Month: August 2005

Funding Cindy Sheehan

“What difference does that make?” said Simi Valley (CA) gold star mother Melanie House when asked if she was getting financial help for her flights to Idaho and Crawford TX to protest the war.  She didn’t want to talk about it, reported ABC7, Oakland.  But another mother, Karen Meredith, from Mountain View CA, also flown to Crawford, voiced some concern: “Sometimes things don’t feel quite right to me. They don’t feel wrong but maybe that’s how they do it in the marketing business.”

For the record, bills are being footed by Ben Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s; MoveOn.org; Dem chairman Howard Dean’s organization, Democracy for America (“involved,” says ABC7); and the radical anti-war group Code Pink, organized by San Francisco’s Medea Benjamin,  author of Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks From The Heart: The Story of Elvia Alvarado and veteran organizer who was dragged off the 2004 Democrat convention floor in handcuffs.

Funding Cindy Sheehan

“What difference does that make?” said Simi Valley (CA) gold star mother Melanie House when asked if she was getting financial help for her flights to Idaho and Crawford TX to protest the war.  She didn’t want to talk about it, reported ABC7, Oakland.  But another mother, Karen Meredith, from Mountain View CA, also flown to Crawford, voiced some concern: “Sometimes things don’t feel quite right to me. They don’t feel wrong but maybe that’s how they do it in the marketing business.”

For the record, bills are being footed by Ben Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s; MoveOn.org; Dem chairman Howard Dean’s organization, Democracy for America (“involved,” says ABC7); and the radical anti-war group Code Pink, organized by San Francisco’s Medea Benjamin,  author of Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks From The Heart: The Story of Elvia Alvarado and veteran organizer who was dragged off the 2004 Democrat convention floor in handcuffs.

Rethinking Crandall-Arambula?

NE Side robberies have residents more than alarmed: they are sick of it and won’t take any more of it.  More than 230 showed at Hatch school for a meeting with police.  The ubiquitous Deputy Chief Scianna led discussion.  Janice Sanchez is resident in charge.  She was delighted at the turnout and residents’ response.  NE Side is adjacent to the high-crime thickly populated N. Austin neighborhood (of the city, Chicago), some of whose residents apparently look on Oak Parkers as easy pickings, coming at them in alleys when they put cars in garages at night.  They show guns and get money.  One woman spotted them as she backed into her garage — never back in: you can back out in the morning when the coast is clear — and changed course, heading back into alley, which she exited with horn blaring.  OP’s top cop has told residents to skip overnight parking ban and put the damn vehicle in front, which is common sense.  Neighborhood watch is in high gear.  Stay posted.

Elsewhere, recently elected Peter Barber has questions and objections at OP elem school Dist. 97 board meetings.  Board is attacking something called “accountability,” which seems to be willingness of professional educators to bring citizens into the act, as through board’s writing questions for teacher– and principal-evaluation questionaires.  This board is setting goals — it’s a school district, for gosh sakes: it doesn’t know its goals?  Another new boarder, Julie Blankemeier, is “skeptical” about said goals, which seems reasonable.

On the village board side, (also) new trustee (all from last spring’s elections) Greg Marsey alluded to a goal of village government, “to make business districts more attractive.”  This is our local mercantilism, which is clearly the path that OP has chosen.  Streets are torn up and remade, buildings are bought and managed, cul-de-sacs are installed, downtowns are sometimes redone (but not The Avenue, OP & Lake St., the true heart of the village).  What if the village let the market decide such things?

Meanwhile, Ken Trainor chronicles an episode in mercantilism in his very readable, very informative story about the bus trip to Lake Forest and points west and south to LaGrange and Elmhurst, in which a non-profit planner seeks business for his organization — oops, does the civic-responsible thing — by showing trustees and village staffers how quaintness survives business expansion.  The story has only one damning feature: Trainor uses a neologism, “kibbutzing,” when he means discussion.  Neologism because a kibbutz is a settlement in Israel, noun not verb, and anyhow he means “kibbitzing,” which means looking over the shoulder of a card player or eavesdropping but commonly, erroneously is used for discussing.  Tsk, tsk.

