The Whiskey Rebellion

(News-Herald, June 2004) It is unfortunate that we Americans are not big on history. It contains many good stories, and provides an enormous amount of insight into who we are as a people. But there are many chapters that we have simply lost. If you want an example close to home, take the Whiskey Rebellion.

Our country is rooted in a great deal of schizoid behavior. Colonists wanted to establish religious freedom, but executed and banished people who worshipped differently. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men were created equal, but was rewritten so that it wouldn’t criticize slavery.

Since day one, we have tried to balance opposing impulses and contradictory principles. Some days it can seem discouraging that Americans disagree so much about what is right and what we should do, but the fact is, most of our history is about such arguments.

The Whiskey Rebellion came out of another one of our old arguments—how strong should the federal government be. The Founding Fathers couldn’t even agree on this one.

We have a tendency to view the framers of the Constitution as a unified group, a pack of wise men who divined the best and brightest way to form a government and captured it in a perfect document.

But the Constitution was a work of massive compromise. It was not obvious that a democracy was the best choice (said one of the framers, “The people should have as little to do as may be possible about government”). Balancing the states was contentious; some states favored one vote per state, while others favored votes weighted by population. It’s not hard to guess which was which.

But the biggest issue was states rights vs. federalism. Would the state or federal government be sovereign?

The Constitution was a patchwork quilt of compromises, and I think it’s valuable to remember that this document did not come about because the framers all shared a common view of one bright and shining Truth. It was, in fact, a document that many, if not most, of the founding fathers considered flawed by the compromise of important principles.

Once the Constitution was adopted, the founding fathers wasted no time in trying to steer the US government in one direction or another to “correct” the compromises that created it. In 1790, Quaker delegations from New York and Pennsylvania presented petitions to the House demanding an end to slave trade. And in that same year, Alexander Hamilton proposed the federal assumption of all war debt from the Revolution. The feds, not the states, would take charge of USA IOUs.

Many resisted what they took as an attempt to give the feds financial power and primacy over the states. But a deal was struck that appeared to trade assumption for a new capital located by the Potomac River.

Once the federal government assumed the debts, they had to raise money to pay them. Hamilton placed a 25% tax on liquor sold in the US. Farmers in states south of New York protested this oppressive move by the federal government.

In western Pennsylvania, this protest took the form of tarring and feathering tax collectors. In 1794, officials ordered the arrest of the rabble; a militia commander was shot and killed by federal troops who were protecting a tax official. The anti-tax settlers went berserk, and President Washington raised a military force from the tri-state area. When negotiations failed, George put on his war uniform and personally led the troops into Western Pennsylvania (now there’s a commander-in-chief for you).

The rebellion was put down. Two rebels were convicted of treason, but pardoned by the President. Thomas Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State and formed the Democratic-Republican Party, which supported states’ rights against the Federalists. When he was elected President, some Federalists began plotting for New England to secede. Aaron Burr, who ran as Jefferson’s VP and almost won the Presidency, waged a political war against Federalist Hamilton so bitter that he ended up killing Hamilton in a duel.

America’s political life has always been cantankerous. And our greatest documents represent solutions to thorny conflicts of principle, not the triumph of one single point of view. The different views weren’t merge, one side didn’t win, and one side did not give up. The American Way is not, historically, that the people who are Right win; the American Way is that everybody gives up a piece of what they want and believe in for the greater good.

A violin string lying on a table makes no music. It’s only when you grab the two ends and pull it in opposite directions that you can make it sing.

NCLB & the Texas Miracle

(News-Herald, January 2004) Okay, if it seems sometimes that I’m a little cynical about the current wave of education reforms, let me tell you a story.

One of the selling points of “No Child Left Standing” (or “Behind” or “In Public School” or whatever we’re calling it these days) was that it was a national version of highly successful reforms already proven in Texas. In 2000, Bush cheered the “Texas Educational Miracle.”

Since then, word has slowly been emerging that the miracle is slightly less miraculous than when your Uncle Floyd pulled a nickel out of your ear. But it does provide a good view of how this drive for “accountability” plays out in the field.

In Houston in February of this year, an assistant principal in Houston was surprised to discover that his school had a 0% drop-out rate, even though a freshman class of 1000 had become a senior class of 300.

There were a variety of accounting techniques used to achieve this effect (remember, this is Texas, home of Enron, that we’re talking about). Students were reportedly encouraged to take a hike; an independent audit of the school system found that roughly 50% of the students who did not graduate should have been labeled dropouts, but were not (“Um, Johnny just moved out of the district, as far as we know…”). That was about 2,300 students.

The drive behind all this was, of course, the push to make good numbers. The superintendent put the principals back to single-year contracts, and they could be terminated “without cause.” Those principals were given mandates: “The district-wide dropout rate will decrease from 1.5 percent to 1.3 percent.” In other words, their job was not to educate students, but to “make their numbers.”

When that same Houston superintendent took over, the success rate for the state’s tenth grade math test in one school was a measly 26%. The year he left, the rate was 99%.

How do we accomplish such a thing? It’s remarkably simple, actually. Houston’s technique was to keep low ability students in the ninth grade; after two or more years in ninth grade, they were bumped directly to twelfth grade. So the worst students in Houston simply never took the assessment test. In the year of the miraculous 99% success rate, there were 1,160 students in ninth grade and 281 in tenth grade.

Houston schools were also under pressure to keep their safety numbers in line to avoid being labeled “persistently dangerous,” another tag that triggers vouchers and loss of funds under the new rules of the game.

How do you keep those numbers down? Schools stopped reporting rapes, stabbings, and assaults as “school crimes,” because those students were arrested by the police and sentenced by the courts, not suspended by the school.

Over a four year period, the in-house police force recorded 3,091 assaults. In its report to the state capital, the school district reported 761 of those.

The Houston system was supposed to be the flagship school district for the country, and it certainly provides a fine example of how the sort of corporate malfeasance that has shot holes in the private sector can be effectively applied to school systems.

You tell your underlings that you will reward them for the appearance of success and crush them for the appearance of failure. It would probably be a better world if lots of people stood up to that sort of bullying, but when a bully holds a gun to your head and demands that you act like a supporter of Jefferson Davis—well, most of us will start whistling Dixie.

A survey of teachers by (take a deep breath) the National Board of Educational Testing and Public Policy at Boston College (phew) found that in states that use high stakes testing (like, say, the PSSA tests in Pennsylvania) 70% of teachers said that the test leads some teachers in their school to teach in ways that contradict their ideas of good teaching. I imagine that problem, of being pushed to do what you know is wrong in your job, is even worse for principals.

Now, none of what I’ve talked about this week is arcane or secret knowledge—it’s all taken from published reports in reputable papers like The New York Times. But my story is not quite over.

Who was this superintendent who led Houston schools through an exercise in cooking the books in order to give the appearance of compliance with the law, while actually avoiding it? And did anything happen to him when it was discovered that he had been thumbing his nose at the regulations?

He’s doing fine. He’s Rod Paige, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education. This would be the part where I become cynical about government reform.

Professional Politicos

(News-Herald, April 10) There are lots of reasons to argue against the slow but steady intrusion of government into every nook and cranny of modern American life.

We could talk about the meddling, the separation of those who make decisions from those who must live with the consequences, the tendency of bureaucrats to get things wrong, or the way that government oversight makes endeavors stiff and inflexible, poorly positioned to deal with change.

Each of those is a valid complaint. I’ll probably get around to each of them sooner or later. But that’s not where I’m headed this week.

One problem with ever-spreading government is that it has created a widespread need for professional politicians.

My own profession is as good an example as any. Teaching has always been tied to government and bureaucracy; since we are an arm of government, that seems only natural.

Nowadays, the state and federal government make decisions about what I’ll in my classroom beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. Harrisburg and DC make choices about what I will do in the everyday-to-day practice of my profession.

But when politicians want to talk about education, they don’t want to talk to teachers. They want to talk to other politicians. And so we have the PSEA and the NEA, groups of politicians who are hired to go talk to politicians about education. I’m not a big fan of either group, and I often suspect that they feel a stronger allegiance to their fellow politicians than to the people who hire them.

But the bottom line is that politicians in Harrisburg or DC are not going to talk to me, not even if they have a question about teaching high school English in Venango County. So if I want to have any sort of voice in the decisions made about my profession at all, I need to hire politicians to speak for me.

