Once a Reporter, Always a Reporter

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Mandatory Unemployment Workshop

2010-03-02T15:59:00.001-05:00

Unemployment insurance recipients in Maryland must attend a workshop (put on by another branch of state government) regarding job seeking skills and coping with the stress of unemployment.
It used to be a two-day workshop but was halved as the numbers of unemployed grew, Maryland instituted a hiring free and then began furloughs of the remaining employees.

I hope the workshops aren’t phased out entirely. Call me a Baby Boomer but I love workshops. They appeal to me as a quick fix like magazine quizzes: What type of man wants the real you? Can you wear black? Are you a Paul girl or a John girl?

Set before our dozen seats were the ubiquitous folders and blank name badges. The first page in the folder was a scrambled set of encouraging aphorisms titled, “101 Stress Relievers.” The page was blanketed with these hundred sayings spewed about in dozens of fonts and sizes, some reading across and others up and down. The workshop leader had been told the inanity of the layout was stress producing.

“Talk to yourself,” extolled one piece of advice further suggesting two phrases, “I can do a great job.” and “I can stay calm under pressure.” Another prodded, “Write down your fears. Write down your dreams. Write your congressman.”

And that was that for the stress management portion of the day. It seemed sufficient. Short of passing out Valium, how much stress reduction is actually going to be accomplished in six hours minus one hour for lunch and two fifteen minute breaks?

The rest of the time was spent shaping us into attractive new hires. We needed different things. All we had in common was that we’d worked on-the-books (meaning we’d paid into our unemployment insurance funds) and had job histories. No small feat as it turns out.

Nine of us were young – I’m saying nobody closing in on 40 any time soon. Three of the young men – one black, two white – were laid off from the construction industry. Six more young people – two white women, two black men and one white man – came from the service sector from jobs in food service, educational services, retail and automobile repair. And three older workers (let’s say 45- to 60 years old) consisted of a white man out of work after two decades in menial non-union retail labor and two white women – one with top notch administrative and para-medic skills and me, refugee from a dinosaur industry.

The workshop leader was among us oldsters and was spot-on with her assessments of each of us. She rallied with the spirit of a wise if slightly tired scout mother. But it's got to be a tough job, trying to arm a disparate people with the tools to battle increasingly bad odds. There's the economy, of course. But that allows for everything else to escalate, she tells us. And she has touched at a piece of each of us by now, so we believe her. Discrimination is alive and well, prepare for it, she says. There are hundreds and in many cases thousands of applicants for a single job, be the best candidate and know someone on the inside. You will take an income cut, the older you are, the bigger the cut.

And that specific information that gets through, it is just damn terrifying, such as: Cut 25 years off your resume.

That's a quarter-century.

But she gave good workshop. Here's some of my specialized good news: Desktop Publishing is one of the projected “future careers.” Old white women are, as always, encouraged to return to school to update their skills or open a small business.

I think I see a future career in this interplay. All I need now is to get one of my daughters to pose for my honed, on-line resume photo.

Seeking an Invitation to Scott Brown's Party

2010-02-23T12:50:00.000-05:00

While the most optimistic among Democrats strive to cast Evan Bayh as a canary, for all the world he looks to me like a rat that precedes the call I have been waiting for -- “Women and children first.”

But a funny thing happened on my way to the lifeboats – Scott Brown rowed by.

Whatever the nature of Senator Brown’s party, he proved this week that it isn’t the nature of the Republicans or Democrats of the 111^th Congress.

And what even the canary scenario makes clear is that the nature of the problem with the 111^th Congress isn’t a two-party stalemate – not when one of the parties controls both legislative houses and the executive branch. It’s a food fight among all iterations that ever were in the splintered Democratic Party.

Gnashing their teeth at this table are everything from the Bourbon Democrats (which in Southern Maryland means needing to drink more to sit by one of them but elsewhere might simply mean Chamber of Commerce isolationists) to the New Democrats (somewhat akin to Chamber of Commerce internationalists). And there are the War Democrats and Peace Democrats, named not for anything in the 20^th or 21^st centuries but holdovers proving we’re a nation not recovered from its Civil War. There are even smatterings of New Deal Democrats and Great Society Democrats retread as Progressives (named such since the spell cast in 1964 forbidding the speaking aloud of the L-word). And of course there are the true Republicans affectionately referred to as Southern and/or Reagan Democrats.

Why even try to explain the Republicans who don’t splinter their factions but kill them off. (How else to explain the contemporary GOP as evolved from Free Soilers?) The last shreds of the Republican’s liberal faction dissolved in tears shed by Senator Charles Percy in 1978 when he promised Illinois voters that if they reelected him he would leave such waywardness behind. They did. He did. More recently the endangered Moderate Republicans turned into Independents. And who does that help?

