Embracing the Shrill

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald takes apart David Brooks in a terrific explication of Brooks' dewy eyed view of Washington journalists and lobbyists. Greenwald calls on a conversation he had with Bill Moyers and NYU Journalism ProfessorJay Rosen to clarify his thoughts.

Brooks got his start at the Washington Times, otherwise known as the NeoCon Newsletter--a paper that has never once turned a profit and is supported solely by Korean "businessman" Sun Myung Moon. This alone should disqualify Brooks from being taken seriously, ever. But this is America where a Know-Nothing like Rush Limbaugh has millions of devoted listeners who engage in an electronic form of voluntary brainwashing every time they tune into his show. He makes Brooks' blatherings seem like grocery store aisle small talk.

One part of Greenwald's discussion of Brooks that interests me is a few paragraphs devoted to the term "shrillness" when applied to journalism. You might guess that my interest stems from my own awareness of my own shrill tone at times, hence the name of this blog. (It is not meant ironically. Ask anyone.)

Greewald does a good job explaining why occasionally a little shrill is just the right thing:

In the context of discussing torture, renditions and the State Secrets controversy, The New York Times' Tobin Harshaw expressly accuses me today of "shrillness" (after having implied it several times in the past):

Greenwald, whose shrillness is usually balanced by ideological consistency and a willingness to hold Barack Obama to the same standards to which he held the previous White House resident . . . .

That, of course, is the same accusation that was continuously launched against Paul Krugman circa 2002 for irresponsibly suggesting that there might be something more than just a little bit wrong with the Bush administration.

One is guilty of the sin of "shrillness" if one: (a) argues that there is something fundamentally -- rather than marginally -- wrong with our political and media establishment and/or (b) fails to use suitably restrained, muted and respectful language when expressing those critiques. Thus, one is "shrill" if one says that George Bush committed felonies by spying on Americans without warrants and torturing people and should be treated like any other accused criminal (rather than saying: "Bush might have circumvented some legal constraints and gone a little too far in trying to keep us safe"). One is "shrill" if one says that establishment journalism, at its core and by design, is principally devoted to serving the interests and amplifying the claims of the Washington establishment (rather than saying: "Journalists could do a better job of reporting some stories"), etc. etc.

"Shrillness" – the first cousin of "Unseriousness" – is the conceptual instrument used to deter and (when that fails) demonize those who view the political and media establishment as corrupt at its core. It's a way of demanding that everyone just calm down, avoid impetuous and inflammatory language, and stop acting as though there's anything seriously wrong with our political and media elites:

Sure, they've made some mistakes; nobody's perfect. But it's not as though there's anything to get excited or angry about. And fine: there are some narrow disagreements among people of good faith and some small problems here and there that require some modifications -- little things like torture, chronic high-level lawbreaking, immunity for the political class (juxtaposed with the sprawling prison industry for ordinary Americans), rampant domestic spying, sky-high walls of government secrecy, full-scale economic meltdown, massive and growing inequities in wealth, endless wars, sleaze and corruption oozing from every Beltway pore, complete media complicity with all of it -- but there's no reason to get all indignant or agitated by it or act as though crimes are being committed or radical changes are needed or anything.

By definition, only people who are "shrill" would do that.

Can I get an A-men?

A Word About Abe Lincoln, Sort Of

Here we are two days from the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birthday.

As I take a moment while the juniors (mostly) finish their U.S. history quiz, I am thinking about the connections that make history fascinating and that seem to elude too many teenagers. I like to file things like this under There Are Only Eleven People In The World.

For instance, some argue that John Brown's radicalism lit the fuse for the Civil War. In 1859, he and a small band of men, thinking their act would inspire slaves to join their cause and rise up against the scourge of slavery, tried unsuccessfully to commandeer the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. He failed miserably and was hanged for his trouble.

John Brown



What I wish Maine students knew is that it was the murder of an abolitionist, a small publisher originally from Albion, Maine named Elijah Lovejoy, that radicalized Brown and inspired him to "consecrate [himself] against slavery."

In the small world department, it was (then) U.S. General Robert E. Lee who finally removed Brown from his hiding place at the Harpers Ferry armory. Also, Lincoln's eventual murderer, actor John Wilkes Booth, was already so galvanized against Brown and the abolitionists that he borrowed a friend's uniform so as to attend John Brown's military-attendees-only hanging. Imagine his state of mind by athe time the Civil War ended.