My profession is by no means unique. Virtually every walk of life in this country has to hire rows of professional politicians. Doctors, lawyers, grocery store clerks, people of retirement age, left-handed basket weavers—if you want to be heard as politicians make decisions that change the shape of your life, you must hire a politician to speak for you. Employers and employees and customers don’t settle matters with each other; they send their hired representatives to battle it out in a capitol somewhere.

We call them lobbyists, but they are simply hired politicians (often retired from elected office), and each one is there because when politicians start deciding things, they want to talk to other politicians.

There was a time when Americans found their solutions locally. Problems were addressed by family solutions or neighborhood solutions or business solutions. Financial missteps and moral misjudgments were viewed as personal human problems. Now we treat them as political problems. If an issue needs to be addressed, we call for the hand of government. But any government solution is a political solution.

There was a time when we trotted out political solutions only for large problems, like the secession of half the country or massive widespread economic collapse or destroying the ugly legacy of segregation. But after discovering how effective that big club can be, we can’t resist picking it up for every little thing, and now we call for political solutions for smoking and bad salesmanship and dry cleaning chemicals and restaurant signage and spelling.

We don’t think we’re clamoring for more politics. We imagine that we are calling on the heroic figure of a good and just elected leadership. But whenever we call on the government, what we get is that guy-- “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you fill out these forms.” I hire my politician to go sic the major politicians on the people I think are the problem, and hire my politician to protect me from the politicians that other people have sicced on me.

The days where one could quietly stay in his corner and do a good job and be respected for that are fast fading. Doing a good job is not enough any more. You have to be able to sell it to a politician. And to have a voice in even the most simple parts of your own daily work and home life, you have to hire a politician to stand up for you, because no one else can.

The Dems Come to PA

(News-Herald, March 27) Tuesday’s paper noted that the number of registered Democrats in Venango County is close to surpassing the number of Republicans. I’ll have to check, but I’m pretty sure that’s one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Of course, they aren’t real Democrats. I don’t begrudge them that—I’m not a real Democrat, either; I realized a while back that being a registered Independent shut me out of the primaries, and in Venangoland, the primary is often the only election that really matters.

These newly minted Dems are intent on enjoying the fun of a Democratic Presidential Primary in Pennsylvania that might actually matter. I’m not sure I share their excitement.

I am what’s called a super-voter; I have voted in every election I ever could, which means I’ll likely vote this time, which means time spent harassing me is better spent than chasing after somebody who’s only going to vote if he’s heading out to buy cigarettes that day and the polling place is on route.

So I anticipate plenty of phone calls, a nice assortment of annoying recorded baloney from the campaigns to mix on my answering machine with the notifications about my car’s warrantee and invitations to timeshare.

But I figured we would mostly be left alone. I figured the candidates would deduce that their time was better spent speaking a rallies of thousands of big-city voters than talking to the fourteen card-carrying Democrats in Venangoland (though I suppose they could cover it by taking us all out to one quick lunch). If we’ve rounded up enough Democrats (real, converted or faux) to attract attention, that would be too bad.

In a way, I can see why this race would be attractive to Republicans.

On the one hand, we have a candidate who feels entitled to office, will pull any political streetfighting tactic to win, and claims that anything thwarting the campaign is the result of a malignant conspiracy between Evil Forces and The Media. On the other hand, we have a candidate whose policies are easily criticized as vague or seriously wrong-headed, but whose rhetoric is inspiring and uplifting, reminding us of all the good things we want to be as Americans.

In other words, Clinton vs. Obama is actually Nixon vs. Reagan.

True, the “First Woman/Black President” marquee muddies the water. It would be nice if we could have the election without gender or race being an issue, but we’re not quite there yet.

It’s hard to tell where we are, precisely. I believe there are plenty of people dumb enough to vote against Clinton because she’s a woman or against Obama because he’s black. But it’s a much smaller number of people dumb enough to say so out loud. So that part of the campaign travels underground, expressed through code, indirection, and internet lies and distortions.

As we settle into our role as the New Iowa, we’ll get to see and hear it all. If nothing else, this election will provide a windfall for media ad sales departments, sign printers and whoever manufacturers those vile, repugnant auto-dialing recorded message deployers.

I do feel marginally better about this election cycle than the decade’s displays of mud-wrestling between two sacks of trained weasels. McCain is the closest thing to an actual Republican we’ve had on the GOP ticket in a while, and I appreciate Obama’s attempts to act like a real grown-up. At the risk of tipping my electoral hand, I will admit that Clinton II embodies pretty much everything I find loathsome about DC politicians (whatever his rather large failings as a man, I thought Clinton I was an okay President).

I feel sorry for local candidates, who will have to try to buy the few seconds of air time not already dominated by Presidential politics. I know there are about 147 guys running for John Peterson’s spot. Somebody has hit the ground running with plenty of tv ads, but all I’ve retained from them is that A) this guy is ticked off about illegal immigrants and oil-rich countries that hate us and B) to my middle-aged eyes, this guy looks to be about twelve years old. I do not remember his name nor the office for which he’s running, so if I’m supposed to be part of the target audience, his handlers may want to refine their message. They don’t have much time before Clinton/Obama have sucked up all the oxygen in the room.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep hoping that the candidates will swing through in person. Maybe they’ll take a ride on the OC & T, or catch a fish on Justus Lake. I would be happy to host a picnic for them and Venangoland’s lifetime Democrats in my back yard. Just call ahead so I have time to get a few extra groceries.

For anyone keeping score, this has seventy-some more words than the newspaper version; the thin-sizing of the paper caught me by surprise and I sent this off before discovering that I would have to adapt to a new, shorter reality. After ten years, I'll be interested to see if I can now write in shorter takes.

The AFA Today

(News-Herald, January 17)Oddly enough, I’m often asked what Diane Gramley and the AFA are up to these days. I am not an expert on the American Family Association. I did interview Mrs. Gramley years ago, and I can report that she does not have horns, does not breathe fire, and does not brandish stakes and torches. I found her intelligent, articulate, and pleasant.

People in these parts have mixed feelings about being targeted by Mrs. Gramley and the AFA. A few years back they mounted a campaign against a production of “La Cage Aux Folles” at the Barrow; it was the most effective publicity campaign ever, filling virtually all the seats.

Still, more than a few school districts have turtled up when they’ve seen Mrs. Gramley approaching. It’s not just that the AFA stirs up supporters, who by and large seem to be happy to stay quietly a home while Mrs. Gramley sallies forth to raise a ruckus in their name. (Like the ACLU and the Moral Majority, the AFA is more a network of sympathetic individuals than a club that gathers members for meetings.) Like most strident and extreme groups, the AFA stirs strident and extreme opposition.

But Mrs. Gramley has moved up in the world, which may be why things have been a bit quieter on the Northwestern PA front (it could also be that we’ve all become better people, I suppose). Previously responsible for Northwestern Pennsylvania chapter, Gramley now heads the AFA for the entire state. She is responsible for keeping an eye on the whole commonwealth, including all the naughty folks in Philadelphia. Along with tax money and legislative attention, it seems that the big city also gets an extra share of moral correction.

The national AFA espouses a variety of causes, from anti-pornography, to generally making gays and lesbians go away, to making advertisers use the word “Christmas” in seasonal promotions. AFA never met a boycott it didn’t like. Some work, some don’t. AFA takes credit for chasing smutty magazines out of 7-11’s, but when it tried throwing its weight at a major bookstore chain, it was sued instead.

AFA has backed off some of its edgier stances. They now endorse values from the “Judeo-Christian tradition;” a few decades ago founder Don Wildmon was suggesting that immorality in the media was a Jewish plot to drive Christianity out of American life.

Mrs. Gramley has mastered one basic trick of press release writing. If I send out a news release reading, “The squash festival will be the best event in world history…” no newspaper will run it. It’s an ad, an editorial, and not news. But quoting somebody—that’s legitimate reporting. So I just quote myself: “Squash Appreciation Society president Peter Greene announced the upcoming festival. ‘It will be the best event in world history,’ said Greene.” A quick google of Mrs. Gramley turns up a variety of press releases in which the AFA announces what she has to say about something.

She’s also producing a weekly radio program, usually featuring a telephone interview with a medium-prominent speaker or author.

Like, I’m sure, many people, I actually agree with some AFA positions. Smut and pornography aren’t good. Many elements of popular culture are toxic. Illegal drugs are bad. In the education biz, government occasionally tries to poke its nose where it doesn’t belong.