Looking longingly at Scott Brown’s lifeboat it seemed possible that a Truth in Labeling Strategy might help me stay aboard my Democratic ship; first moving the Southern Reagan Democrats over to the Republican side of the aisle. Let’s at least get over the illusion that a majority of anything exists in congress. And before you Democrats start wailing about your loss of numbers (cause judging from my Southern Maryland district let me assure you there would be a loss of numbers) consider how this relabeling would reconfigure our upcoming gubernatorial primary.

If the Republicans are leery of these additions they could turn into Tea Partiers and perhaps those Southern Democrats could return some Moderates to the Grand Ole Party. It couldn’t hurt to have a few more Moderates running the place.

Then let’s throw the Bourbons and New Democrats in together. Let them bicker among themselves about who gets to make the buck today at the expense of ten bucks tomorrow. Let’s see if they can convince anyone besides the bankers that a dollar today regardless of tomorrow is really Capitalism at Work for All.

Let’s just change the name of the War Democrats to the Add-Ons and seat them near the New Democrats. Then fold those Peaceniks in with the Liberals because their couple of votes never matter in the present anyhow, but it is always nice in hindsight to see one or two Democrats had a sane world vision.

And as for all the rest of us – we wimpy Progressives and noncommittal Independents and even some of those Tea Partiers who actually just want their country back – let’s give Scott Brown a call to see just what this new form of governing is about. Let’s ask him to speak at a luncheon or something. Maybe he doesn’t have a grand plan yet, but it would be nice just to hear again his explanation for voting in favor of a Democrat-crafted job-creation bill. “…anytime you can make a small step, it’s still a step.”

Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

2010-02-16T15:22:00.001-05:00

That question was posed in the Feb. 7, 2010 Washington Post Outlook above Gerald Alexander's argument that liberals “to a degree far surpassing conservatives” believe their view “self-evident” and that conservatives are either too ignorant to have legitimate views or are liars.

Liberal sanctimony far surpasses conservative sanctimony? The words “talk radio” alone should dispel that notion.

Not that liberals aren’t condescending. They are. It’s from getting there first on the social issues: universal education, civil rights, women’s suffrage, Vietnam. They are the outreach branch of government. They believe they can see the future, shape it and bring everyone on par with themselves (whether this means up or down). As Alexander implies, their condescension can be insufferable. Liberals not only think they are right -- as in correct -- they believe they are in the right. This is akin to believing God is on their side, which actually has something of a right-wing ring to it.

Alexander’s interchangeable use of Republican for conservative and Democrat for liberal is also inadequate to describe the paralyzing failure of legislators to listen to one another.

As the spouse of an elected middle-of-the-road Democrat I’ve had plenty of opportunities to sit between one of the many conservative Democrats in my husband’s district and one of the fewer liberal Democrats.

Painting in broad strokes, the liberals are condescending and, as Alexander describes, suggest that if I were smarter I would grasp the imperative of their vision and its singular rightness. When they are at the podium they tend to lecture.

Again in broad strokes, the conservatives are bombastic and not listening either. They pegged me as a liberal since I was a reporter a decade ago. Not that I wrote opinion pieces, just that I worked for a newspaper so I was a liberal. They don’t care if I’m smart or dumb, they just don’t care. When they get to the podium they tend to criticize.

It just isn’t about a warring two parties. If it were that simple the past year would have been a legislative triumph for the Democrats.

It isn’t about philosophical differences. The conversation is nowhere near a philosophical level. That would be a huge step forward. Great friendships, even love can grow across political, religious and ancestral divides. Even if not common ground, an exchange of give and take can be forged among people speaking and listening to one another.

It is about behavior, as Alexander suggests, but not just of the liberals. Perhaps town meeting rage shocked some federal lawmakers last summer, but nearly any local government forum on property taxes or garbage or land-use will show no one group more vitriol or inflexible than another. Or that one subject – be it health care, immigration, Afghanistan, Iraq – draws more fury than any other.

Enraging tones of voices and superior attitudes are the norm in political arenas today and maybe everywhere. Perhaps this is what is meant by “postmodernism,” suggested a friend more conservative than I am who agrees that no one philosophy or party has a corner on the misbehavior market. Her point is that today we value individual expression, the individual above the group.

Now that sounds capable of producing the intractable behavior both parties and both liberal and conservative philosophies appear to embrace today. In terms of the U.S. Congress, that would change the formula from a simple us versus them battle – which surely would have been won/lost by now—into a case of every single legislator versus everyone else.

Now that is postmodern. That is intractable.