John Wilkes Booth

There is much more to say about Maine's connections to slavery, from the rum running, coastal barrel industry, dried cod factories and the economic plunge after the import of slaves was halted in 1808, to the 1820 Missouri Compromise that split Maine from Massachusetts, to Uncle Tom's Cabin written by Brunswick's Harriet Beecher Stowe. Slave-based commerce built much of the New England coast, yet few students in this school, let alone this state, could tell you that.

The Next Time I Hear...

The next time I hear a Republican Senator, Congressman or RNC Chairman say, "The government has never created a job," I am going to ask, "Then what the hell are we paying you for?"

I am at the end of my rope with the self-fulfilling prophecy of lousy elected officials and policy-makers talking about how horrid government is and then proceeding to make it horrider.

The One Percenters

It is 11:13 p.m. on Friday, 6.Feb.09. The U.S. Senate has supposedly agreed on an Economic Stimulus Package. From everything I have read, our very own Reasonable Republicans, Senators Snowe and Collins, have all but handed the Radical Right Wing the keys to the kingdom.

When they could have made the right choice, a la Rachel Maddow's wonderful dissertation today about facts (not up yet, I'll link it when it is) and moved away from the economic policies that put us firmly in the loser column, they clung to the bad old Reagan-Gingrich illogic. Tax cuts, not spending, carried the day, and it was our own Susan Collins who thought it a dandy idea to do away with state aid to education. As a teacher working as a teachers' aid seeking full time work in an environment of nearly panicked administrators, I can say that this was the wrong move.

And now, as I write, they are voting on an amendment to "bar any stimulus money from going to ACORN," the non-profit working to register voters that became a media mash-up during the campaign. Amazingly it failed, 45 to 51. It makes me wonder, however, whether the Republicans are going to offer amendments to keep the Stimulus Package from funding, one by one, every organization the Radical Right opposes. It could be a long and petty process.

Seems to me there is a perfectly good reason for the GOP to be so studiously clueless about economics. The people their tax cutting panaceas will help the most are the One Percenters, the one percent of Americans holding 33 percent of the wealth. These are the people who line their pockets, whether as part of their campaigns or later in private dealings. They are the ones with access.

A note for the over 40 among us. Most of my life, the obscenely wealthy held no more than 20 percent of our country's wealth. That was bad enough. However, only in the last eight years, thanks to Dubya's tax cuts, did that figure swell to 33 percent.

When I think of how far we suddenly are from President Obama's promise to undo those tax cuts, I want to cry. Then I want to get out my pitchfork and get on the Metroliner.

Dear Susan Collins DBA Reasonable Republican

It is all about the tax code.

Unless the fight over tax breaks removes income taxes for those who earn less than $35,000, or adds grants for education and home windmills, please stop wrangling over them. Unreasonable Republicans, like Eric Kantor who persist in using the incorrect form of the word when describing "Democrat leaders," are wrong and and have misjudged what will help most of us.

When will the Unreasonable Republicans stop pretending that a few hundred dollars in the pocket of Edgecomb's Sheepscot River Pottery is going to make a difference to how many people they hire this summer, or how many people stop to buy Maine-made ceramics. The majority of Americans do not want the President's stimulus package held hostage by those who would do the bidding of the obscenely wealthy, one half of one percent of the population. As for the lip service given to supporting the middle class and small business, the best "job generator" will be universal health care.

(Images from the Americans Who Tell The Truth project by Maine artist Robert Shetterly)

Please return to the reason and confidence embodied by Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower and Margaret Chase Smith. Rather than continuing the craven taxation practices of the last 30 years, now proven not only ineffective but damaging to the economy, please adjust the return appropriately. Current tax policy made so much cash available to the gilded class that investment counselors had trouble finding diversified, smart, safe havens, thus currying the growth of idiotic (credit default swaps) and downright immoral (Madoff's Ponzi scheme) investments. Blaming those who bought houses they could not afford without blaming those who made cash for those loans available fails to address the whole problem.

The Unreasonable Republicans, John Cornyn, Rush Limbaugh Mitch McConnel, Eric Kantor and John Boehner to name a few, have been acting badly in the last couple days. Can the reasonable Republicans, like yourself, step up and use some moral authority to stop them?

Your new seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee gives you exponentially increased gravitas and makes your reasonableness all the more critical. Word is your influence helped three Republican colleagues on the Appropriations Committee decide to support the spending portion of the stimulus bill. For that I am grateful. The federal government must act on behalf of the people to save our economy from ruin.

I ask you to please consider excising from the Stimulus Package the tax cuts so popular with the Unreasonable Republicans and some of your constituents--though not a plurality. Please read smart economists like Kevin Phillips and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman who make a darned good case against tax cuts. Rather, they indict the relative tax freedom of the obscenely wealthy as the cause of many of our current economic ills.

