Warren Buffett speaking [ht WSJ.com’s Political Diary]:

[T]he Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and to realize you need one leader and, in general, support of that. But I think that the Democrats when they’re calling for unity on a question this important, they should not use it to roll the Republicans. . . . You can’t expect people to unite behind you if you’re trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat.

* More: One way for small towns to save money is to merge, to realize economies of scale, reports WSJ.  However,

Despite the popularity of merging, it’s rarely easy. Neighboring cities often have different property values, tax rates and levels of government service. People with higher property values often worry that sharing with less-expensive districts will lead to worse schools and fewer government services. More broadly, communities with healthy finances often aren’t eager to bail out neighboring cities in trouble.

So if you were looking for an Oak Park-River Forest to go with the longstanding OPRF High School, don’t — any more than for a River Forest High School.  There was briefly the latter, 1946 to 1949, when 330 or so RF students attended the school as guests of River Forest Community High School District 223, which paid their way.

D-223 lost its cachet, however, and in 1949 was created District 200.  This brought things back to what had been normal since 1899.  At this time no man mentions a separate school without becoming an island or merely a flapper of gums.

* Yet more: The author writes “with clarity and pace, unfettered by historiography,” says J.P.D. Cooper in Times Lit Supplement 2/27/09, reviewing Stephen Alford’s Burghley: William Cecil at the court of Elizabeth I, a life of the man who ran things for QE1.  The clarity and pace part sounds good, and I can do without superfluous historiography; so it looks like a good one, at least if you can stomach his persecution of Catholics and execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

As Cooper says, commending Burghley/Cecil for statesmanship,

Elizabeth had hoped that a quiet assassination might remove the need for a public trial.  Burghley’s instinct was sounder, that justice had to be seen to be done.

Those were the days.  Cooper also notes Burghley’s “conformity to Catholicism under Mary when so many Protestants went into exile.”  Fast on his feet, that fellow.

* Yet more: A more savory account is that of Margaret Roper, daughter of Thomas More, the English chancellor who did anything but get ahead by going along, being beheaded by Henry VIII in a matter of conscience.  He was the man for all seasons, but behind the man was the daughter, learned and accomplished and encouraging of him to the end, working past soldiers to give him a final hug in the Tower.

Author John Guy, in his A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More, “perhaps goes too far when he suggests that Margaret might have been able to avert the Reformation,” says TLS reviewer Miranda Kaufmann (2/27/09).  She was “the one person in England . . . who could match Tyndale as a translator and stylist, and could be relied on to conform to Catholic teaching and doctrine . . .  But . . . she was a woman, so it never entered [church authorities’] heads,” Guy wrote.

She was able enough to correct an edition of the letters of St. Cyprian by their family’s friend and major creator of the Renaissance, Erasmus — at sixteen!  Her father, no slouch as we know, his Utopia (the Happy Republic, a Philosophical Romance) an apt case in point, had home-schooled her and her siblings, teaching them Latin and Greek.

His friend Erasmus, by the way, ruled himself out of Thomas More-style heroism, writing in 1521, 14 years before More’s beheading, “Mine was never the spirit to risk my life for the truth.”  He feared he would “behave like Peter” when trouble came — the Peter who produced the triple denial of Jesus.  “When popes and emperors make the right decisions, I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly, I tolerate them, which is safe.”

An Oak Park-River Forest High School board member reminds readers in an Oak Leaves guest essay (which ran several weeks ago in the Wednesday Journal of OP & RF) of the board’s now-weeks-old resolution to keep tax rates as they are for nine years:

In its regular January . . . meeting, the board passed a unanimous resolution . . . that it will undertake a major shift in its long-range financial planning . . .  It . . . is likely that the district will have spent its reserves and will probably have to ask the taxpayers for another tax increase by 2018.

The . . . resolution was a signal of [the board’s] intention to halt, insofar as possible, its growth in expenditures . . . over the next nine years and to keep . . . within its income, without requiring another tax increase.

The matter has special pertinence in view of ambivalence on the issue on the part of three board candidates, each a non-incumbent, at the APPLE forum of 3/3.  Ralph Lee, who wrote the essay, says the resolution has been unreasonably ignored by local media.