But I am naturally suspicious of people who have complete certainty that they know the mind of God, and I am doubly leery of people who believe that Being Correct gives them the right to bully people who are Very Wrong. The national AFA seems to attract those sorts of folks both as allies and as foes; in addition to its own attacks on others, you can find ugly attacks against the AFA from people who are certain that the AFA is dead wrong and so should be denied any decent treatment. I don’t buy this argument no matter how it’s applied. No footnote to the Golden Rule says “Do unto others, unless they’re wrong, in which case go ahead and treat them like garbage.”

I suspect that much of AFA’s agenda has more to do with politics and culture than with God (as Rev. Gene Carlson recently said, “When you mix politics and religion, you get politics”). But I’ve been on the receiving end of their disapproval, and I seem to have survived. Dissenting voices are an important part of a free society. I appreciate Mrs. Gramley’s willingness to sign her name to her opinions and assume the non-traditional-family role of lady political activist. It’s too bad she doesn’t have as much time for Venangoland any more, but I’m sure there’s a way to get AFA supporters to speak up.

Information Vacuums

(News-Herald, December 13)Nature abhors an information vacuum. Where information is missing, nature always finds way to pick up the slack. This is a simple principle, easy to grasp, but often forgotten. People, particularly when occupying sensitive positions of power or bureaucracy, seem to have an overwhelming urge to “manage” people by withholding information.

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them” is the operating principle, and it’s true, as far as it goes. But the oft-forgotten rest of the saying is “but it will surely come back to bite you in the butt.”

On some level, we all know this. It’s a principle that has been celebrated endlessly on television. If the first part of an episode involves a husband deciding that he will avoid trouble by keeping some piece of information from his wife, every tv viewer over the age of six knows that hilarity will ensue as his secrecy breeds disaster.

The problem with an artificial information vacuum is not just that it’s hard to control. The problem is that when you refuse to tell people things they want to know, they will invariably just start making stuff up. Nobody ever EVER walked away from a situation like that saying, “Well, they aren’t talking, so I guess we’ll just never know.”

All of the great wrangles in these parts have featured this principle at work. From the Hospital Merger Fiasco to the endless Two Mile Run Drama, confusion and mess have been sown by folks who figured they could keep a lid on things and avoid further squawking.

In the murky uncertainty of the merger of the Oil City and Franklin hospitals, a thousand imagined outcomes were conjured up. The Oil City Hospital is going to be closed. The Franklin Hospital will be closed. A thousand nurses will be laid off. The Oil City building will be encased in concrete, then blown up. Patients will be dragged to the Franklin facility and then forced to live within the Franklin City limits.

It’s not that the complete truth is always greeted with a warm fuzzy hug. Had the merger plans been laid out in detail from day one, there still would have been plenty of people hopping mad. But by trying to avoid that scenario, honchos managed to still get all of that anger PLUS a bunch more anger about things that weren’t even going to happen.

And if that isn’t messy enough, an information vacuum provides opportunity for deliberate abuse. Hypothetically, a physician who was worried about having his golden applecart upset by the merger would have been free to fill the vacuum with whatever tale he chose to spin in order to stir up people for his own purposes.

Two Mile has often offered more of the same. We could go back through the years, but let’s just set the wayback machine to last summer.

All the park authority ever needed to do was issue a simple sentence beginning with the words, “It’s necessary to close the park for the season because…” and finish it in fifteen words or fewer. Instead, we got gobbledygook that was, perhaps, intended to soothe the savages. It didn’t—it just left everyone in the county free to invent their own reason for closing the park.

So many stories have been made up about the park that the average shmoe doesn’t have a hope of figuring out what the heck really went on. That’s how it is with an information vacuum; before you know it, you’re trying to prove that forty-seven different things didn’t happen and answering questions like “When did you stop beating your wife?”

That’s why it’s worth it to tell people you don’t have an answer—if you tell them nothing, they’ll guess that you’re keeping the truth hostage for nefarious purposes. That’s why it actually makes sense for news outlets to keep reporting “Nothing new has happened at this time.” The truth may be boring, but it still fills the information vacuum.

Sometimes information has to be held back. It would have been nice to have regular updates on the saga of the Crook Who Stole Venango County’s Money, but the feds asked our local authorities to keep a lid on it and that seems like a hard-to-ignore request. Troop movements, contract negotiations and medical tests are better handled without widespread public scrutiny, balanced by the knowledge that the results will ultimately be revealed.

It should also be noted that it is not an information vacuum when the information is right there for all the to see, but people are just too lazy or cantankerous or attached to what they’ve already decided is the truth. If you insist on remaining unbothered by the facts, the only vacuum is between your ears.

County Commissioners ('03 Edition)

Just happened across this, which is what I had to say about the commissioners' race in 2003. I still agree with all of it, even though today's election involved a whole other batch of clowns...

(News-Herald, March 2003)Suddenly, everyone wants to be a county commissioner. It’s uncanny, particularly when you think of all those years we couldn’t give the job away.

Not that I’m complaining. The most common problem we have in local elections is lack of choice. It’s great to have a decision to make; the trick is to figure out how exactly to do it. I’m reminded of an old political saw: if twelve clowns are performing in the center ring, you can jump in and start reciting Shakespeare, but to the audience you’ll just be the thirteenth clown. Soon we voters will have to learn to tell these clowns apart.

It’s too early to endorse anyone by name, and I don’t think I know the whole list of candidates anyway. But I already know what I’m looking for.

First, remember what the commissioners can and can’t do. It’s a mistake to think that the commissioners can magically create thriving businesses out of thin air. County government has the ability to get in the way of many things, but not a lot of power to make things happen.

So insisting that more businesses would come here if the commissioners would just wave a magic wand and make a money tree spring from the ground is silly. Nor do I want to solve unemployment by making the government so large that everybody in the county works for it.

But future commissioners do need to have a plan for cooperative regional economics. If candidates don’t know their way around the Bosworth report, they’d better have some ideas of their own.

Second, I want a commissioner to be a clear-eyed cheerleader.

Clear-eyed because there are certainly challenges that we face as a county, and we won’t deal with them successfully by ignoring them.

Clear-eyed because we need, in all our local leaders, some vision. It is useless to define our challenges in terms of what’s gone. It will not help us to look at our present and talk about how it differs from our past. Past is past; it’s gone. What we need to look at is how our present is different from the future we want for ourselves, and how we can bridge that gap.

If we have a serious vision weakness locally, it is our preoccupation with the past. We used to have more jobs at Joy. We used to have oil industries. All that is true. It’s just that, in terms of keeping our county vital, it doesn’t mean jack.

It’s as if we’re a family on a long car trip and we get out the map and spend hours going over the roads that got us to where we are. Well, if we’re going to continue the trip, we don’t need to know where we’ve been. We need to know where we’re going.

And “we’ll keep doing the same old thing and try to cut corners while we do it,” is not a plan for the future. It’s a recipe for helplessness. Keep cutting corners, and pretty soon you have nothing left at all.

So the clear-eyed part is important, but so is the cheerleader part.

I don’t want a mindless cheerleader. I don’t want someone with a smile pasted across his face telling me that a broken water main is good because it’ll water the grass. I don’t want someone to come watch my house burn down and tell me how pretty it looks.

But I have no patience for civic and business leaders in our area whose basic pitch seems to be, “Hey, we’re in horrible economic trouble and the business climate is awful and our people are leaving in troop ships and the weather sucks and grass won’t grow here and the sun never shines and we don’t even have a Starbucks. Don’t you want to come here to live and work?”

I don’t want to be represented by someone who is ashamed to live here, who thinks all our young people should run away, who thinks that we are on the brink of disaster and there’s nothing we can do but curl up and try to bounce when we hit bottom.

We have considerable resources in this county, a multitude of tools with which to build a future. The county commissioner candidates that I vote for will be people who can see that and are prepared to invest in it.

The candidates that I vote for will be folks who see county government as a resource. They’ll be able to manage effectively because they’ll see our county employees as people who work to help maintain quality of life in the county, and not a barrel-load of flunkies who need to be slapped up and kept in line.

We have many resources in Venango County; they aren’t infinite, but numerous and rich nonetheless. If you want my vote, tell me about that. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’ll just be the thirteenth clown.

VENANGOLAND ELECTIONS 07

(News-Herald, November 1)Halloween’s over, so we can move on to something really scary—local elections.