Emasculated at the Super Bowl

2010-02-09T18:14:00.003-05:00

Super Bowl XLIIII commercials from three ad agencies promoted three dissimilar products and all using the same theme.
Tom Shales of the Washington Post named the “oddly recurring theme” of the Super commercials “the perpetual male fear of emasculation.”
The Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review 2010 Results by Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker called this “creative theme … the domestication of the American man.”
I saw them as simply bizarre with themes of castration and impotence at the hands of women, not women in general but very specifically their wife/girlfriend.
Calkins and Rucker suggest “compelling research” backs up the “insight that men in the United States are feeling weak and powerless.” They offer unemployment and economic indices as specifies. (http://kelloggsuperbowlreview.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/kellogg-super-bowl-advertising-review-2010-results/).
Well, maybe that explains the theme of emasculation. Two other ads could be lumped in that category. One featured men wandering around fields dressed in their underwear. And then another spotlighted only one man, sleepwalking in his underwear, on his search for a Coke. Those guys looked pretty weak to me.
But what about those that blamed women for feeling powerless?
“Were these ads for a post-feminist age?” Shales asked and then answered, “They seemed to have a retro appeal – for better and worse. Probably worse.”
A retrograde synapse was sure triggered in my mind as the theme emerged – it recalled the 1970s perfume commercial of a woman who promises to “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never never let you forget you’re a man.”( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X4MwbVf5OA)
Yep, worse than retro, back then the theory was that sex sells. Neuromarketing holds sway today and finds that fear sells much better.
So although virility is deeply linked to wealth – or as Aristotle Onassis said, “If women didn’t exist all the money in the world would have no meaning,” – that doesn’t seem quite the message of the emasculation commercials.
And fear of domestication? Please. Marriage remains a much greater benefit to men than women – after all, who wouldn’t want someone to bring home the bacon, cook it up in a pan, and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera?
No, a few of these spots have the feel of the stuff of nightmares – the same fears of – dare I say it – women that prompted Germaine Greer to warn us, around the same time the bacon perfume was hitting the airwaves, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”

Dreaming of Libraries

2010-02-02T17:54:00.013-05:00

If I were dreaming about the perfect library I would plunk it down in the midst of a campus with – at least – a small middle school and small elementary school. My favorite part of this particular dream is to include – attached to the schools – offices for a social worker and a police officer and a public health officer. I’ve got no problem visualizing librarians in that mix.
Yeah, yeah, yeah … I know, I know, I know … That’s why I call it dreaming.
My public construction dreams always reduce central bureaucracies. I dream of central offices holding many fewer desks but just as many filing cabinets. Naturally, in my dreams, the few administrators are cheerful and keep their agency’s missions alphabetized, on-time and legal.
In my dreams social workers, public nurses, cops and other such human advocates work as close to teachers as I can imagine them – helping services are provided from offices embedded throughout the community.
My favorite part of this dream is linking to public schools. I believe public schools are the most important of the three great American institutions that permit democracy by making knowledge available to everyone. The other two are a free press and public libraries.
I can do quite a few riffs on this theme, but usually stop myself at this point; realizing dreams of de-centralizing bureaucracy and empowering neighborhoods borders on delusional. Still, dreams do ultimately prove the starting block for public construction. And lately dreams about a new county library on a hunk of undeveloped public land are making headlines – as such things often do. It got me dreaming.
A quarter century ago Leonardtown’s library was overflowing. Librarians and citizens convinced the powers that were of their need for bigger digs. They got the Armory.
The next St. Mary’s County library dream resulted in new construction – a regional library in Charlotte Hall. By the time the facility was built desktop computers, the Internet, changes in service needs and deliverables made the ultimate arrival of bricks and mortar obsolete by completion. (It's like when a jetty was finally built to protect a channel for commercial fishing access, but commercial fishing had died before the channel was completed. But that's another story.)
Because librarians are resourceful, the Charlotte Hall building was re-imagined as a community library that houses a regional function.
A more recent decade -- and this was nearly a decade ago -- was spent seeking funding to replace the old Lexington Park library because it was located beneath an aircraft flight zone for tester jets.
I’m just saying.
I'm saying that technology is ubiquitous. I'm seeing the time it takes to move dreams into bricks and mortar. Concrete outcomes are increasingly obsolete by the time they are achieved. Having sat through my fair share, I have my doubts that public hearings can resolve this. Bureacracies can't easily change course midstream. Perhaps, like most of us, they don't have the ability to see changes as they are happening.
But whether those of us steeped in print media acknowledge it or not, cataclysmic changes on the scale of Gutenberg’s press have occurred. It is no longer a question whether electronic books and computers will replace print books, let alone dvds and everything else ever labeled "media."
The questions now are how to preserve the integrity of knowledge in the face of incalculable input; how to disperse it. Books might not even figure into the equation by next decade.
What is needed is not less dreaming, but larger dreaming. Not delusional dreaming but struggling through today’s immediate needs to imagine a life not yet invented: Tomorrow.

