in as e-mail all the way back last Tuesday.

Orin P. Smith of the Palmetto Family Council sent out this note to members and/or friends, taking note of my recent column in which PFC board member Hal Stevenson played a prominent part:

Columbia businessman Hal Stevenson is a
tremendous encouragement to me. Maybe that’s because I have the sense that
he "gets it." By that I mean I think he has a deep understanding of the
connection between faith and public policy and he articulates it in a winsome
way. Because that is the whole idea behind family policy councils, I
was glad to see Hal return to the board of Palmetto Family
Council a few years ago and agree to serve as
Chairman of the Board from 2004 to 2006. 

The column that follows was
the featured editorial in The
State [Columbia, SC] newspaper Sunday before last. I share it with you
not for Hal’s specific impressions of particular candidates for President (which
PFC does not necessarily endorse) or any other specific content or words he has
chosen, but to show how Christians can make a difference in the public square by
being accessible, fair, principled, and just plain interesting to talk
with.

I think you will appreciate the final sentence of the article
above all. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

-OPS 

Here’s what strikes me about this, and not for the first time: Traditionalist Christians are not accustomed to being written about by the MSM as actual folk — real, thinking, breathing human beings — when they interact with the political sphere. They are used to being categorized, caricatured, flattened out into two dimensions at best.

Another way of putting it is that they are not accustomed to seeing themselves written about in ways that they can recognize themselves. Hal said something about this to me in reacting to the column in a conversation I blogged about, and in thanking me for getting him straight.

I say this not to brag on myself — I know I have plenty of flaws as a journalist; one of my few virtues is that my subjects usually say I get the context of what they’re saying right, and this is an example of that.

I say it to marvel at yet another example of the ways we fail in this society to engage each other as we truly are, in the realm of politics. This is another of the many flaws in our partisan, conflict-oriented, anti-intellectual way of choosing up sides so that we won’t have to think.

It’s really a pity that something as simple as what I did — show a "conservative Christian" (which in itself is an inadequate term) as a thinking person instead of a Pat Robertson cartoon — should stand out so that a couple of people who’ve been burned in the past should see it as worth remarking upon.

In other words, it’s not that what I did was so good. It’s that so much else that you see is so bad.

How do we give this guy a virtual slap up ‘side the head?

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Normally, I just delete comment-spam and notify Typepad — there’s a button to click on that does both at the same time, not that it does any good in the long run, because the stuff keeps coming.

But this one is so timely, so relevant, so enterprising, so egregious, so offensive that I just have to take note of it.

Someone reacted to this post with a comment steering us to this site — to save you from clicking on it, I’ll just tell you that the site features T-shirts in various styles, all bearing the offensive question spoken by the woman (the obnoxious woman, the woman that I struggle to find a word to describe) in the video.

This is a specimen of the disease eating away at our body politic. This slimeball might actually make some money off of this. Meanwhile, people who care about this country worry that if Mrs. Clinton (or anyone else with the name "Clinton" or "Bush") is elected, we might actually see an escalation of the virulent partisanship of the past 15 years, if that is possible — all because of the kind of people who would ask this question, or have such T-shirts printed up, or, worse, buy the damned things.

Looking at that Web site makes me want to reach through my laptop and give somebody a good slap up ‘side the head. I wanna go all ad hominem on ’em. But I don’t know how.

McCain on question about beating the ‘rhymes with rich’

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Just got this from B.J. over at the McCain campaign:

Hey Mr. Warthen –
I think you might be interested in this. Here’s the deal: On Monday in Hilton Head at a Meet & Greet, some lady asked McCain, “How do we beat the bitch?” He responded. (See Video 1) Last night, CNN’s Rick Sanchez stooped to new levels of sensationalism in reporting the incident. (See Video 2). This morning, we released a statement from Buzz Jacobs, SC Campaign Manager. (See Below) Today at noon, McCain is holding a national blogger call and this is sure to be the hot topic. I thought you might want to get on that call, so if you’re interested, please let me know ASAP and I will send you the call info.

Thanks,
BJ

I told him, yeah, I might want to listen in on that. Anything y’all want to share prior to that? Personally, my immediate reaction is that I have but one complaint about the way Sen. McCain handled it: he spoke of the nomination of the "Democrat Party," not the Democratic Party. And I think the guy on CNN talking about it makes an ass of himself.