It’s probably a good year to learn about “bullet voting.” Bullet voting depends on one simple fact—you don’t have to use every vote you have.

Imagine a race in which four people are running for two seats: Tom, Dick, Harry, and Some Guy. Three voters go into the booth, each with two votes to use and only one candidate they really like.

So Voter A, a Tom fan, votes for Tom and Some Guy. Voter B votes for Dick and Some Guy. Voter C votes for Harry and Some Guy. And in the end, Some Guy is the big winner while Tom, Dick and Harry tie for last place.

It may seem counter-intuitive to “waste” a vote, but if voters A, B, and C use one vote to vote only for the candidates they really like, Tom, Dick and Harry tie for the lead and Some Guy loses.

Even with four people running for four spots, rationing your vote can still affect the order they come in; in some elected groups, that matters.

It’s a fine year to remember all this, because—well, the school board elections present No Choice At All, and other elections feature those jobs that nobody understands, like County Comptrolling Clerk of Electoral Records Secretary. Then there’s the race for County Commissioner.

I don’t suppose you could get a more disorganized, tragically doomed race if you tied a bunch of squirrels’ feet together, shook them up in a sack, and dropped them at the top of a water slide to go after a couple of acorns strapped to the bottom of the pool. In a thunderstorm.

We have the water muddied with write-in candidates. I suspect that the write-innacy of Horn and Smith is less about ego and more about some Powers That Be looking at the primary results and choking. But a write-in is tough going in Venangoland, and if the electorate has already rejected you once, that’s a pretty clear predictor. I give Smith the edge here—she came close in the primary and her name is easy to type. But while the electorate may be fickle, I doubt that several hundred voters have changed their minds since spring.

That leaves the duly selected candidates, none of whom have ever held elected office. I understand that every politician has to start somewhere; I wish these folks weren’t starting out by running the whole county.

Vance Mays stands out by being a Libertarian, a party that I like in theory. But Mays’s position on economic development seems a bit disingenuous. He says we shouldn’t spend taxpayer dollars on a development agency; it can be done by volunteers. Furthermore, he himself can pick up the phone and have thirty CEO contacts lined up to develop the county. Except that he apparently hasn’t actually done that yet. So I guess his point is that we shouldn’t hire someone to do a job that can be handled by a volunteer, and he will volunteer to do that job as soon as we hire him as commissioner.

The rest of the field is the usual mish-mosh of Republicrats. I remain unimpressed by the assorted posturings re: Two Mile Run Park. At this point we know two things about the park—nobody has a good long-term plan for the place, and it is a miniscule portion of commissioner responsibilities. Electing a commissioner based on a park position is like electing a President based on his plans for the janitorial staff at the Statue of Liberty.

In May, Jan Beichner said that if county government had better communication “you wouldn’t see so many lawsuits.” I’m willing to accept that Beichner is an expert when it comes to lawsuits and the county.

Troy Wood has actually bothered to learn something about county finances. Stan Grzasko has some actual experience with a larger scale union organization. Timothy Brooks is well-educated, but largely invisible during this campaign.

If these were all people who were getting ready to interview for a job, I would guess it was a job they didn’t particularly want. Little campaign material (including no web presence), statements vague to the point of uselessness, and none who appear to have done their homework. Everyone who ever ran for office in this county declared themselves in favor of lower taxes and more well-paid jobs. Big deal. Do any of these people have a clue about how to actually accomplish any of their goals? If they do, perhaps they should share those clues in the next couple of days, because they’re not entitled to our votes just for showing up.

POST-NATIONALISM

(News-Herald, June 28) I want to start with a short history lesson. Please bear with me.

Up until the 19^th century, nationalism was not much of an issue in the world. People’s allegiances were to family first, then maybe community or tribe. The king was just some guy who, hopefully, would leave you alone. “The king is dead; long live the king” didn’t so much mean “Hooray for us” as “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

In the 19^th century, several leaders discovered the value of nationalism as a motivational tool, building it up until we arrived at “modern” wars like World War I, where people were successfully motivated to fight and kill and die for The Motherland.

As a relatively modern nation composed almost entirely of non-natives, the US has always had a bit of the nationalism bug—though the Constitution was a tough sell because most folks at the time considered their primarily allegiance to be to their state. But we’re used to the notion of national pride, national honor, national interest. It seems natural and normal to us, but it’s not the way Things Have Always Been.

Now, I wonder if we aren’t seeing a change into a post-national world. And these days it’s clearly visible in two ways: terrorists and corporations.

Lebanon is an example of a place where government and nation are in danger of being overwhelmed. It’s just one of many locales on the globe where terrorists live, or at least occupy the space, with no particular allegiance to or stake in the actual nation.

The Taliban have always been an effective enemy to pretty much anyone who wandered into Afghanistan because they show no particular interest in actually taking over the country. Terrorists don’t want to rule, don’t want to waste their time on the mundane business of government like maintaining roads and services. They just want to be able to do as they please and take what they want.

Likewise, modern multinational corporations operate in a world that is above and beyond nations. These days, nobody would expect a CEO to announce that he was making a corporate decision based on loyalty to the nation that he calls home.

We occasionally get some noise about how global economic stuff will ultimately be good for America, but nobody really knows how that will pan out, and, really, it’s a justification after the fact, not a motivation for decisions. There seems to be an unstated assumption that governments are an obstacle to economics.

Terrorists threaten governments with guns and bombs while corporations buy them with money. Both are looking for the freedom to exert their will without being restrained.

I have no idea if life in a world without national allegiances is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Nationalism had its good points, but it has also motivated people to do many awful things. I suspect the post-nationalism is neither good nor bad—it just is. It will be a benefit for some people, a curse for others. It will lead some people to do good things, and others to do terrible things.

But a post-national world will be one that involves new roles for governments. Terrorists and corporations want pretty much the same thing from governments—to be left alone and allowed to pursue their interests with a minimum of interference.

That requires some sort of cooperation with the government, because while interference sometimes comes in the form of laws and legislation, sometimes it comes in the form of angry citizens carrying pointy sticks. Corporations cooperate by paying some attention to citizen interests. Terrorists cooperate by agreeing to not blow up too many important people too often. Both have learned to cooperate by providing some of the goods and services that governments traditionally take care of.

The big difference between these new rulers and governments is that citizens don’t get to elect the CEO of Satan-Mart or the leader of Titanic Whackos Instigating Terror.

That’s what may make bad news for the rest of us. First, because we don’t easily wield the power to make these guys go away. And second, because governments are torn between serving the citizens who elect them, the bomb-wielding whackos who threaten them, and the corporations who pay them. My hope? That government will remember that their job is to protect those of us who think of ourselves as citizens from all those other folks who don’t.

TWO MILE RUN: WRETCHED FAILURE ALL AROUND

(News-Herald, May 31) The Two Mile Run County Park flap has been, every step of the trip, a classic Venangoland confrontation between folks who set out to do the Right Thing in the worst possible way, and folks who believe the world would be a better place if we could just roll the clock back forty years.

When these two sides line up against each other, confrontation always turns ugly. When one side looks across the gulf, they see a bunch of slope-browed yahoos who don’t have the brains to know what’s good for them. When the yahoos look back across the gulf, they see arrogant snobs who believe their money and education make them so much better than everyone else.

The last time these two groups squared off was the Great Hospital Merger Fiasco. History shows that merging Oil City and Franklin hospitals was exactly right, but the Big Bosses managed to mishandle it every step of the way, feeding an increasingly angry opposition. Arrogance married mule-headedness and gave birth to the Worst Possible “Solution” -- a hospital in Cranberry.

The county’s decision to give up management of Two Mile was smart. It was a black hole of tax dollars, taking from the taxpayers while barely remaining usable. Handing it to a management firm made sense. Instead of the classic government management model (“Run this business for us and we’ll pay you the same whether you succeed or fail”), we got a conservative free-market approach (“Run this business, and you will prosper only if it prospers”).

But the first proposal for park development called for a complete change in the character of the place with a resort hotel and a fancy restaurant. At the most this required a steady stream of rich folks from far away places; at the very least it required that local folks be convinced the plan had merit. The park folks failed to sell the plan, and by the time the plan was scaled back, it was too late. Somehow the battle lines between ignorant yahoos and arrogant snobs had been drawn.