Those Damn Watermen

2010-01-26T09:15:00.003-05:00

Aren't they ever going to give it up? Those damn watermen, those under-educated, poorly disciplined, oddly spoken pirates, perennially accused of a willingness to take the last oyster (or crab or fish) if given half a chance.
As if to prove themselves just that bad they raise their Shakespearian voices and press their faces much too close and call their accusers bald-faced liars.
The vitriol suggests Shakespeare again, suggests they doth protest too much.
I walk a thin line here – writing about watermen. A legitimate newspaper wouldn’t let me do it. But I’m compelled, whenever I hear drums beating for those damn watermen again, when I hear government officials calling for restraint and scientists demanding more laws to prevent those pirates from taking the last living oyster of the Chesapeake. I'm compelled when the Shakespearian oratory starts up in my kitchen.
Each time officialdom drums up animosity against the watermen more empty Save the Bay promises follow and then some more money will be piddled away in yet another phony solution. At least that’s how the last 25 years have gone.
It is similar when the focus shifts to the farmer and that profession is pilloried in the name of the Chesapeake Bay. Or in the name of tobacco, as the case may be. Except, of course, the federal and state governments bought the tobacco farmers out.
Eh, eh, eh, not to go there, I walk a thin line.
Still, regardless of my biases, it seems odd to blame the aging and disappearing watermen for the death and breeding failures of the resource. I don't mean to be stupid. I get the tipping point theory; more watermen, more clever capturing devices, etc. etc. I get that they’re not angels. Trust me, I get that. I know they are pirates. I am bias. I wouldn't accuse them of taking the last oyster. I won’t have to. That oyster will be dead long before a waterman reaches it.
But putting all of that aside, if harvesting the Chesapeake Bay is the reason the life in the bay is diminishing, how come there aren't any more toad fish left? Why won’t the grasses grow? How come the eroding shoreline is filling with junk weeds?
Maybe the problem isn't actually the watermen. Or maybe their share of the problem is minuscule. Might not even be the watermen plus the farmers together. Maybe even both the watermen and farmers added together aren’t even a statistically significant portion of the problem. Maybe they're nothing but another resource being pilfered away by other mismanagement problems.
Maybe all of us recently arrived at water's edge to live and boat and spew and drain and dribble – those of us with those damn watermen in our view-shed, threatening to take our last oyster, maybe we too doth protest too much.

Swimming In Poison

2010-01-19T16:23:00.001-05:00

Check this out. A nonprofit devoted to business expansion in the Washington D.C. region includes in its guidelines this advice, “need to refrain from disparaging other localities,” as quoted by V. Dion Haynes in a recent Washington Post Business story.

The business leaders in the greater Washington D.C. region need to be told to be polite?

Oh, my, my, my, my, my. Used to be courtesy paid off, it ranked right up there with Cleanliness and Godliness as the upward mobility route.

Not that the loss of courtesy is news, but to such an extent that grownups have to remind grownups that rudeness is acting in their own worst interests? They need to be reminded to be courteous when representing their company? Be polite when portraying themselves?

The Be Polite message always seemed to be: Act right to get your way. Act obnoxiously and you will not. Or, as my mother was fond of saying, “You attract more bees with honey than vinegar.”

Clearly that message has gone astray. Courtesy used to be an expense-neutral commodity whereas discourtesy cost opportunities and advancement. So maybe it is the results that have changed. Maybe disrespect and rudeness don’t backfire anymore. Maybe courtesy no longer reflects back upon itself.

And maybe that’s why I so often feel I’m swimming in poison.

I have wanted to write about swimming in poison for some time now but am usually so immersed, dispassionate commentary eludes me. When I’m in the pool drowning in it, it’s all I spit back out.

We make this poison out of pure meanness, I think. And I can manufacture meanness as fast as anyone. It’s rampant in the world, perhaps sparked by nothing more (or less) than unvoiced insecurities and fears. Maybe by scars left in 7^th grade.

We feel like such little things in the overall scheme; cornered in our various pools of meanness and fears and misunderstandings, rarely if ever receiving recognition deserved.

It is tough to be a grownup. As Marshall McLuhan described it, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

Making that even more frightening, according to Buckminster Fuller’s seminal “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, “… there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it..

“Lack of instruction,” Fuller continued, “has forced us to find that there are two kinds of berries-red berries that will kill us and red berries that will nourish us.”

I’m thinking we’ve been chewing on a lot of bad berries lately.

For a variety of reasons I’ve not been picking any berries lately – to extend the metaphor – although the respite will end soon and I will be back swimming in both the Pool of the Political Spouses and the Pool of the Nonprofit Beggaries– and there is plenty of poison flowing in both those places.

I write now because the brief respite lets me ponder ways to swim across without swallowing and make resolves to add no more poison of my own. As I mourn the lack of an instruction manual to tell me how, exactly, to do those things, it strikes me that that Greater Business Leader’s Guide is exactly what we do need. Maybe that is where Spaceship Earth is right now, at a place where the best instructions we can offer is to be polite.