Also, here’s the release to which B.J. referred:

STATEMENT FROM SC CAMPAIGN MANAGER ON CNN REPORT
For Immediate Release
Contact: SC Press Office
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
COLUMBIA, SC — U.S. Senator John McCain’s South Carolina campaign manager Buzz Jacobs issued the following statement in response to a report aired last evening by CNN’s Rick Sanchez:

"It is disappointing that Mr. Sanchez would choose to engage in sensationalism in the hopes of generating a story. It not only reflects poorly on him, but on CNN. If Mr. Sanchez had even the faintest perspective on the race for the White House, he would know that Senator McCain has expressed his utmost respect for Senator Clinton numerous times on the campaign trail as he did at Monday’s event in Hilton Head."

                        ###

Spam magnets

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Here’s an interesting phenomenon to ponder — and perhaps some of you who understand the Web better than I do can explain why it happens.

One of the few good things about the fact that I now have my blog programmed to hold comments for my approval (I’d rather leave the spigot open, but I’ve been taught over and over that blog hooligans always take advantage of that) is that I can stop all the spam comments before they appear.

These things come in waves. For instance, I’ll get six or seven in a row that all have "hotel" in the fake e-mail address, and ostensibly advertise deals for holidays at hotels in Zurich, London, Hong Kong, etc. The text will more often than not contain a generic-sounding message such as "Great site! I’ll be back," or "Not doing much today; just sitting around." Like I’m interested.

But here’s the thing that puzzles me: These messages keep getting posted on the same old posts, over and over. This one, headlined "Another try," is a real spam magnet — even though, when I went to find a link to it, I had trouble finding it. Google didn’t want to go directly to it, which suggests to me that it hasn’t been accessed much by spammers or anyone else. So how come spam messages keep appearing on it? You’ll note there are a bunch of spam messages on it from before I went to the current policy of approving them before they appear. (I’ll go clean those later.) Is that it? Does the presence of spam attract other spam?

Note that the post is from September 2006, and yet I got a new piece of spam on it today. That’s part of the modus operandi of spammers; I guess glomming onto on long-forgotten posts is a way of flying under the radar.

Here’s another example: "Jim DeMint meeting," from August 2005. This one, old as it is, also received a slice of spam today, and also has a bunch of old spam clinging to its bottom like so many barnacles. Posts right next to it don’t have this problem; the spam goes straight for this one.

Also, once again, Google would not take me straight to this one. But it took me to something interesting: This site, which seems to form a sort of nexus for spam and this particular post. Can anybody tell me what this is, and better yet, how to stop this whole problem from recurring?

Anyway, the whole thing is like something from science-fiction/fantasy. It’s as thought these posts are interdimensional portals of the sort that Heinlein wrote about in this one, or the open ends of wormholes or something. Altogether weird.

Catholics Fed Up with Partisanship

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At least, that (what my headline says) would probably have been the name of this group if I had been the one to start it. Or perhaps, "Catholics Cracking Heads for Civility."

But Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good is kinder and gentler than I am, so they take a more easygoing approach in their approach to promoting our common goals — more civility, more respect for reason in debates, and less mindless partisanship.

I just received a release from the group announcing that "A diverse group of prominent lay Catholics — including 11 former U.S. ambassadors and former chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National Committees — have called for a more civil tone to replace the divisive rhetoric and partisan attacks that define our national political debates." The release provided a link to the document signed by those leaders, "A Catholic Call to Observe Civility in Political Debate." So I went and read it.

You gotta love such statements as this:

  • As Catholics we must learn to disagree respectfully and without judgment to avoid rudeness in expressing our opinions to those whom we suspect will disagree with us, or in reacting to others’ expressions of opinion.
  • As Catholics we need to keep in mind the common humanity that we share with those with whom we disagree. We must avoid seeing them as "the enemy" in a life-or-death, winner-take-all political contest.
  • As Catholics we should never lose faith in the power of reason – a unique gift from God to mankind – and we should always keep ourselves open to a reasoned argument. In this spirit we should defend our views and positions with conviction and patience, but without being obnoxious or bullying.