Saving Cindy Sheehan

“Considering the human factor,” generously subtitled “What I really want to know is whether that pain of loss in wartime ever really goes away,“ in Chi Trib by Charles M. Madigan, can use some editing and comments, offered here in brackets, with italics and bold face added:

Sometimes you get yourself in a mood that just won’t let you go [folksy style alert!], and my mood about Cindy Sheehan and what has flowed from her decision to protest the death of her son [a bit more than that, I’d say] by camping out at President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, is becoming one of those things. [So far, it’s all about Madigan, whose moods we are expected to care very much about; you know, good old Charles.  Shucks.]

A little over two years ago, I went [more Madigan here: we care] to Bedford, Va., [later i-d’d as a “little town . . . in the shadow of” a mountain range] to talk to some women and men who had lost friends on D-Day. Bedford had 35 young men [specify young when aiming for tear ducts] in the first wave of soldiers to push onto the beach, all National Guardsmen, and 19 of them were killed in very short order. More died later.

What I really [really?] wanted to know was whether that pain of loss in wartime ever really [really now!] goes away.

[Even] before the Iraq war death notices started coming in, I wanted to remind people that each loss is an individual loss, that it breaks hearts forever, one at a time. [Thanks, Charles.]

It is so much more than a number. [Oh boy, how many say it’s only a number!]

The little town [what little town? oh, the one you visited] sits in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a place where your [mine?] eye falls kindly [not rudely?] on everything from [its] 19th Century architecture to the forests along the [mountain] range.

It seemed the kind of place just [just so] invented for storytelling.

Many people in the South [Virginia] have a gift for measured speaking that makes it easy to take notes or listen for nuance, for suggestion, for that taste of cadence. [Can’t you just taste it?]

It makes you [me?] think, “Well, this lovely woman [which one is that, Charles?] could just as well be singing,” or, “You could dance to the way that man talks.” [Oh?]

I chased around town looking for the right women. [Chased?]

Elizabeth worked at the drugstore in the telegraph booth on D-Day, [How about “I found Elizabeth, who worked” etc.?] and she got [”who got” should do it] the first word of Bedford’s loss some time later when she turned her machine on in the morning and the messages from the Department of War to the families of dead soldiers started printing out.

Imagine that, sitting there in your little booth and seeing the names of fellows that you maybe had dated, maybe had kissed under a streetlight one hot summer night, maybe danced with, or kissed goodbye when the troop train pulled out of Bedford so long ago.

“The secretary of war regrets …”

It’s a lot of heartbreak for a little town. [And a lot of one-sentence paragraphs, short ones at that, for 800 words.]

It must have been awful to be there in the weeks after D-Day and find out about those deaths. [We get it.] Even all these years later, some of the women still grew teary when they talked about their dead boyfriends, how this one had a chest wound and had drowned on the beach when the tide came in and washed his stretcher away.

“You just don’t get over that,” one of them told me.

The elderly woman who headed the draft board at the time recalled the farmer who came bursting into the draft office with his loaded shotgun, ready to kill everyone. Two of his sons had been sent off to war, and one wasn’t coming back. He was talked out of it.

How many times did those kinds of things play out? How noble did it all seem a decade or so later, when the flags stopped waving and what you were left with was an overwhelming loneliness for someone you will never see again on this Earth?  [Not noble?  Ignoble?  M. suggests but never quite says something here?  Does he mean D-day was a waste?  He’d rather not say, apparently.]

That is why I am taking this opportunity to quietly curse Cindy Sheehan’s critics in word and thought far too inappropriate to be published in a newspaper. [This is Charles Angry and Inarticulate.  He can’t say what he’s thinking.  We can only guess and cringe, which is a good deal for him, since he’s lost for words.  But can’t he just say “Grrrrrr”?]