As the World Warms

2010-01-12T07:40:00.011-05:00

When the blizzard of 2009 paralyzed Washington D.C. global warming manifested – again – upon St. George’s Island.
St. George’s Island is shaped like a crab claw dangling into the mouth of the Potomac River. The spine of the chunky part of the claw is a beach facing southwest. It is separated from the smaller pincer by a gut descriptively named Island Creek. Along the other side of the island the pincher crumbles into marsh and the larger St. George’s Creek.
It’s a lovely island made particularly picturesque as snow fell the weekend before Christmas. Surely the falling was equally picturesque in Piney Point – the other side of the bridge – and on up the 50 miles to D.C. However, unlike those towns to the north, St. George’s Island did not remain picturesque on the ground. Upon impact the snow turned to brackish puddles which grew into inland seas – some of which never fully recede anymore.
That’s something new.
Flooding isn’t new to St. George’s Island. When the wind blows hard East, across the mouth of the Chesapeake, the tide rises but does not completely fall. Ultimately this floods the creeks and marshes; on St. George’s Island typically a couple times in autumn and occasionally in spring.
For my first two decades here, the phenomenon merely flooded a small stretch of road, little more than a spillway of asphalt, between St. George’s and Island creeks. For the first few years traversing the flooded spillway required driving slowly so the water didn’t splash into the car’s engine. Within the past 15 years a trapped tide can get so high only the tips of tall marsh grass indicate the asphalt's edges.
Still, this was not considered a big deal by true Islanders.
In the late 1980s, St. George Islanders’ living memories recalled storms that tore away farm fields, their schoolhouse and ball fields, hotels and homes. These were rare, monumental storms, some on par with the disastrous Hurricane Isabella (2003).
Prior to Isabella only three storms had carried water across this yard. But since then water has flowed across the yard and beneath my house a couple times a year.
It used to be only backed-up tides could flood the island. Fresh water, no matter how long it rained, drained into the surrounding tidal waters. As long as the tide fell, water drained off the island. Even with land a mere two feet above sea-level – like this yard is (was?) – it takes a lot of water to raise sea-levels two full feet. Up until then, up until two full feet of tide had backed up, rain drained.
But the rain pools now. I don’t see that two-foot elevation anymore. The snow melted upon contact with the pools already so slow to freeze they must be brackish.I am thinking of replacing the azaleas with aquatic vegetation.
I wasn’t always so cavalier. I used to harangue about the loss of wetlands and development incentives on fragile landscapes. I was so active an activist. I would forget I lived in a glass house. I could even forget Walt Kelly’s rejoinder:

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

No matter how we couch it, that is the truth.

So pushing it out of my mind with new gardening strategies is getting tougher with each tidal slap of the pilings beneath me. My home has become a glass lighthouse.
With such an encompassing vantage, haranguing is getting harder, too. As is obvious from this watery perch, there’s no one left to harangue.
So I grow cavalier. It’s nearly imperative to become cavalier, just to go down with any dignity whatsoever.

7th Grade Girls and 5th Grade Boys

2010-01-06T15:17:00.001-05:00

To start 2010 on a positive note – given that we learn more from failure than success – I advocate looking at the debacles of the Decade of the Aughts as a series of Hard Lessons Hard Learned and puting them to work improving the upcoming Betwixt and Be-Teen Years.

Who among survivors of the Aughts can’t cough up a couple Hard Lessons Hard Learned? Who among us, just for example, hasn’t learned a financial lesson or two?

Something else I learned about the Debacle Decade was that seventh grade girls and fifth grade boys ran it. This seems to me to be an obstacle to getting the job done. Whatever the job is.

The labels are neither age nor gender exclusive. My debacles of the past decade include old men back-stabbing on a caliber unequaled by anyone less than a seventh grade girl and young professional women beating their chests like fifth grade bullies atop whatever mound on whatever playground happened to be designated top-of-the-hill. And I saw -- and participated in -- all manner of behavior in between. My lesson hard learned? I'm still a seventh grade girl.

I was in student council in 7th grade in the mid 1960s. Back then it was called junior high, as though the adults were merely prepping us for the Real Thing. I also wrote for school publications – writing being my single gifted talent. I received recognition for writing, but since competition was sparse – a lot of people actually don't like to write – I was dismissive of those recognitions; but I was very proud to hold the popularly-elected council seat. Winning that seat displayed a second-tier of popularity.

In junior high, first tier for girls was cheerleader, a competition I lost annually.

In junior high the tiers didn’t apply to the boys – whichever boys the first tier girls went steady with were the first tier boys. But fifth grade boys were still king of the hill. Girls weren’t yet of consuming interest. Holding one’s own in the playground was paramount and could still be achieved by fairly blunt force. Fifth grade is pretty much the end of the pushing and shoving games permitted children – tag, snowball fights that deteriorated into faces in the snow, war. Fifth grade, at least for boys, if you ran fastest or climbed highest or pushed to the ground the most other boys, you held a place on the hill.

My Debacle Decade was populated with both those seventh grade girls and fifth grade boys loosed upon the playground without an adult in sight.

Everything from a neighborhood association meeting about where to locate the fire hydrant to a council discussion regarding where to place the line to the hydrant to a state legislature debating how much water can be allocated to the line to proposed federal guidelines to assure the water is safe – everything I could see during my Debacle Decade was conducted by seventh grade girls and fifth grade boys.