Spending priorities are in order, he wrote, inviting debate about “this new policy direction” in an effort to gain “approval of a majority of voters.”  Absent this approval, he said, “the board or, if necessary, . . . the voters” can devise a new one.

Politely, Lee was offering a take-or-leave proposition.

The board has also gone ahead with plans to privatize the maintenance crew, and these candidates were explicitly opposed to that.  Two mentioned the 2018 date and a third spoke of “other ways of cost containment” than privatization.  The issue is bound to arise in forums yet to come before the 4/7 election.

For the latest stuff no one else has, you must go to Scrappleface, where the motto is “We report, you decipher.” 

Here’s the skinny on missile shield deployment negotiations in Eastern Europe.  You find it there, but remember, you heard about it here.  Unless you heard about it somewhere else.

High school election coming up in OP & RF, where the elite meet to learn.

For 10 or 15 minutes last night (3/3) at a forum sponsored by APPLE, the black parents group, at Oak Park & River Forest High School, six candidates for the OPRF board firmly assured 70 or so listeners of their full support, in some cases overriding support, for early-childhood education.

“It’s not an option to ignore any [educational] level,” said Rosa Higgs, a teacher. “I know that when I am on the board, OPRF will reach out to every pre-school. We are all one learning community,” . . . .

My Oak Park Items blog at the Wednesday Journal has the definitive account.  Other issues: the black-white achievement gap, disciplining of black boys, honors courses and black students, outsourcing (privatizing) maintenance work. 

If it’s any consolation to Oak Parkers, for whom crime has increased, consider this from Rasmussen, the pollster:

Nearly one-third of Americans (32%) say crime has increased in their communities in the past year, and 72% of those impacted say it is Very Likely that increase is related to the poor economy.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 54% say crime in their communities has stayed the same, and eight percent (8%) say it has decreased. Six percent (6%) are not sure.

The Oak Park story is scary enough:

There were 166 reported robberies last year in Oak Park, compared with 114 in 2007. Robbery arrests were also up. There were 48 last year, compared with the 36 the previous year.

On the other hand, “it’s safer today than at any point in the last four decades,” says village president David Pope.  Last year’s (apparently overall) increase was only four per cent, and “crime totals” were the fourth-lowest in 27 years.  Crime was “less than half of what it was in 1991.”

Hmmm.

Salman Rushdie has it right about “Slumdog,” which he says “piles impossibility on impossibility,” among other ridiculosities placing characters at the Taj Mahal, 1,000 miles from the previous scene.

Well it is an adventure story, light on probability but heavy with shock effect.  When has that not been a winning formula?

But I missed the Taj Mahal scene, partly because I had enough of the impossibilities, partly because the sound effects (at Oak Park’s Lake Theatre, packed for the occasion) were deafening, and partly because the subject matter constituted an emotional beating-up that I was not in the mood for and trust I never will be.

Indeed, my life partner and I split somewhat after the blinding-with-acid scene, which was not my idea of fun, though hundreds on the scene disagreed, remaining in their seats.

Neither did Rushdie like the cinema-adapted “The Reader” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” telling an Atlanta audience they suffered the fate of movie adaptation that does no justice to the book.

The first he called a “leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability.”  The second “doesn’t finally have anything to say,” he said.

He’s probably right, but he might also have noted the orgy of self-congratulation nicely noted by a Detroit News man:

The tearful moments and peer hugging reeked of over-indulgent self-congratulation and carried all the sincerity of a corporate love-in. After each award, the stage looked like a crowded bus stop for famous people.

It’s a problem with industry and professional groups.  The Chicago Newspaper Guild did a lot of that in years gone by, when winners sometimes took a long time telling why they won, careless about the chances of breaking one’s arm while patting oneself on the back.

Robert Burns, poet of the downtrodden, once considered moving to the West Indies to be a plantation overseer (of slaves) and later worked as an exciseman, a job much condemned as oppressive of the poor.  Joe Phelan comments:

The negotiation of such contradictions is one of the severest tests imposed on the working-class writer.

The near-miss on the overseer job

serves as a stark reminder of the moral compromises forced on people in Burns’s social position by the overriding need to make a living.

Forced?  No one in Burns’s social position ever refused such a compromise?