Some of this mess was unexpected. I’ve met Tim Spuck, and I’m familiar with the Rudegeairs, and they all strike me as reasonably decent folks, so how the stupid spat over the observatory managed to spiral out of control is a mystery to me. From out here in the cheap seats, it seems like the sort of dispute that two friendly ten-year-olds could resolve.

Of course, other parts of the mess are completely predictable. Once things turned unpleasant, lawsuits were inevitable—the courts remain the weapon of choice in the county.

Not that there was any mystery about some of the outcomes. If the Two Mile Run treehouses are competition with Turtle Bay Lodge, then my dog is competition with the Lipizzaner Stallions and I am a serious contender for the US Senate. Of course, if Mrs. Beichner becomes commissioner, she’ll be able to insure that the “competition” never threatens her again.

And about the commissioner soon-to-be-elects. I’m not particularly comforted by their offer to help out with the park. Here we are about to seat an entire brand new set of inexperienced county commissioners who will have to manage a court system, oversee regional economic development, and administer a massive staff of county employees, and the first thing they want to get a primer on is the park !!??!

But there’s still plenty of dopiness to go around. When a usually-reliable radio newsman reported that the Rudegeairs had skipped town, he could have resorted to the journalistic approach of driving past the house with his eyes open. The Rudegeairs deserved better.

And I’m going to hope that the park board’s decision to freeze Two Mile in place for the summer is a prudent managerial choice and not just a petulant pouty fit. Because it certainly seems like the message of the shut-down is “Our main goal in managing the park is to get our own way, and if we aren’t going to, then why bother.” This is a different message from, say, “We’re going to take this chance to give the county one more summer of the park being run the way we believe it should be run.”

Right now it looks like a bunch of sad failure all around. Parks Unlimited failed to win allies and articulate a vision of themselves as aggressive caretakers of a county trust. Their opponents failed to articulate any vision that didn’t include some fantasy-based return to a golden age of the park that never existed.

In some ways it’s a small loss. It’s not like we have a woods and water shortage in Venangoland. But it would be nice not to have to watch the “arrogant snobs” and “ignorant yahoos” square off yet again.

PRIMARIES 07

(News-Herald, May 10) I’m not always one to count down to election day, but I’ll be glad when the primaries are over Tuesday.

The newspaper’s real reporters will no doubt continue their fair and even-handed coverage of the upcoming election. Fortunately, I am not bound by any requirements to be fair or reasonable, so I can present you with my totally biased voting guide.

ACT 1

Act 1 is Smilin’ Ed Rendell’s latest attempt to pretend to provide property tax reform in Pennsylvania. All of these attempts have had one thing in common; they’ve been set up so that if people like them, Harrisburg can take the credit, and if people don’t, Harrisburg can blame it one someone else.

The saga has been marked by a struggle between local school boards, who keep refusing to do what they’re told, and Smilin’ Ed, who keeps looking for ways to force them to.

Act 1 will not reduce taxes. It will just move them around. The question that voters get to answer, unfortunately is not “Do you think this is stupid?” The question instead is, “We’re going to force someone to pay some of Grampa’s property tax. Should we force people who work for a living, or people who have investments?”

Retired homeowners will be the big winners. Depending on where you live, big losers may be A) people with jobs who rent or B) people with significant investment income. Should be interesting to see what effect the decision has on where people choose to live, since school districts can make themselves investor havens or renters’ hell.

JUDGE

I just had no idea that a judge job was such a plum. I am becoming tempted to run for the office myself.

It’s not just the astonishing amount of money being spent on the campaign—it’s that it’s all been spent so badly.

There’s the signage, enough that if we could make a sizable papier mache addition to the courthouse. There’s the small forest of junk mail bending the backs of Venangoland mail deliverers. And there’s the endless onslaught of phone calls, many of which sound as if they’re coming from a call center somewhere folks couldn’t even find Venango County on a map.

And out of this very expensive onslaught of campaigning, we get these basic messages:

1) This is my name.

2) This is what I look like.

3) I want to be judge.

4) I think fairness, integrity and experience are important.

From the weight given to #4, you would assume that the candidates think

they're running against a sleazy crook who has never seen the inside of a courtroom. If that guy were running, at least he would stand out in some significant way from the other three. As it is, we’ll all just vote for the one we’ve got the best impression of based on hearsay, stories we’ve heard at church and the grocery store, and any personal info we have. We could have done that without record-breaking attempts to buy the office.

COUNTY COMMISSIONERS

Here’s a clue. If you think one of the major issues facing the commissioners is how to handle Two Mile Run County Park, you shouldn’t be a county commissioner.

I’ll settle for someone who has a reasonably good grasp of how to handle the nuts and bolts of keeping the county functioning. I would love to see people in politics in the region who have some drive and a plan, some sort of vision for the county beyond plodding along with business almost as usual.

But vision is hard to come by in local politics, and I don’t necessarily blame our politicians. I suspect that some days they feel that if they brought back a sack with a billion dollars in it, some local residents would complain about the composition of the sack, the stacking of the money, and how we should just throw the money out if those people are going to get some of it.

Beyond that, I don’t honestly know who half the commissioner candidates are. Heck, I couldn’t even tell you which office some of the names-on-signs are running for.

School board elections? As usual, there aren’t enough willing citizens to give voters a real choice, except in Cranberry, where it will be a circus no matter whom the voters elect.

One word of advice. If you have a true favorite candidate for one of the mob races, vote for just that candidate. When the ballot says “select up to three,” you can select just one, and that gives your candidate a better shot.

And whoever ends up running the county, I hope they vigorously pursue candidates who don’t take down their stupid signs promptly.

NONE LEFT BEHIND

(News-Herald, January 2003) Yes, I was initially resistant to the federal education initiative. I know that in the past I may have referred to “No Child Left Behind” as “dangerously dopey” or “a cynical attempt to dismantle American public education.” But I have seen the light.

It makes perfect sense to approach the human endeavor of education with the expectation of a 100% success rate, and it seems only right that any school district that falls short of perfection should be stripped of financial support and taken over by the government.

In fact, I think the feds should extend the principle to more fields devoted to improving the human condition. Let me propose a few programs.

“No Smile Left Behind.” It’s time for the dentists of this country to provide thorough and effective treatment of their patients. There’s no reason in this day and age that we can’t have 100% perfect dental health—so all dentists will be expected to have 100% success with their patients. If not, they’ll be replaced with special government-issue dentists.

“No Patient Left Behind” Probably the only area of human service as wide-reaching and important as education is health care. In a world with 100% perfectly educated youth, surely we need to have 100% success in health care.

So we’ll give hospitals twelve years to improve their delivery of treatment, and at the end of a decade we’ll have hospitals that cure every person who comes through their doors

See, the beauty of No Child Left Behind is that unshakeable 100%. For too long, we’ve accepted less than perfection. For too long we’ve accepted, for instance, that saving lives from cancer is hard. Let’s adopt, instead, the NCLB philosophy; if any hospital fails to provide 100% cure of anything from cancer to the common cold, we’ll stop giving them any money for treating patients. That’ll get them to stop monkeying around and trot out that 100% successful cure that we know they’re hiding somewhere.

But let’s not stop there. We need to address other aspects of health. We’ve heard repeatedly that America is overweight. That gives me an idea for our next program:

“No Behind Left Behind.” Most every town has a YMCA or YWCA or health club; there’s no reason for America to have any fat people. I say there’s no reason not to expect each exercise-based facility to have 100% success in getting every person down to perfect fighting trim. Biology, habit, ambition, determination, desire—these minor quibbles won’t stop us from having perfect schools, so if the Y can’t get every rear end in the area into a slim pair of jeans, then the government should take over and implement their plans for weight reduction in the US.

And why stop with physical well-being. Let’s have “No Soul Left Behind.” Churches have clearly been dogging it in this country. After several centuries, we are still surrounded by sinners and evil-doers. I say it’s time for church leaders to get off their duffs and get that salvation train rolling.

It is time that every single soul in this country was saved. So let’s give the churches and synagogues a decade or so, at the end of which we’ll expect a salvation rate of 100%. And if any church fails to produce, then we’ll just bring in government officials to properly supervise the salvation of American souls.

I’m excited about this revelation. As a teacher, I’ve always bought into the notion that there’s no such thing as a perfect school. But all the things that we have claimed stand in the way of perfect education—individual differences in abilities, goals, circumstances, ambition—are the same factors that challenge the success of most human endeavors. So if government legislation erases these from schools, they can be erased from other areas of human existence as well.