No matter the stated mission for the gathering, the energy was spent positioning and assessing ourselves in relation to everyone else who was also positioning and assessing.Seventh grade girls. Fifth grade boys. A lot of energy was spent but not a lot got done. The mission itself lent little more to the effort than a title for the agenda:

Wednesday Night Association Meeting about Fire Hydrant Location.

Proposal to Extend County Water Line.

Legislation to Withdraw from State Aquifer.

Health Care Reform ... I’m just saying ...

The world as we know it is crumbling about us and we’re worried about how we look and where we place within an imagined hierarchy. We worry about how it plays to the folks back home; about the next election; about who on the committee can help pull us farther up the hill. We’re so worried about these things we have become unable to get done even our most basic agenda items. These behaviors – just as in fifth and seventh grade – have become not merely a collection of human impulses but ends unto themselves: becoming the most popular; becoming the most important.

So that is one of my Hard Lessons -- being the most popular still doesn't get the job done. So what to do with the Hard Learned to address the Betwixt and Be-Teen approaching? Maybe reduce my craving for popularity. Get back to the business of writing. Since not that many people actually like to do it, maybe some of it is being left undone.

I Believe Howard Kurtz

2009-05-14T22:06:00.000-04:00

Newspapers died for me four years ago when I was disappeared from mine.

It was already a running family joke. Local elementary and middle schools invited both my husband and me to their job fairs. "Who in their right minds would suggest a child become a waterman or print reporter?" we would laugh at the dinner table. But even as we laughed neither of us really believed we would become extinct. But we have. And it isn't funny at all.

He went extinct first and reinvented himself as an environmental educator. Then four years ago I was banished in 20 minutes from the newsroom I had joined in 1985, before marrying that retrograde waterman who had reinvented himself once again, this time as an elected office holder.

The Washington Post Company's conflict of interest rules that govern the newspaper company I worked for proved impossible to abide during my husband's candidacy -- despite my transfer to a sister paper in a different county. I left the chain around the same time Matthew Cooper of "Time" and Judith Miller of the "New York Times" were refusing to name their anonymous sources regarding the disclosure of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Gallons of ink debated the importance of anonymous sources to journalism and thus to democracy itself. It seemed the debate only generated interest among print reporters.

In July 2005 Howard Kurtz wrote a piece in "The Washington Post" about Cooper who Kurtz apparently couldn't reach, so he quoted Cooper's wife the "Democratic consultant Mandy Grunwald."

The story pushed me over the edge. Friends and former colleagues were already desperately tired of my entreaties: Why could reporters of large, national publications retain their positions and marriages to newsmakers? The only answer that ever made sense -- although it never seemed fair exactly -- was size. Large, national newspapers could move a reporter married to a newsmaker to a different floor or a different beat -- the conflicted reporter could be -- at least theoretically -- removed from those reporters who covered the spouse in question. At a community newspaper this is impossible on every level imaginable, including theoretical ones.

I was not assuaged by the size argument. I ranted and raved and fumed. Of course readers didn't believe in newspapers anymore -- from the outside it looks like insider baseball.

So when the layoffs -- called buyouts -- began and it became clear that the bigger the newspaper the faster it failed, I felt slightly vindicated. But that ended quickly, when entire papers began disappearing. And when the meager freelance budget of that community paper one county removed dried up last year, I started getting really scared. That community newspapers could fail, long considered the strongest financial bastion of the industry, was like suggesting that environmental educators could disappear as surely as the ecosystems they celebrate.

It got even worse last week when Kurtz, a self-proclaimed optimist, admitted he, too, saw the end at hand. The newspaper, he wrote within the first 100 words, "might be left behind by history and public indifference."

Might? Meet my daughters: avid readers who grew up in government hallways and the newsroom of a community newspaper. Their humor is newsroom cynical. Their history is community news. One even qualified for admittance to the august University of Maryland's journalism school last year -- despite those laughing dinners. But she turned on her heel and transferred to a school that doesn't even have a journalism department. These are the most newspaper-friendly of their generation. Even if I can convince myself they aren't indifferent, I cannot fool myself into thinking they see newspapers as anything other than history.

Kurtz's article was long and carried an increasingly desperate tone as he tried to affix blame and share blame. I know that feeling. I've lived that sense of banishment for four years now and struggle to confront living with it forever. I've created a webpage and write about all that has been lost of my husband's former life. Now I have to include my own. And I need to find other financial resources since writing doesn't do it anymore. It is hard to outlive your vocation. Really, really hard.

Toward the end of his article Kurtz pegged us all -- the celebrities down to those of us who cover school boards and planning commissions and the biggest pumpkin at the county fair. He wrote, "Newspaper folks may have an inflated view of their self-importance, but what they do has an impact beyond their readers and advertisers. Local TV isn't likely to expose a crooked mayor, as the Detroit Free Press did. Bloggers aren't going to reveal secret CIA prisons."

He's right. We're going to rant and fume and write about what used to be.

And we should all be scared. Really, really scared.