I’m a little less certain over the signatories’ tiptoeing around the issue of whether the church should act to correct Catholics who clearly do not support the Church’s social teachings, whether it’s Democrats embracing abortion or Republicans dissing various forms of public assistance. Ultimately, I have to applaud the nuanced, soundly Catholic approach that the document takes, including the following elements:

  • It chides "Catholic politicians who advertise their Catholicism as part of their political appeal, but ignore the Church’s moral teachings in their political life…"
  • It adds that "we should not enlist the Church’s moral endorsement for our political preferences," and "we should not exhort the Church to condemn our political opponents by
    publicly denying them Holy Communion based on public dissent from
    Church teachings."
  • At the same time, it says, as "lay Catholics we should not pass judgment, and should avoid public
    statements that undermine the authority of the Church’s leaders.
    American Catholics know who their Church leaders are: their Bishops,
    Archbishops, and Cardinals." While an "individual’s fitness to receive communion is his or her personal responsibility… it is a bishop’s responsibility to set for his diocese the guidelines for administering communion."
  • In other words, it’s up to bishops whether they want to deny communion. A very Catholic answer, and I agree with it.

But… the group that’s promoting this laudable call for civility is also one that promotes Catholic Social Teaching, and I wish priests and bishops would speak from the pulpit more about our moral obligations in those regards, and do so without worrying who’s getting their feelings hurt.

It’s one thing to engage in the idiocy of the perpetual struggle for supremacy between the two, equally morally objectionable political parties. Catholics should never engage in the dumbing-down of issues or ad hominem rhetoric that the parties and their auxiliary interest groups promote. All of that is extremely destructive. (And we Catholics should challenge ourselves whenever, in others’ eyes, we are seen as guilty of this.)

But if the Church truly believes in the dignity of all human life, in our obligation to be stewards of the Earth, our duty to the poor, and so forth, then it ought to be no respecter of persons as it speaks out in a bold way that makes these positions crystal-clear. (That would of course include challenging me on my support of military action, which puts me in the position of justifying whether our presence in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else is in keeping with the Just War doctrine, or can be made to be in keeping with it.)

I realize I’m not being terribly clear myself here. OK, go back and read what I wrote about the moral instruction regarding political issues that I heard in a synagogue a couple of weeks back. No individual was trashed or called names; no political party was condemned. But it was made clear that as Jews, you are expected to believe in certain things, and act accordingly in the public sphere.

That ought to go double for Catholics. Jewishness is to some extent tied up with ethnic identity, whatever one chooses to believe. Catholicism is purely a matter of what you believe, and there should be no shyness about pointing out where Catholic teaching begins and ends, and when policy proposals are in keeping with it and when they are not.

If this petition leads to less of the vicious nonsense that I decry constantly on this blog, then praise be to God for the miracle. But I hope it will also encourage bold declarations of what is right and wrong in terms of policy, and whether a given proposal is in keeping with such standards or not.