Sheehan made the choice to protest by plunking herself down [he means, made the choice and then plunked herself, etc.] in Crawford and demanding to see Bush so she could ask him exactly why her son, Casey, 24, was killed in an ambush in Baghdad’s Sadr City in April 2004. [Does Charles really think that’s all she wanted? She’d like it seen that way, yes.]

The reporters descended on her the way buzzards float down to pick at roadkill. [Oh boy.]  Supporters eager to voice their concerns about the war, toss some rhetoric [is that what it is?] at Bush and maybe get some time on TV showed up too.

Sheehan has now become one of those unfortunate media creatures, which diminishes her message and her impact. [Charles, there’s not a p.r. practitioner in the country that would agree with you: becoming a media creature is where’s it’s at, for gosh sakes!]

She has complicated matters with her own comments about the president as terrorist and her thoughts about Zionist conspiracies. [To say the least.]

Those remarks have opened the door to White House apologists of many stripes, who stepped in to criticize her quite aggressively, just as they seem to mysteriously step in to criticize anyone with unkind words or difficult questions for the president. Fine, that’s how they play the game. [Hey, we got buzzard reporters, people who toss rhetoric at Bush, and White House apologists playing a mysterious game, and it’s o.k. with Madigan?]

Anyhow, Sheehan became a certified, confusing, big-time media event. [Somehow it happened, unbeknownst to that poor woman.]

Let me say this, Cindy Sheehan, so you can use it later. [Uh-oh, free advice.]

I am sorry you lost your son. There will be this empty space [what empty space would that be?] around you for the rest of your life.

I know a place you can go down in the Blue Ridge where all the sweet women will weep with you and share their memories later, perhaps when you need them the most. [But will they demand Bush change policy?]

======================================================

All in all, this is the sort of thing that gives bathos a bad name.

Late night and gangster memorial

Getting late to yesterday’s (Sunday’s) Chi Trib Metro section, I ran across a story about Vickie Quade and Maripat Donovan in federal court about who owns “Late Nite Catechism,” the immensely successful Catholic-nostalgia monologue in which Donovan plays a histrionic nun.  Having met Quade once, I read on . . . and on and on, to the end, so well was the story done, by Josh Noel, a hard-working, prolific Metro reporter.  How many law suit stories have I tried to read and found turgid and confusing.  Not this one, which is full of detail and clear.

Then I found another story, also by Noel, about Rogers Park cops removing a street corner memorial to a dead gang member, so identified by the police commander.  How many such stories have I read that interview survivors who say he was kind to his little sister and cops who say he was an outlaw with implication he got what he deserved.  Not this one, which used its ample Sunday-paper space to pursue details of the matter and leaven it with intelligent commentary not just by the commander Bruce Rottner (I think of Loyola U. basketball star of the 40s, Mickey Rottner) but also by a U. of Chi academic of 55 years experience.  Again, detailed and clear.

Noel knows what he’s doing.

Late night and gangster memorial

Getting late to yesterday’s (Sunday’s) Chi Trib Metro section, I ran across a story about Vickie Quade and Maripat Donovan in federal court about who owns “Late Nite Catechism,” the immensely successful Catholic-nostalgia monologue in which Donovan plays a histrionic nun.  Having met Quade once, I read on . . . and on and on, to the end, so well was the story done, by Josh Noel, a hard-working, prolific Metro reporter.  How many law suit stories have I tried to read and found turgid and confusing.  Not this one, which is full of detail and clear.

Then I found another story, also by Noel, about Rogers Park cops removing a street corner memorial to a dead gang member, so identified by the police commander.  How many such stories have I read that interview survivors who say he was kind to his little sister and cops who say he was an outlaw with implication he got what he deserved.  Not this one, which used its ample Sunday-paper space to pursue details of the matter and leaven it with intelligent commentary not just by the commander Bruce Rottner (I think of Loyola U. basketball star of the 40s, Mickey Rottner) but also by a U. of Chi academic of 55 years experience.  Again, detailed and clear.