The feds have given us great new principles to live by: Perfection is attainable and we should never settle for less. People fall short of perfection because they’re unmotivated; threaten to take away their livelihood and they’ll do better.

And if you lose your way on the path to perfection, the government is always ready to step in and show the way, because the government, apparently, knows the secret of achieving 100% successful perfection. In fact, I’m sure they can make a go of two more programs—“No Evildoers Left Behind” in which 100% of America’s military enemies are neutralized and “No Stomach Left Behind” in which 100% of all Americans have enough to eat. Should take twelve years, tops. And if the feds don’t get it done, I think we should cut their funding.

PARTY-JUMPING

(News-Herald, April 5) The flap over party-hopping county commissioner candidates is a new twist on an old Venangoland election tradition.

For virtually every other election it’s normal procedure for candidates for every office from school board to ferret inspector to file as candidates of both parties. This has nothing to do with political philosophy or the principles of one party or another. It has to do with the laziness of county voters.

A candidate for office has two pre-election details to sweat. One is making sure that he is listed with both parties. The other is hoping that his name will be drawn for the top of the candidates listing on the ballot.

Plenty of people in Venangoland still love to vote the straight party ticket with no particular regard for the actual person running. If my dog were running for office, he could get 20% of the votes cast by crossfiling; if his name were at the top of the list, he’d get 35%.

It’s a curious phenomenon because political parties stand for so little these days.

Nationally, the GOP has been spoiled by success. It got tromped in the last election by valuing, as John McCain correctly observed, political power over principle. The GOP forgot that it had any principle other than the desire to keep and exercise power, and so the party that once championed smaller government spent money like a drunken sailor and stuck Uncle Sugar’s nose into every nook and cranny of American life.

The Democrats are similarly principle-free. They have found some things to pretend to believe that get them votes, but their main message is still, “We aren’t those guys.”

As little as parties matter on the national scene, they matter even less here.

Take, for example, the Cranberry School Board. You would think that these folks had run out of ways to embarrass themselves years ago, but no. There are always new ways for them demonstrate the fine art of scrabbling and wrestling for power. It’s hard to escape the impression that the district could be fabulous if the board members focused as much energy on education as they spent on putting “those people” in their place.

This is local, small-time politics at its finest. We’ve watched these two factions, in one form or another, battle it out for years. Yet I would wager that most of us have no idea how the party affiliations stack up in all this mess. Nor in all the heated rhetoric do we read any mention of Democrat or Republican.

The politics are personal. It’s my good, noble friends and I, trying to stop those big doodyheads over there. Small town party affiliations don’t tell us much about the candidate’s ideology or philosophy. Mostly party affiliation tells who they hang with, who they’re loyal to, who sits at their table at the country club.

The requirement that county commissioners not come from all the same party makes sense, not because we need a balance of ideologies, but because it improves the chances of electing people from different political cliques.

I can see why Dems might be touchy about the matter, because that one seat is the only office in the county that a Democrat has a good shot at winning in an election. It has to be annoying to nominally Democratic candidates that some nominal Republicans are trying to take even this small prize away from them.

But for the general public to complain is just silly. Telling Republicans apart from Democrats in this county is not a matter of distinguishing between sheep and wolves or elephants and donkeys. It’s more like distinguishing between guys who wear boxers and guys who wear briefs—it can be done, but not with a quick, superficial glance.

The electorate loves to complain about elected officials, but then, a large portion of the electorate never even shows up to elect. And when it does show up, it doesn’t bother to learn anything about the candidates (who could, on the local level, be anything from a highly-qualified capable grown-up to a clueless dimbulb to my dog).

Yes, sometimes voting is a fruitless exercise. Cranberry’s board isn’t the first to ignore a clear message from the voters, and it won’t be the last.

But if you don’t want to elect a Republican in Democrat’s clothing, don’t vote for it. And if you really want to vote in a way that is useful, learn something about the candidates and decide who has the brains, ability, commitment and skills for the job.

When the time comes, go to the polls. Exercise your ability to think. And if you can’t do that, exercise your ability to stop complaining.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

(News-Herald, January 18) No Child Left Behind is celebrating its fifth birthday this month (which means, of course, that if it were a human child, it would be time to start running NCLB through a battery of standardized tests). NCLB is also up for review by the feds that spawned it. So many folks are reflecting on the act and its various side-effects.
It’s tempting to dismiss the act simply on the basis of its most obviously objectionable aspects. For instance, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that NCLB is partly a money-making scheme for book publishers. Book publishers write standards for reading, produce materials designed to teach those objectives, and then win government recommendations that only their books be used.
Or the central insanity of NCLB—the 100% success rate. Nobody else in the country is expected to have 100% success. Not doctors, not lawyers and certainly not politicians. Heck, after the Iraqi WMD’s failed to materialize, we were reminded that the heavily staffed, generously funded intelligence community could certainly not be expected to be right all the time.
But here in Pennsylvania, in less than a decade, 100% of all students will be above average (which means, I guess, that they will all be well-educated enough to know that there’s no way 100% of anything can be above average).
Administrators and school boards hate the unfunded mandates (that’s when the government tells you that you must feed each student steak, but you have to pay for it yourself). Conservatives (at least the old school ones) hate having the State grabbing control of local school districts. Teachers resent being treated like the problem in education instead of the front line troops.
It’s easy to let these philosophical issues overwhelm views of NCLB. But at the same time, there are practical aspects to appreciate.
There’s no question that some school districts have, over the years, chosen to warehouse their problem students, to simply tolerate untalented, unmotivated, unwelcome students. Wait a few years, and they’ll go away.
School districts have often catered to the college-bound crowd. If you “just” want to be a welder or a mechanic or a plumber or any of the jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us—well, we sometimes figured that we just didn’t need to try to teach you all that much.
NCLB challenges the idea that some students aren’t worth the great effort it takes to work with them. And that’s an assumption that should be challenged.
NCLB also recognizes the need for some sort of measure of what a school district accomplishes. For way too long, the ed biz was marked by an attitude problem. Questions about what we were doing and how well we were doing it were greeted with a haughty, “We are the public school system. Stop questioning us and trust that we are doing great things.”
The push for a stiff and strenuous standard is a Good Thing, and if we judge NCLB on practical results, we have to give credit for that push.But it is also in the area of practical results that NCLB ultimately has failed, and failed miserably. Because at the heart of those standards, we don’t find a serious attempt to set and evaluate strong valuable learning goals.
All we find is a test. A one-size-fits-all, high-stakes, not-very-good test.
School districts ought to be talking about how to best educate their students. They ought to be talking about what goals are most valuable, what measures are most reliable, what will best produce wise and productive members of society. Instead, school districts are having only one conversation: how do we get better scores on the test? It’s like the head of Ford saying, “Never mind if the cars are any good—are the workers wearing clean uniforms?”
We take class time away so that we can take practice tests. We take teaching time away so that teachers can coach students on the practice items they missed. And if they don’t do well enough on the practice test, we replace some of their enrichment classes with classes about how to take the test. And if we don’t do it, the State threatens to take our school district away.
The tests are exactly what you would expect from a committee of bureaucrats, measuring little of value, and doing it poorly. At the end of the day, the scores prove one thing—how good the students are at taking that standardized test.
NCLB was supposed to transform schools. It has. Where educating students was once our main concern, it is now a side business, an afterthought. We’ll squeeze it in around the edges, once we’ve made certain we get our test scores up.