No More Kissing

2009-05-04T17:10:00.000-04:00

What a relief! Finally a reason to turn away this kissy-kissy habit that has become the bane of many a political spouse and one would have to presume thousands of others, who, let's be honest, were much happier with a handshake instead of a kiss.

I'm not talking about those air kisses or even the cheek-to-cheek stuff. I'm talking about how in the past half-decade this kissing business has become extreme.

I don't think it was the matter of my demotion from reporter to political spouse that accentuated my personal awareness of this. I am willing to concede that I might have been more immune to the practice as a reporter but even so, I think this increased kissing was happening in the wider world and merely coincided with my demotion.

It seemed to be an established practice when I was a mere candidate's wife. Standing next to an already installed political spouse I watched with dread a reknowned lip-to-lip politico making his way down a spousal greeting line. (You may ask, "Why were only the spouses stuck in this line?" Even now as a bona fide elected official's spouse I can still only respond that I don't know. But after a mere four years I must add that their timing is a constant wonder to all us spouses.)

So, standing next to this tenured spouse, watching the lip-locker drooling his way toward us I asked, "Once you're elected, can you just say no? Turn your cheek? Avoid this lip-lock?"

"No," she said just before the lip-to-lipper drooled her silent.

As he turned to drool one on me she took a deep slug of her deeply amber shaded drink and as he laid one on me she lowered her drink and confessed quietly in my ear, "It's why I drink. It kills the germs."

The H1N1 flu warnings do not suggest alcohol as an antidote, but the warnings do make clear that the casual lip-lock is a bad plan in a world frightened of a pandemic. So while the warnings don't pointblank admonish casual kissing those masks appearing on everyone's faces imply it. And the constant handwashing advice goes further, suggesting that the handshake might rightfully be banished as well.

This has given me pause, I had never equated the handshake to a kiss, which is quite surprising as I look back. My decades of public bathroom behavior inspired stand-up comedy from both my daughters. Who would have thought washing with soap through at least two choruses of Happy Birthday, using elbows for turning off faucets and toilet paper for opening doors in restrooms equipped only with blow driers could be so inspirational?

But for all of that bathroom paranoia, I was a consummate handshaker. And for decades of such behavior I had never even heard of hand sanitizers. What was I thinking? Extending my hand all these years of reportage to politicians, criminals, lawyers, teachers, the afflicted, the winners and the losers, all in the search of a good story, a better angle, a closer bond. I used those same hands to first diaper, then brush hair and ultimately guide those little girls in and out of those bathroom incubators for, well, ever it seemed at the time.

And I missed the grip after my fall from reporter to political spouse. As a reporter the handshake felt like a great equalizer. As a spouse I learned that my old hand clasp became merely a handle pulling me into often awkward and occasionally really yucky encounters. Perhaps this is merely redirected bathroom paranoia, but once no one was interested in printing what I had to say about those objects of my hand clasps it began to feel that some of those former claspers relished lipping me up in my new role. And it didn't feel as though they meant it in the good way.

So these pandemic fears of damp germ distribution seem a healthy step toward a better life for many -- certainly for me -- but what's the alternative with handshaking suddenly considered risky behavior as well?

A friend suggests the oriental bow. Palms clasped together -- not offered -- and a slight inclination of the head toward your own fingertips. Of course, she counsels, the lesser personage must bow slightly deeper to the higher ranked, which will certainly pose some difficulties -- although not for spouses who are pretty clear where they stand in most greeting situations. But the lower bow can carry its own gender issues, not the least of which will be who gets the best view down someone's blouse.

Still, I like the idea. Frankly, looking strikes me as a lot healthier than all this touching. And I can think of a certain sloppy kisser who might be well pleased with the trade-off.

Not to Say Fishermen Aren't Scoundrels

2009-04-28T16:00:00.000-04:00

Not to say fishermen aren't scoundrels, liars, maybe even thieves -- at least of fish and oysters and crabs. Until recently that seemed penny ante compared to, say, derivative trading, whatever that is.

Fish thievery was more in keeping with the waterman who asked a legislative panel, "You don't think we'd take the last oyster, do you?" Indeed, the legislators did and legislated accordingly.

It isn't easy to legislate fish, or crabs for that matter. Oysters can be a tad bit simpler, staying in one place as they do. Thus fishery laws end up as complicated as proverbial fish tales. To make the point, a New England maritime museum displays a four-inch thick three-ring binder filled only with current tiny-print regulations.

By and large fisheries laws boil down to limiting when and where a certain number of fish can be taken and by what method. The result is that every fish, oyster, lobster and crab caught commercially carries a manifest from sea to platter.

Scoundrels can still steal fish and lying about their size and how they were caught is as old as fishing itself. But a lying, thieving fisherman will have to eat an undersized, out-of-season fish. Selling the wrong sized fish in the wrong season isn't going to work.

That does, however, leave the Bait and Switch Con -- recently demonstrated by mortgage lenders and again those derivative traders. Consider the bait, "You can afford this house." And the switch: But only at the first year rate. Or,"This house is worth a half-million dollars." Last year.