Noel knows what he’s doing.

Movement, or political party?

Dem Party of Oak Park:

Join the movement!  Events are being scheduled around the country for an all out day of action on April 4, 2011.  On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to stand with sanitation workers demanding their dream: The right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a better life. The workers were trying to form a union with AFSCME.  As more details become available, DPOP will spread the word and take a stand.  Hope you will too! 

Right.  And the state of Tennessee in April of ’68 was on the brink of fiscal dissolution too.  So what?  If you’re a Dem, you don’t have to worry about those things.  Congr. Danny Davis doesn’t.

Dumbed

From the files:

DUCK, HERE COME FACTS . . .

As for what reporters write, it makes us dumb, says U. of Florida history prof C. John Sommerville, author of How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society, as reported on the UF website 4/26/99 by Cathy Keen. It’s the nature of the beast, says Sommerville, in that it subjects us to a “daily, and often hourly, barrage of disassociated facts.”

It’s the daily-hourly part that does it to us. Each day has its front page and headlines – though headlines vary in size, to be sure. Each elicits at least comparable interest. Newspapers can’t wait for the important to happen. (Slow news day mean something minor gets played big – remember Bob Newhart’s explaining why so much was made of the U.S. sub shelling Miami by mistake?)

If they did wait for something important, says Sommerville, “they might be idle for weeks and their capital assets would get rusty.” So they approach every day as “worthy of the same attention.” (Yes and no; again, some headlines are bigger than others.)

Moreover, news doesn’t reflect the world, it tells what went wrong.

LOOK SMART . . .

And so on. Trouble is, for every point Sommerville makes, I think of an objection. When he gets to solutions, however, I’m with him. He’s for reading books and magazines. He stopped reading newspapers several years ago but still knows what people are talking about.

It’s true, you can pick up a lot on the fly. A salesman told me he routinely checks the sports pages of any city he’s visiting – in the daily paper, to be sure – before making his calls. That way, he can chat up the most enthusiastic fan. For that matter, the more enthusiastic, the more the fan wants to do the talking anyhow. A salesman can look very wise and interesting by keeping his mouth shut.

In the Jesuits we were (once) advised never to read a newspaper sitting down. That way, you wouldn’t be tempted to linger over the ephemeral. And what do you think? Latin for daily paper is “ephemeridae,” as in here ephemeridae, gone tomorrow.

We were indeed (regularly) warned against “desultory” reading, meaning without purpose, on the fly. As incipient scholars we were rather to program ourselves. I met one of us in the library once of a summer’s day poring over an art book – the best of Western Civ, that sort of thing. Desultory? Nope, he wanted to be at least somewhat versed in what an educated man knew. Off he went, eventually, to be a theologian, but like the newspaper-perusing salesman ready to look wise and sound interesting to the enthusiastic art fan.

If you love God, blow the whistle

Good Wash Times story here about “faith-based whistleblowing”: speakers-up for safety motivated by religion hold a convention, for God’s sake, in DC.  E.g.,

Joe Carson, a nuclear safety engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, [who] said it was his Christian worldview that impelled him to blow the whistle 19 times since 1990 on workplace and public-safety hazards at the Department of Energy, guardian of the nation’s nuclear stockpile.  “Whistleblowers are thinking of what’s good for others, not just looking out for number one,” said Mr. Carson, 51.

And there’s the Exodus-citing Jewish lawyer, the Lutheran who quotes Matthew, the Methodist pastor, the Catholic FBI agent, and a cast of dozens more due in town Sept. 23 for a meeting of Whistleblowers for an Honest, Efficient and Accountable Government at the Watergate Hotel. 

If I were still in the business, I’d want to cover that meeting, which effort would include, I presume, some wetting of one’s own whistle in off hours.