The terror of having to let our kids out of our sight

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
No man could have missed her. Dressed, if you want to call it that, in a hot little “nurse” costume — snug white dress covering not a bit of her long legs, pert little cap pinned atop blonde head, high-heeled white boots — she caught my eye from a block away.
    “Somebody’s got her Halloween costume on,” I started saying to my wife with the least-interested tone I could muster. But something was wrong. The girl was teetering in a way that went beyond the impracticality of her boots. She barely made it across Main Street to the northwest corner of Main and Blossom, where a temporary tunnel guides pedestrians past high-rise construction.
    As she disappeared into the tunnel, my wife said, “Pull over.” My first chance to do so was beyond the construction, almost to Assembly. My wife hopped out and headed back, in full Mom-to-the-rescue mode.
    She found the girl with her dress hiked up to her waist, panties fully exposed, looking for a place to relieve herself.
    “No!” my wife ordered, reaching out her hand. “Honey, you just can’t do this. You cannot walk down the street staggering in a little nurse uniform in Columbia, South Carolina. I’m going to take you home.”
    The girl obediently dropped her skirt, took my wife’s hand and cried, “Oh, thank you, thank you for helping me!”
    Seconds later, I glanced in the rearview mirror to see my wife marching that statuesque woman-child by the hand toward the car as though she were a preschooler who had wandered away from the group. I reached back to clear space for her on the back seat. She got in, my wife got in, and I pulled back into the traffic on Blossom, moving toward the river.
    I asked the “nurse” whether she had been headed to one of the nearby sorority houses. No, she slurred, her dorm was beyond the Greek Village. I pondered that in confusion. My wife got her to tell us the name of her dorm — which was three or four blocks back, at the heart of the campus, 180 degrees from the direction in which she had been staggering. I did a U-turn at my first opportunity.
    “I’m so sorry,” she kept saying, alternating between that and “Thank you, thank you so much!” She was extremely grateful. She had been one lost little girl, and she knew it. She was a freshman, just weeks away from home.
    “All my friends are older, though,” she offered as an explanation of her condition. She said something vague about guys making assumptions, which seemed to be her way of accounting for being alone.
    My wife, determined to have the girl learn something from this experience, pointed out that young girls have disappeared from the streets of Columbia. “Oh, I know! I’m so sorry,” she repeated, adding plaintively:
    “I’m trying to be a responsible freshman!” She was so earnest that we didn’t laugh, not until later, after we had deposited her back at her dorm and could feel like maybe, for tonight at least, the child was safe.
    But it was only a feeling. She wasn’t safe, in the way a parent would define it. Just before we let her out, she was on her cell phone trying to tell a friend how to come to her dorm — the place she couldn’t find herself. Despite having just been so lost and frightened, despite being so grateful for her deliverance, somewhere in her besotted mind floated the idea that the night was young.
    Once they leave home, we never can tell ourselves that they are safe, can we?
    That same night, six of the “nurse’s” fellow USC students, and another from Clemson, would die in a beach house fire in North Carolina.
    That may seem a wrenching transition, from seriocomic little episode that ended well (we hope) to a tragedy that has consumed our community for a week and touched hearts across the nation, but to a father, the two things have an awful lot in common. They both evoke the constant, gnawing fear that comes when your children are no longer in your sight, no longer under your protection.
    That “nurse” was exactly the age of the youngest of my five children, who is off on her own and far away. Just over a month ago, our daughter’s boyfriend — her only close friend in the entire state of Pennsylvania — was killed in a car wreck. He was a passenger in a car with three other boys. It was broad daylight, and they were moving safely and legally down a quiet, Shandon-like residential street when another car ran a stop sign and hit them broadside. David was thrown from the vehicle.
    When the third of my five kids was 3 or 4 years old, he had a maddening habit of slipping away on little adventures. But after mere moments of sheer terror, we’d find him and scoop him into our arms, and the universe would resume its proper shape.
    It’s so easy when they’re little. It’s when they get tall, when they take on a deceptive semblance of being men and women — like the “woman” I thought I saw in the nurse costume — that it gets really tough. It’s when they have every excuse to be out of your sight, and everybody tells you that you have to let them go, that the real terror begins.
    My mother used to have a quotation cut out and taped to her kitchen cabinet, to the effect that having a child was “forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”
    That is exactly true, and of course it is impossible to go on living like that. But we do. I don’t know how. God somehow suspends the physical laws governing the universe to make it possible for us to get up, put one foot in front of the other, walk on ice thinner than an eggshell, and keep doing it as though we actually believe what we’re doing is within the realm of possibility.
    And most of the time, it works. It worked that night, for two parents somewhere in the Upstate. That little “nurse” was going to be picked up by somebody, because she was never getting home on her own. Why did she take my wife’s hand? Is it because she recognized her as a Mom? I hope so. On behalf of her real parents, out there walking on their own thin ice, I sincerely hope so.

Hyper-intense eye candy

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Football2

        Way, way more intense than this…

Followers of this blog may or may not have picked up on the fact that I am not a football fan. In fact, it would not be unfair to call me an anti-fan. I mean, I’m glad everyone is such a good mood in Columbia these days because of the Gamecocks’ fortunes (bread and circuses do, indeed, have a practical point), but I’ve also seen them drunk, angry, and up close, so I take these good vibes with a full lick of salt.

But Saturday night, I found myself in a local pub actually watching college football — and being drawn into it. It was less a cultural phenomenon than a neurological one. It was the effect, previously unknown to me, of wide-screen HDTV.

I commented to my wife that someday, when our perpetual state of pecuniary strangulation has subsided somewhat (I’m a perpetual optimist), I’m gonna have me one of them. The idea, for me, is that I’ll then be able to get full the effect from all those DVDs I’ve been collecting in widescreen format (even though I realize they won’t fully use the features of the screen). That’s why I have a TV set, after all — to watch movies on.

And wonder of wonders, she didn’t contradict me! She actually spoke of the thing as though it were a possibility, wondering where it might go in the house. She was thinking along the lines of the same location as my hypothetical pool table. I suggested it would be hard to fully extend a LaZboy with a pool table in the way, but I did it gently, so as not to break the spell.