If it didn't sound so Biblical you could almost call those folks Fishers of Men.

Recent federal indictments surrounding the baiting of watermen and switching of fish manifests are now sending a handful of St. Mary's County watermen to federal prison. It seems their manifests contained lies about the method they used to entrap the fish. And the way the feds figured this out was to entrap the watermen, which somehow seems to wind back around and make the feds Fishers of Men. Or, as one of the men who bit on the bait described it, "You might be able to walk by a $100 bill lying on the ground one time. Maybe you can even walk by it a second time."

In a Bait and Switch the point is to make more money than the delivered product is worth. When the indictments came out the amounts of money the watermen were accused of making were laughable. The value of those landed fish must have been based on Cafe' des Artiste's dinner prices, joked local watermen. That was before the specter of federal prison rippled through the local watering community.

"If I was speeding up this highway, a cop would stop me and I'd get a ticket," said another fisherman. "They wouldn't wait until I'd gathered five years worth of tickets and make a federal case of it."

Fisheries are federal cases, partially because of the transitory nature of fish. Unlike the folks at the bankrupt banks, the bankrupt mega-insurance agencies or the financial investment firms, these fishermen broke federal laws dealing with how they caught fish. Traders and bankers and other derivative folks didn't break laws. They broke the nation. Maybe the whole world.

It seems, though, greed motivated all of them. And it happens that greed makes wrongly manifested fish a federal offense but wrongly manifested livelihoods legal.

So the punishment for lying about fish doesn't warrant a bail-out. Still, it seems that would be cheaper. Probably only one of the derivative folks' bonuses would cover even the Cafe' des Artiste prices applied to these watermen's fish. It seems possible only one bonus would suffice to convince all of these busted fishermen to never fish again. That's what the federal laws are all about -- stopping overfishing. Federal law presumes overfishing makes fish so rare they deserve federal protection -- it doesn't assume what some folks suspect, that the explosion of over-mortgaged houses lining the waterfront might have had something to do with the rarity of fish as well.

Then again, in some lights, it does seem odd that overfishing is the federal offense. If that is really why the fish are gone how come you can't catch any of those old toadfish anymore? There has never been a fishery for them. No manifest necessary for those bardogs. Just used to throw them back and hope they didn't bite again. Maybe they'll come back, too, once those fishermen reach prison, that is if the folks struggling to find jobs or pay their mortgages ever get a chance to just take a day off and go fishing again.

Constantly Yielding to the Teachers

2009-04-22T20:42:00.000-04:00

Tuesday night St. Mary's County government's 2010 budget hearings were televised. What a relief. I used to have to attend.

When I first attended -- this would have been in the mid-1980s -- the very richest man in the county was a county commissioner. He held fast to a policy of absolutely no property tax increases whatsoever, no matter what, come hell or high water. The tax rate was close to the lowest in the state, which saved most property owners some bucks but saved him bundles.

Two groups of people typically testified: Parents who wanted more money for recreational activities for their children. And teachers. The people who wanted more parks and sports asked that more money be spent on them. The teachers were more outspoken. They asked for tax hikes. They were working in schools from hell suffering from high water.

Public schools were visibly crumbling. The elementary school closest to my home had buckets collecting rainwater in classrooms and down the hallways. It was the solution to leaking roofs in other schools as well. Local teachers were among the lowest paid in the state. Recruiting and retaining teachers were Herculean tasks. Classrooms bulged with well more than 30 students at even the youngest grades. Closets in some schools were turned into instructional space.

It took another decade before all the roofs were repaired, new schools were under construction, teacher salaries became competitive and class sizes regularly fell below 30 students. The richest man in the county was still the richest man in the county but he wasn't a commissioner anymore. Term limits.

Teachers were the driving force of the changes. Some years recreational proponents gave way to library patrons who other years were overshadowed by sheriff deputies who other years were outdone by pleas from senior citizens to keep tax rates low. But every year teachers made the biggest show, created the headlines, demanded that St. Mary's County cough up the money to keep its educational system competitive. And they were successful.

Even during the years taxes were reduced -- in the late 1990s -- and the years they were raised to compensate for the depleted coffers -- in the early 2000s -- the teachers came one after another to speak for increased educational funding. They insisted, one after another, that the increasingly well educated population would support paying more for the benefits of quality education.

But this year -- and maybe it was the medium, maybe the television itself warped the message -- but this year, even as they asked for more money, a vocal cadre of teachers wielding umbrellas applauded an even larger cadre of speakers calling for tax cuts.

The umbrellas symbolized the teacher's perennial call for more spending on education. But as the same teachers applauded those calling for tax cuts the umbrellas reminded me of the old leaking roofs. That past was remedied by teachers and parents who insisted that the average home owner would forgo their relatively modest savings from reductions of pennies on the tax rate in exchange for a quality school system.

Of course, the richest man in the county would save a great deal more from those pennies than the average home owner. He's gone now. But I thought about him Tuesday night and imagined how he would have grinned at such a turn.