PASSING THE GENERATIONAL BATON

(News-Herald, January 11)Passing the mantle of leadership can be a big generational challenge.
Barack Obama has been clear about analyzing his own appeal, which he seems to feel rooted in a generational boomer-fatigue.
That’s sad for the boomers—if Obama or one of his cohort win the White House, that will mean that the boomers provided the nation with a grand total of two Presidents, leaving them far in the dust of virtually every other American generation. That would be a boomer bummer, because we planned to permanently remake the world in our collective image.
And yet Bush and Clinton embody much of what is obnoxious about the boomers. Boomers specialize in a kind of single-minded righteousness, a sort of philosophical deep-seated double-jointedness. We know what we want, and we do what we want, but we always have a profound deep sincere righteous reason that we should get to.
So whether it’s hiding from the draft or using money to avoid responsibility or cheating on the wife or starting a war you’re clueless about how to finish, a boomer can make it all okay. At least, in his own head.
At our worst, boomers talk a good game of Right and Wrong, but somehow end up doing whatever we want to do anyway. The current political spectacle—Bush II forced to ask his dad’s friends of the Iraq commission to help sort out his mess, while the younger generation is already agitating for a new broom to sweep clean—may seem uncomfortably familiar to many boomers. Our parents still providing practical clean-up for our zealously idealistic messes, while our children wonder if we’re going to leave them anything in unbroken condition.
Well, if the younger generations find their elders obnoxious now, wait till the boomers finish retiring and decide that the Right Thing To Do is for taxes on investments and homes to be cut while working folks pick up the slack.
Of course, not all transitions in leadership are about the boomers (as much as we boomers have trouble believing that anything could be Not About Us).
Last week’s column about the Franklin Club’s financial problems had barely hit the newsstands before folks were reminding me of some earlier chapters in Club history. For instance, there still seems to be a bit of testiness out there about the Club’s reluctance to recruit and retain junior members back in the 1970’s. As some folks remember it, Club Elders considered proposals to try recruiting a younger wave of future members, but decided that young’uns could jolly well come ask to get in when they’d worked hard and proved they deserved it.
Groups in Venangoland sometimes have trouble handing the baton to the younger runners in the pack.
It’s not that they don’t want the young folks around—the younger generation is perfectly welcome to join in, as long as they don’t raise a fuss, don’t talk back to their elders, and promise to do everything exactly the way the older generation has always done it.
It’s not that the older generation wants to hold onto the power; they just want to be sure that everything is going to go on properly (“properly” being defined as “the way we would do it ourselves”).
There are plenty of churches around that have traveled to the brink of extinction with this formula—they’re perfectly willing to reach out to young people, as long as the young people prove that they’re the Right Kind of Young People.
Not that the issue doesn’t have some of its good points. I’m pushing fifty, but there are still places where I’m considered one of the Young Fellas.
And it’s not entirely the older generation’s fault, either. Sometimes the younger generation has a tendency to sit sheeplike, feet propped up and comfy, congratulating itself on having the good sense to have older folks around to take care of business. It’s haard to pass the baton to people who have their hands in their pockets.
Sometimes the younger generation does actually goober things up. Someone who is more ambitious than smart, more interested in winning the role than in knowing how to fill it, will often make a mess worse than any reluctant retiree ever imagined.
But that should be the exception, not the rule. One of the most basic responsibilities of leadership is to find and prepare your eventual replacement because (hot flash here) you will not be there forever. Even if you’re a boomer and you’re prepared to rule the roost until the end of time.

VETERANS DAY

(Nwes-Herald, November 9)This year there’s no excuse.
Veteran’s Day is an unusual civic holiday because it comes attached to a particular date, instead of a particular weekend. So mostly it falls in the middle of ordinary workaday stuff. That, as it turns out, is no accident.
It started, of course, as Armistice Day. In 1919, the President declared a holiday on the 11th. In 1920, he called for Armistice Sunday. In 1921 it was an un-named holiday marked by the burial of an unknown veteran of The Great War in Arlington National Ceremony. Similar ceremonies were held by other Great War allies, scheduled to commemorate the end of fighting in 1918 on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
In 1926 Congress officially named it Armistice Day and then, in 1938, they made a holiday out of it. That was just before war broke out in Europe and the war that Armistice Day commemorated, the Great War, the War to End All Wars, acquired its roman numeral.
Ike officially changed the name to Veterans Day in 1954. And effective 1971, Congress attempted to change the holiday to “the fourth Monday in October.” But an unusual and amazing thing happened—Americans largely nixed the chance for a government-sanctioned three-day weekend, and opted to keep Veterans Day on its traditional date. States opted to hold the observance on the 11th. By 1975, only for states followed the “fourth Monday” rule. In 1978, Congress put the holiday back where Americans said it belongs.
Veterans Day suffers from an unfortunate tendency to be mixed up with Memorial Day. Memorial Day, intended to honor those soldiers who have passed away, is often generalized to make mention of all soldiers past and present. It’s a nice thought, but it renders Veterans Day a bit redundant. It can also deliver the unfortunate and unintended message that live veterans aren’t that different from dead soldiers.
Veterans are a special breed, and never more so than in the 20th century. Up until then, a man’s military service became part of who he was. A military rank was important enough that it became a permanent part of a man’s name; it had enough status that some men added an unearned military title just to give themselves some more clout.
But with WWI, we see a new era in military service. We have repeatedly asked men to travel around the world, risk their lives, and learn how to act outside the boundaries of regular civilized behavior. Then after we have asked them to leave home and family, risking life and limb and spirit, we ask them to come home and behave as if it never happened.
America has always depended upon citizen-soldiers. But in an earlier time, we counted both equally as part of a veteran’s identity. In modern times, we expect the citizen to dominate. Most of us know veterans, but often if we were asked to describe those people, we would call them “teacher” or “doctor” or “musician” or “neighbor “ and their military service would appear way down the list.
My point is this. We haven’t just asked veterans to leave home and family behind to risk life, limb and spirit. We haven’t just asked them to endure hard training to learn skills that they will never use in civilian life. We have also asked them to come home when it was all over and behave as if those years were spent doing nothing more exceptional than mowing the lawn or studying accounting.
We owe them. Even if we disagree with the causes that sent them abroad, even if military service never put them in harm’s way. Nobody enters military service thinking, “Maybe this will make me rich and famous.” Military service, voluntary or drafted, is service to the rest of the citizens of this country, and even if we disagree with the situation in which it is given, we can and must respect the spirit and sacrifice involved.
If you see a veteran Saturday, thank him (or her). You still have time to drop a note in the mail to a vet.
And the Oil City VFW and American Legion are throwing a parade. At 10 o’clock on Saturday morning it will step off from the VFW post, march across the Center Street Bridge and end in Justus Park, where there will be an 11 o’clock ceremony. The Venango Vets Honor Guard and the Oil City High School Band will be included.
The very least we can do on the 11th is pause at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour and remember. It would take only a little more effort to stop by Oil City to attend the parade and ceremony.
This year it will be Saturday. We have no excuse.

ELECTIONS 06

(News-Herald, November 2) I still have to make some election decisions. Hutchison vs Hutchinson contest—I know both the candidates and they’re both good guys. I also struggle with the Swann-Rendel contest. I don’t know either one of those guys, but I don’t like either one.
But when it comes to national races, I know what I’m doing. And since everybody else is telling you how they’re voting, and why, I might as well join the party. At least I’m doing it here in print, instead of calling you with one more recorded message. If you’d rather, you can stop reading now, and I’ll see you next week, with something non-political.
My own voting history is splotchy. I registered independent for years, until I realized that, locally, primaries are the main event. So I registered Democrat, on the theory that my vote would have more weight in the tiny crowd of Venangoland Dems.
I never vote straight party. The two political parties are a shameful mess, stumbling dinosaurs who have outlived their value. And they know it, too—that’s why they spent the last decades rewriting election laws to make it harder for any third parties to crack the Dempublican monopoly.
I like strong effective local government, and I prefer the feds be as ineffective as possible.
For that reason, I don’t like entrenched power. Years ago I was happy to help chase the Democrats out of power; they were fat, happy and out of touch. And I think we’ve come back to that place.
These guys just don’t care.
This is what I hate worst about the partisanship in DC. Not the struggle strictly along party lines, but what ignorance it indicates. These guys battle as if what happens in Congress is personal, only about them, as if they and their opponents are the only people in the room. Their first loyalty is to their party, not the people who elected them. And they dismiss the opposition as if those guys did not represent citizens back home.
This Republican administration has grasped one of the important lessons of the previous leaders—it doesn’t matter what you do, only what you say. As long as you say what people want you to say, you can go ahead and do whatever you want.
Republicans made a promise to go stamp out gay marriage and funnel money to religious groups. Then – they did nothing. And then, just a few weeks ago, Condoleeza Rice swore in new Global AIDS coordinator Mark Dybul. With Laura Bush as a witness, Dybul’s gay partner held the Bible, and Rice recognized the partner’s mother as Dybul’s “mother-in-law.”
I’m not a fan of the theo-con agenda, but I’m impressed at the brass it takes to ignore so many people who help get you elected.
But then, Congress is pretty well ignoring all of us. Accelerating a trend started Dems when they were in power, Congress discusses and debates almost no bills that come before it. Perhaps that how, here in the USA, we’ve ended up with a law that says the President can grab anyone he believes is giving aid or comfort to an enemy of the State and throw that person in a prison for as long as he wants, without a word of explanation to anyone.
It is a conservative dilemma. Conservatives would like to see fiscal responsibility in DC; conservatives would like to see a federal government that didn’t try to stick its nose into every school or bedroom in the country. When a secretary of defense takes us into war with a flawed Plan A and no Plan B, you’d like someone to hold him accountable. But what do you do—vote for a Democrat? If you can find a Democrat with anything resembling a clue, he isn’t likely to be promising to stand up for conservative values.
But if elections are good for anything, it is for reminding the bozos in DC that they are, in fact, elected. The way I see it, there are only two possible outcomes for this election.
Those in power remain in power, and they conclude that even after every kind of betrayal, failure, corruption, and lie, they really are elected for life and need never listen to regular citizens. Or a bunch are sent home, and those that remain suddenly develop a new interest in paying attention to the citizens of this country. Then, after two more years of fumbling around, we might have an election in which candidates actually listen, and we can get a Congress that is slightly less useless than this one.
Vote against the incumbents in DC? Darn right—if I could, I would vote against the whole of Congress. These guys need to go.