I think she was, at least to a slight extent, in the grip of the same thing that grapped me — the extreme, deep intensity of those hypersharp colors dancing around on the screen. I actually got, sort of, in a way, caught up in the games on the screen.

Looking at one of the two giant screens, I pointed out that everybody seemed to have on makeup. She said they DID have on makeup. Well, yeah, the sportscasters in the studio had on makeup — I imagined I could see each grain of powder caked onto their base — but even the fans in the stands seemed to have on makeup. I think it was just that every feature on their faces was so ridiculously clear and sharp, that it was as though they were artificially accented.

But then, I looked over at the other screen, and everybody looked just as intensely clear and sharp, but they didn’t seem to have on makeup. They looked explosively natural. I then realized that there was a tiny flaw in the color tuning of the first one, imposing a slight bronzing effect on European skin tones, suggestive of makeup. But it looked so good anyway that if I hadn’t had the other screen to compare it to, I would have said the color was beyond perfect.

Yeah, I know "beyond perfect" is an oxymoron, but what do you say about colors and shapes that impress themselves on your brain in a way that goes beyond colors and shapes as they are commonly understood. It’s like those old detergent commercials from when they first started adding phosphorus or whatever to the powder, and the ads said "whiter than white." These uniforms on these players were redder than red and bluer than blue and turquoiser that turquoise.

At one point, we encountered some folks we knew — friends of one of our daughters. And as my wife was speaking to them and I was looking over her shoulder trying to listen, it hit me that their faces were so dimly lit, so flat in their coloring, that my eyes sort of slid off of them, with little to grab onto.

My senses had become jaded that quickly. We had been there less than an hour, and the intensity of color had already made real people and real life insufficiently stimulating. I was appropriately embarrassed, ashamed and appalled at this realization. Time to leave.

Sirens_2
But it occurred to me leaving that if I had one of those things at home, I might not just watch movies on it. I might even watch football. But don’t worry, I won’t let me or mine get corrupted or anything. I’ll get my men to stick beeswax into their ears and tie me to the mast before hitting the "power" button.

Football4

        … and way bluer than this.

The cognitive divide between black and white

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE TIME of the week has arrived at which I look at some problem or other and confidently pronounce, as though I knew, just what we should do about it. But I have no solutions today.
    Today, I’m just sad, and solutions seem scarce. Part of it is personal. I just returned a few days ago from Pennsylvania, where my youngest daughter’s closest friend had died after a traffic accident. But there are other causes.
    As I write, my wife is on her way back from Memphis, where she had been, tending to family business, when the awful news came about David. She had to fly back there after the funeral to get her car, and drive it home.
    A few minutes ago, I checked on her by cell phone. I told her I was groping about for a column idea, and she said I should write about how lucky we were to be living in South Carolina rather than Memphis. She cited what she described as the painfully divisive victory speech Mayor Willie Herenton had delivered after his re-election a few days ago.
    I just saw the video, and she’s right. Lord knows we have our own demons here in the state that was first to secede, and would do it again if some had their way. But there is a rawness to racial tension in Memphis that is hard to describe if you haven’t been there.
    There was a time — 16 years ago, when he became the first black mayor of that city — when Willie Herenton was a sign of hope: a black man elected with both black and white support.
    It was the sort of thing we had wanted and expected to see for a long time. Back in 1974, when we were students at Memphis State, Harold Ford — senior, not the one who ran for the U.S. Senate last year — ran for Congress against incumbent Republican Dan Kuykendall. My wife and I were totally for Ford, even though Rep. Kuykendall was her Dad’s friend and business partner. He had been all very well and good for the folks his age, but our generation was going to change things. And that race thing? Our kids would only know about that from history books.
    So it was sad, here in the next century, to hear Mayor Herenton tell his supporters in his hour of victory that “I now know who is for me, and I also know who is against me,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd applauds, because they know just what he means.
    For a man just re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term, Mr. Herenton had a huge chip on his shoulder. “There are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis,” he said to much cheering. “There are some haters…. I know about haters, and I know about shaking ’em off.”
    He went on to tell about “two sad occasions” from the campaign. “I’m gonna let you know about the sickness in Memphis.”
    He spoke of a basketball game at which he had presented the key to the city during halftime, and “the fans showed so much disdain and hatred… and that place was full, 90 percent white.”
    Another time, while appearing live from Memphis on “Good Morning America” along with Justin Timberlake, “I get up on the stage, and it was 95 percent young white kids, they booed me on national television.”
    “But what they want to say is, can Willie Herenton bring us together? I didn’t separate us.”
    “Memphis got a lot of healing to do. But see, I don’t have that problem. They’ve got a problem.”
    We’ve all got a problem, and not just in Memphis. What is Memphis but a great, big Jena, Lousiana? Another town where there are no heroes, just a place full of people, black and white, all messed up over race.
    Mayor Herenton isn’t just some isolated megalomaniac. Judging by the reaction, every person in that room saw what he saw, just the way he saw it. And whites, watching on TV, saw a guy who was calling them racists.
    The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper the mayor dismisses as the voice of the white establishment, harrumphed that “contrary to the innuendoes he made during his speech, the 58 percent of voting population who opposed him can’t all simply be dismissed as racists.” No, they can’t, especially since one of the two candidates who split the anti-Herenton vote was also black. But Herenton supporters can stew over the fact that in the whitest precincts, his support was in single digits.
    It’s this cognitive divide between what white folks and black folks perceive, when both are looking at the very same thing, that keeps us from putting this mess behind us. And I didn’t just arrive at this conclusion.
    Somewhere — maybe in a box in my attic — is a manila folder containing a printout of a column I wrote in 1995, but never ran in the paper. I wrote it in a state of bewilderment on the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted. I hadn’t followed the trial and didn’t care much about it one way or the other, but I had found myself in a room with a television when the verdict came in, and a crowd had gathered to hear it. You know what happened next: The black folks watching cheered; the whites stared in silence. To me, another rich guy’s lawyers had gotten him off; big deal. But that wasn’t the way my black friends in the room saw it at all, and I was shocked at the contrast. But because I had no solution to offer, because the column just chronicled my shock, I didn’t deem it worthy of publication. I’d hold it until I could come up with an answer.
    I’m still holding it. And now, here we are. What’s my point? I don’t have one. I just think it’s sad. Don’t you?