This is hardly to blame Burns.  The first stone finds few to cast it.  But the reviewer oughtn’t do such excusing.  This is in Times (of London) Literary Supplement, whose strength lies in its analysis on literary and scholarship grounds, not in lecturing readers on the human condition as seen from a strongly class-conscious point of view.

Here we go with the inaugural address, spotlighting passages that are overwritten:

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace.

Come on.  This is schoolboy stuff.  So is this:

Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.

I’m offended.

At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

Ditto.

More to come . . .

For a thoughtful assessment, this commentary got off to a fatuous start? I think so.

Obama’s inauguration was just the kind of event that might inspire genuine poetry: it was that rare moment when the public intersected with the private for good instead of evil.

It’s about the dumbbell poem read at the grand event by Yalie Elizabeth Alexander, who is black, says Adam Kirsch in The New Republic blog, “The Plank.”  She is?  Could have fooled me.

Her best poems–especially in her first, reputation-making book, The Venus Hottentot–do not accept that there is an antagonism between African-American “folk” culture and “high” culture.

Reminds me of the woman sitting next to Winston Churchill at dinner who said she had decided to accept the universe.  “By God, you’d better,” fumed Winnie.  But this woman would rather not, apparently.

Kirsch likes her, but she

suffers . . . from excessive self-consciousness about her role as spokesman and example. As she writes in “Ars Poetica #92: Marcus Garvey on Elocution”:

To realize I was trained for this,

Expected to speak out, to speak well.

To realize, my family believed

I would have words for others.

Go, girl, they said, as families do.  But why is she so pedestrian about it?

This is the problem.  Wordsworth and friends walked away from the oh-so-poetic and found beauty in everyday matters, like daffodils and skylarks.  But this lady reads like a telegram.

Kirsch says her weakness lies in her “consciousness of obligation,” in her “poetic superego” that

leads her to affirm piously, rather than question or challenge. This weakness is precisely what made her a perfect, an all too perfect, choice for inaugural poet.

She’s ceremonial, period, producing “inspirational banalities”:

Indeed, in “Ars Poetica #1,002: Rally,” published in 2005 when Barack Obama was still just a first-year Senator from Illinois, she already imagines herself lecturing a crowd . . .

I dreamed a pronouncement

about poetry and peace.

“People are violent,”

I said through the megaphone

on the quintessentially

frigid Saturday

to the rabble stretching

all the way up First.

What, no irony?  Does she really want to go that far, with that people-are-violent stuff?

But Kirsch has choice words for her 1/20/09 offering:

This poem, written for a book and not for an inauguration, is already public in the worst sense–inauthentic, bureaucratic, rhetorical. So it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem today with a cliché (“Each day we go about our business”), before going on to tell the nation “I know there’s something better down the road”; and pose the knotty question, “What if the mightiest word is ‘love’?”; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: “on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.”  The poem’s argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity.

Knotty question, yes.  Kirsch is too kind, handling her as someone with something to say, trapped by a situation:

Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou’s, Williams’s, and even Robert Frost’s inauguration poems already proved: that the poet’s place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

I’d say, rather, that she exposed herself, as her fellow poets expose themselves in today’s poetry-society readings coast to coast probably but definitely in Chicago, celebrating the everyday in terms that require little imagination and less cerebration.

Let’s be calm about this, but not too calm.  It’s 26 minutes past the two-hour window we were assigned two days ago in which the AT&T repair man was to arrive — between noon and two, the U-verse lady Ashley said.  No, Eric tells me, full of apologies, it’s a four-hour window.  He called our man (or woman), who will be calling me shortly on our trusty Verizon cell phone.

More to come . . .

OK.  Ben just left, 3:37, and we have phones.  I did not hug him but considered it.  What he did was fix what James did wrong two days ago.  James of U-Serve, that is; Ben is of regular AT&T (I think). 

In any case, he pulled one plug from the huge all-purpose modem, from the slot called “Aux.”  This Aux (auxiliary) connection was screwing everything up.  This on top of leaving my office phone unconnected made a double boo-boo by the personable James, who should go back to U-Verse boot camp, I fear.

So now we are digital and will be informing Comcast not to send our $60 or so/month bill, and even our cheap LD service in Utah, and will be paying $90/mo. for a year, or would if we had only one line (we have two, and it’s up accordingly), for the Big Three: phone, ‘net, TV.  Let’s see how it all works out.