WHERE ARE THE CONSERVATIVES?

(News-Herald, September 21) As the November elections approach, I find myself in the usual sort of bind, the usual problem of a man in a garden store trying to decide between a bag of horse manure and a bag of cow manure, wishing that he’s come to the store in a truck instead of a station wagon with window that won’t roll down.
What I’d really like to see on the national scene is a batch of actual conservatives. We have plenty of faux conservatives. I’m tired of them.
Take Rick Santorum. Let’s see. Has no clue about the life of ordinary not-rich citizens (all you working women—go home and get back in the kitchen). Thinks that government should put its nose in areas where reasonable people used to think the federal government has no business intruding. Helped the current administration run up an unfathomable mountain of debt. Supported the federal take-over and dismantling of public education, but made sure that his own children would be safe from government meddling in school programs by moving them far away from their alleged home and yanking them out of public school. And billing the taxpayers for it.
Spending gazillions of dollars you don’t have. Sticking Uncle Sam’s nose in everybody else’s business (while making sure he leaves yours alone)—let’s face it. Santorum is a Democrat, a tax and spend liberal supporter of the nanny state.
Now, if you want to vote for Big Rick because you agree with his “family values” that’s certainly your privilege. Just don’t tell me that he’s a “good old conservative.’ He’s nothing of the sort. But he has plenty of company in DC.
The last Republican to get us into a serious war was Abraham Lincoln. McKinley was a Republican, and he sort of backed us into the Spanish-American War, but as wars go that was less exciting than even Operation Desert Storm, which was also Not Really a War.
No, it used to be that it took a Democrat to get us in a real mess, like two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam. It’s conservatives who are supposed to be good at keeping us from becoming entangled in these foreign morasses. Historically it’s conservatives that understand how unpleasant war is and that it should be avoided. It’s also conservatives that understand that if you’re going to fight a war, you need to fight like you mean it.
It’s the traditional conservative who was supposed to present the hard-headed cold-eyed unsentimental no-free-lunch view of the world. No conservative I can think of would have claimed that we are fighting for the fate of Civilization As We Know It, but that we can do it with a handful of troops and absolutely no sacrifices by people on the home front.
From Terri Schiavo to Gay Stuff to abortion to running schools to spying on anyone they don’t approve of, we’ve got a bunch of government folks who are sure that Uncle Sugar should be forcing American citizens to behave as Big Uncle believes they should.
I am not surprised to find government officials saying these kinds of things. I am surprised to find these people calling themselves conservatives.
And remember when conservatives used to taunt Democrats for being “tax and spend liberals”? Well, those were the good old days. The current “conservative” administration has spent us into the biggest national budget deficit in the history of the world (over—or under—300 billion dollars).
Now, I don’t want to argue any of the merits or demerits of these issues. There may be good arguments for taking some of these federal actions. It’s just that I expect to hear them from a liberal.
I certainly believe that there are situations and areas of civic life that call for the intervention of the federal government. But mostly I’m pretty sure that the less that gets done in DC, the better off the rest of us are. I’d like to see a law that says that Congress can only meet about thirty days out of the entire year—the rest of the time the various stuffed shirts have to go home and live cheek by jowl with their constituents. If they want to go back and monkey around for more than the thirty days, they have to meet the costs of doing business out of their own pockets.
It may be that I’m really a Libertarian, but Libertarians always seem to have a mean streak, an attitude of “I should be free to take your lunch money, you should be free to try to stop me, and the government should butt out.”
There are lots of things not to like in this election cycle (Smiling Ed and Dancing Lynn come to mind), but it would be nice to have a real conservative in the mix. I miss ‘em.

LEGISLATIVE LAMENESS

(News-Herald, July 6) On the national level, election year politics have brought us a massive parade of pointless posturing. The nation is embroiled in a difficult and costly war. We face growing challenges with energy supplies and prices. And as a people we are struggling through another bout of distrust and cynicism with our leaders.
So, of course, faced with a variety of difficult and challenging issues, our leaders decide to tackle flag burning and gay marriage. Not only are these ridiculous side shows, but they are old, tired sideshows.
A flag burning amendment has been raised before, and every single official who raised it this time already knew what the outcome would be.
The gay marriage debate is even more cynical. Regardless of how you feel about the issue, conservatives already campaigned on their promise to do something about it. And then, once they were swept into office with the support of the Religious Right, they did absolutely nothing.
“Elect us and give us the power to do something about this,” they say. But it’s a promise they have made before and then reneged on. One wonders how many times they think they can get away with calling the religious right for a pre-election booty call. “Honest, honey. This time I really will call you the next day!”
But even more discouraging are the cheeseballs in Harrisburg. I sometimes watch the commonwealth congress on the PCN cable channel. It doesn’t make me feel better about what the folks at the state capital are up to.
Take for instance the recent debate about raising the minimum wage. Now, this is a fairly complicated subject. The growing ranks of the working poor create both philosophical and practical problems. Philosophically, it’s tough that someone can be able-bodied and willing to work and yet they still can’t get by. Practically, there are financial costs to all of us as the government gets into the business of picking up the slack for the working poor.
But at the same time, when you raise the minimum wage, businesses cannot suddenly go pick money off a magic bush with which to cover their increasing payroll costs. It’s a difficult issue to settle, but you’d never guess that from watching the debate in Harrisburg.
Now, in all fairness, it may be that there was some very wise and thoughtful discussion occurred when I wasn’t watching. When I was watching, nothing wise or thoughtful was going on.
A representative from Berks County took the floor to explain that no minimum wage law was necessary at all, because if people just worked really hard, their employers would pay them really well. After all, his sons have always worked really hard and they always make more than minimum wage.
While his point is not completely ridiculous, I think there’s a fair amount of labor history that suggests that business owners don’t always take care of workers out of the kindness of their corporate hearts.
Besides demonstrations that some legislators do not live on Planet Earth, there were displays of political horsepucky that suggests the legislature’s collective age is about ten.
There were attempts to bury the minimum wage bill by attaching it to irrelevant amendments, accompanied by the kind of arguments familiar to anyone who hangs around elementary school playgrounds.
You may remember this sort of thing. Billy calls Bobby a mean name. Bobby punches Billy in the arm. Billy says indignantly, “Why did you punch me in the arm?” Bobby replies in equal indignation, “What? I did not punch you in the arm!”
Legislators pull procedural tricks to mess with a bill, and the pretend that they were doing no such thing. Opponents respond with passive-aggressive balogna.
At one point, one of the parties refused to cast votes on an item, presumably because a six-year-old style tantrum seemed to be the best way to address the issue. The opposing party asked the chair to call a technician since apparently some of the voting buttons were not working, because pretending not to see the tantrum was a great way to stage a larger sulk.
How can these alleged grown-ups not realize how stupid they look? But then, Harrisburg seems to be unaware of any audience. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the great midnight money grab is not that nobody in the legislature seems to have said “This is wrong,” but that apparently nobody said, “You know, rewriting the rules to give ourselves a raise in the dead of night will look really bad.” It’s not that we need any great system for accountability in H-burg. We just need our representatives to act as if their bosses were watching.