Consider my situation. When my mother died in 1998, half of her two million dollar estate went to the federal government, and a goodly portion to two states, Maine and Texas where she lived. My sister and I split the remainder, bought modest homes and invested the what was leftover. Those investments have shrunk to piddling suggestions of their former selves. Both of us work in public service. She as a Marine Patrol Officer; I am a teacher who took a few years away from teaching to raise my young son and attend grad school.

Now, as I attempt to return to full time teaching (I will stifle a rant about how American public policy fails to encourage women to take time off to raise their children), I do not regret the taxes I have paid in 35 years of employment, or even the onerous Estate Tax. I resent that our infrastructure is not better, our schools are not more vigorous, our public transportation is a joke, in part because, as Phillips points out, while the incomes of the wealthiest families in America have grown exponentially, their tax rate has shrunk to that of my neighbor the home builder. How is it that the Mellons and the Morgans pay the same rate as a contractor in Midcoast Maine?

Senator Collins, you have minions who can do this math better than I. However, I know in my head and heart that one half of one percent of the population should not be protected at the expense of the rest of us.

We must return to the path of that Reasonable Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower. His highest tax rate was 91 percent. Reagan was wrong. This grinding, as yet far from finished debacle proves it. Progressive tax reform is essential to this country's recovery; it is critical to our identity.

Accepting Obama's Challenge

Yesterday, Jon Robbins, my sophomore English teacher and husband of the pastor at Sheepscott Community Church, told me a story about what happened to him after he heard President Obama's Inaugural Speech and its challenge to work toward solutions on our own. Jon said he had run his errands and was on his way home when he approached St. Patrick's, the Catholic church in Newcastle. A large sign advertising a blood drive beckoned. "I gave blood," said Robbins.

The President's speech "had an effect," said Robbins. Now, I am sure Mr. Robbins has given blood before. I failed to ask. For all I know he gives blood every month. This probably was not an earth shaking move for this classically educated English teacher who now binds books by hand--complete with gold-edged pages. His point, I think, was that the President's speech had an effect, however humble.

Though I wish I could say I have made similar moves, humble or not, today I saw a local opportunity for someone trained in the trades to make a difference in a seriously Obama-ish way.

In Bath, the state's first Regional School Unit, RSU 1 is "seeking a student centered instructor with knowledge of new, electrical alternatives, including solar and wind." Now is the chance for someone with these critical skills to help the community, state, nation and globe in one fell swoop.

This is when I wish I had fewer liberal arts and frou-frou skills. I mean, can a lovely plié and a well choreographed dance effect much positive change in an economic disaster? Actually, I believe they can. However, that does not keep me from envying those with more practical, Whole Earth Catalog skills. (I can can, though--and not just the dance.)

This Bath vocational school work, helping teenagers get some semblance of a useful trade as we move away from fossil fuels, seems nearly as important to the world as the work of my public service heroes, Doctors Without Borders. No, whomever takes this Bath job will not be dodging bullets from the Janjuweed or risking Ebola virus in the Congo. However, he or she will almost certainly have to bob and weave with the dissonant rhythms of adolescence and institutional learning, motion that when repeated sometimes can make one feel under attack and a bit ill.

Whom do we know who could give this job the weight and attention it deserves? We know a lot of people you and me. For more information go to the Maine teacher job website.

President Obama Beautifully Slaps Limbaugh and the GOP

If I had my druthers I would probably flog a diary a day from DailyKos. Today, I give in to the urge. (Translation: the house is a mess and I should be vacuuming.)

Here is a piece noting President Obama's--it feels so good writing that--recent advice to the GOP to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh if they want to "get anything done." What I love is that this suggestion has the excellent quality of insulting both Limbaugh and the Republican Leadership, as noted by Kos poster freelunch.

Another smart commenter asked who supports Limbaugh and in an effort to turn the diary into one of action, I linked to another Kos diary with a reasonably updated list of sponsors. A few months ago, when I tried to get the list of local advertisers from Portland's WGAN560, our local Limbaugh station, I was quizzed about my motives as if I were one of bin Laden's lackies.

Sadly, I simply have not been able to bring myself to listen for more than a moment or two, even in the name of gathering intelligence for a letter-writing campaign.

We have got to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. Now.

Heart(wood) and Soul

Elise "The Scorpion" Voigt from Heartwood's spring '08 production of the original work "Gilgamesh."
Steve "The Body" Shema as Gilgamesh in "Gilgamesh."