Heroes vs. victims

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A member of my Rotary club brought this Robert Kaplan piece in the WSJ to my attention:

I’m weary of seeing news stories about wounded soldiers and assertions of "support" for the troops mixed with suggestions of the futility of our military efforts in Iraq. Why aren’t there more accounts of what the troops actually do? How about narrations of individual battles and skirmishes, of their ever-evolving interactions with Iraqi troops and locals in Baghdad and Anbar province, and of increasingly resourceful "patterning" of terrorist networks that goes on daily in tactical operations centers?

The sad and often unspoken truth of the matter is this: Americans have been conditioned less to understand Iraq’s complex military reality than to feel sorry for those who are part of it.

I wrote back that I agreed completely. That’s why I wrote essentially the same column back in 2005.

The end of the Wal-Mart era?

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Whoa. I don’t even have anything in particular to say about this right now, but it seems that the tectonic plates have shifted beneath us, and I thought I’d bring it to y’all’s attention:

Wal-Mart Era Wanes…
By GARY MCWILLIAMS
October 3, 2007; Page A1
    The Wal-Mart Era, the retailer’s time of overwhelming business and social influence in America, is drawing to a close.
    Using a combination of low prices and relentless expansion, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. emerged from rural Arkansas in the 1970s to reshape the world’s largest economy. Its co-founder, Sam Walton, taught Americans to demand ever-lower prices and instructed businesses on running a lean company. His company helped boost America’s overall productivity, lowered the inflation rate, and strengthened the buying power for millions of people. Over time, it also accelerated the drive to manufacture products in Asia, drove countless small shops out of business, and sped the decline of Main Street. Those changes are permanent.
    Today, though, Wal-Mart’s influence over the retail universe is slipping….
    Rival retailers lured Americans away from Wal-Mart’s low-price promise by offering greater convenience, more selection, higher quality, or better service….
    … American shoppers are increasingly looking for qualities that Wal-Mart has trouble providing. "For the first time in a long time, quality has a chance to gain on price," says Lee Peterson, a vice president at Dublin, Ohio-based brand consulting firm WD Partners Inc….

Quality? What kind of gimmick will these ad wizards come up with next?

Be sure to check out the short video showing graphically how Wal-Mart took over the country. It’s cool.