On a recent January night in Damariscotta a dozen well-fed souls traipsed through the outerspace-like chill to find Tennessee Williams' southern sensibilities of the Wingfields in the latest production of "The Glass Menagerie." After a sumptuous supper on Water Street we hid the remaining food from the surprisingly cagey resident Labrador Retriever, and walked the five minutes to Skidompha.

After the play Heartwood Theater's director Griff Braley called the family "dysfunctional." The production's superb acting, tight pacing and sensitive staging allowed the famously difficult relationships to take center stage in Skidompha Library's intimate lobby.

Go. The play is up into February. It is winter in Maine. Where else are you going to see professional level drama disguised as local theater? Dixie Weisman, Elise Voigt, Kevin Kiley and Steve Shema are great. They listen to one another and know what they are doing. Braley's productions are famously well-paced. This group of actors takes his direction to heart and gives the audience the gift of transparency. The words and story take precedence.

Teach Your Teachers Well

After spending a few hours yesterday investigating the teacher shortages in this country, I am incredulous that someone ostensibly employed to increase the number of available qualified teachers could be obdurate about how and where in Maine to take one of the five most popular teaching methods classes. These are classes without which one cannot teach; they are essential to certification.

After telling me there was no way I could take her program's course, this woman had no idea where, other than her program, one might go in the state to take such a class.

The feds display incredible duplicity when they say schools must hire highly qualified teachers and then not be fully prepared to help qualified teachers get more qualified. Nowhere in the Maine university catalog or online is there a social studies methods class this spring--except the one I am barred from because I am a certified teacher.

Undiplomatic may be the kindest way to describe the University of Southern Maine administrator who explained to me that there are no social studies methods classes for me to take. This woman, who helps run a program to train teachers, sounded positively imperious when she asked, "How did you get certified in the first place?" It was as if she could not believe I would want another certification.

Only after an e-mail that I thought clear enough, and about five minutes on the phone did she fully grasp that I am a teacher certified in two subjects, English and Phys Ed, with 12 years experience and great recommendations, who has spent the last five years replenishing teacher mojo in graduate school and work in other fields, who, gasp!, has the audacity to want yet another certification, this time in social studies. Because of my graduate work and because I am already an experienced teacher, all I need is a methods class. She replied finally, "We only offer methods classes to our students," meaning USM enrollees studying to be teachers.

Toward the end of our conversation she argued with me about how I came to know that her program offered a methods class at all. "They're hidden, our students can't even see them." I told her the class was listed on the Maine Street section of the University site, and still she failed to believe me.

Only when I pointed out that the school was missing out on my tuition and the school where I work would be missing out, did she even consider passing my e-mail on to another bureaucrat for further consideration. He declined the option, calling me a non-matric, sending me and my cyber inquiry packing.

All I know is it is a darned good thing I like obstacles.

(Image from Rousseau's "Emile")

Roundabout Way

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Christmas shopping and a quest for a replacement for my dead Airport wireless router has taken me to Augusta, our fair capital city, a couple times recently. Could someone tell me what is up with the Cony rotary?

Having lived in England for a while as a kid, I think rotaries, or roundabouts as the Brits call them, are the bees' knees. They're ecological and fast. No one has to stop unless absolutely necessary, saving both fuel and time.

The trouble is, the ones with more than one lane are counter-intuitive. Drivers going around farther than one exit are expected to dive into the center lane, drive 'round, signal and squirt out at the right place. Actually, the counter-intuitive-osity appeals to me, too.

Since there are two two-lane rotaries in Augusta, it is easy to tell the drivers who took driver ed somewhere free from similar traffic patterns. They have a panicked look on their faces as they circle the rotary in the outside lane, endangering the people who expect the outer lane to be empty or at the very least taking the same exit.

Lately the entrance to the rotary next to what used to be Cony High School, the one on the east side of the Kennebec, has three, count 'em, three lanes. The geniuses at MDOT have posted signs about six yards before the rotary's entrance explaining the concept of a rotary, long after a driver ought to have made a decision about which lane to take.

Apparently the logic is that the far right lane takes the driver east, out Cony Street, the middle one heads up Route 9 past O'Connor GMC to Waterville, and the far left lane points drivers to the rotary's center lane to spin around to either of the bridges crossing the Kennebec. Great in theory. Is it just me who thinks it would have been nice if some clue could be offered before driving past the high school parking lot?

Now the drivers circling the outside lane look closer to traumatized, their blanched faces and knuckles can be seen from space, and those of us following the rules on the inside lane have to use the eyes in the backs of our heads. Oy.