Tag: America

REACHING FOR A HEADLINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Being employed as a newspaper editor meant I had to be scrupulous about avoiding the slightest appearance of partisanship in public. Too many people assume bias on any pretext and extend that to an assumption you cannot hear their position fairly. In reality, these are the ones who want you to be actively in their group rather than neutral in reporting both sides.

Admittedly, I’ve long felt a tension between avoiding any appearance of having a position and upholding moral values. Can you be objective without any sense of what’s true or how it all fits together?

For many of us, there are unwritten rules about what’s acceptable and what’s not, and the code I followed came largely from the Kansas City Times, where your community participation is limited largely to your church. I wonder how it would have handled my joining a denomination known for its social justice witness – one where I could gently encourage others in the congregation to activism, even if I could not act with them.

Early on, as a cub reporter, I learned you cannot wear a candidate’s button or apply the bumper sticker, even if you can distance yourself in critical thinking. Some fine journalists refrain from even voting in elections, which in turn raises some questions about democratic responsibility in the aftermath.

Retirement, though, is allowing me to slowly move away from that, and this is the first time in my quarter-century-plus in the Granite State I’m attending presidential primary events – on both sides of the political divide, at that.

It’s been eye-opening.

My wife, on the other hand, is an old-pro at these things and often explains nuances to me, the one with the degree in political science. (OK, my focus was on political theory and policy analysis rather than the nitty-gritty of campaigning, elections, and legislative maneuvers.) And one daughter, seasoned in the behind-the-scenes work of running a candidate for office, has convinced me of the importance of organization, planning, and staff discipline.

It’s still early in the fray – a wonderful opportunity to observe, actually. And it’s as much fun to watch the crowd, large or small, as it is the candidate or staff. They cover the range.

One thing I notice, though, is the working press and the video crews. CNN, C-SPAN, and, I’m guessing, MSNBC News have a trio of cameras side by side staffed by college-fresh crews just about everywhere. Just in case? Who knows. The metro reporters, in their suits and loose ties (if that), are looking for the telling detail, likely for a wrap-up later, while the frumpier local papers just want a story for the next edition, daily or weekly.

And that’s had me wondering just how I would cover the typical event. Most of these appearances, after all, are pretty standard repetition of policy positions easily available online. There’s nothing new there – and thus no news.

Well, the Q-and-A portion in what many bill as a town meeting can be interesting, if the questioners are actually from the public and not just campaign plants.

We got a flash of that yesterday at Dover City Hall when Hillary Clinton was heckled by a juvenile but orchestrated ban-fracking group. From everything we saw, she responded admirably, calmly, professionally – and got a loud, standing ovation in response. Not that you’d know that part from the headlines or news stories.

The strident outburst seized the coverage and nearly hijacked the event. But it was also allowed to remain, standing silently, with its banner, in one corner of the hall. Did it advance its cause?

I doubt it. We come to these appearances to hear positions, not to dictate their answers. We want honesty, not pandering.

As we heard Ohio Governor John Kasich say earlier in the week, in front of a much smaller gathering, New Hampshire voters serve as an X-ray machine, looking at both a candidate’s outer and inner qualities. He’s right. It’s not a responsibility we take easily. Just consider standing more than an hour in a long line snaking through the steamy summer confines of a city hall corridor before standing another hour-and-a-half through the event itself, as the audience did for Hillary.

I’d urge the protesters, by the way, to take their banner and voices to stand outside the Republican hopefuls’ events and see where that goes.

In the meantime, I’m reminded of the gap between what is often experienced in a situation like this and what we read of it in the news story. What I experienced and what I read aren’t the same. And, no, I wouldn’t accept a campaign sticker – I was there to watch and listen.

As for that public responsibility? We’d hoped to get up to Laconia later in the afternoon, where the Donald was to appear at a rally – no Q-and-A, I presume. But we agreed, we’d had enough for one day. You can absorb only so much at a time. And, as I search for that coverage this morning, apparently there was nothing newsworthy to report there.

NOT MINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

New Hampshire has more than its share of vanity license plates, a practice that often provides amusement in the thick of traffic or parking lots. For a number of years, mine said QUAKER, which spurred some lively conversations — to say nothing of what happened when parked next to Bob McQuillen’s QUACKER plate. (His goes back to his days of teaching high school shop classes — the result of one day when a student I will not name accused him of sounding like a duck when he got angry.)

So we were driving through downtown the other day when we noticed this plate:

We need to talk.
We need to talk.

Only in the photo do I notice the second D rather than O — representing another variant on the root surname Hodgson. Still, it can be unsettling when you have a rather uncommon one to see another around.

A LITTLE TRASH TALK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The SUV pulls out from in front of a neighbor’s house and tosses a plastic iced-coffee cup, straw, and lid onto the elderly woman’s driveway across from me as I’m weeding.

I retrieve it, put it in our recycling bin.

So they want a clean interior?

It’s not their vehicle that needs purging.

Oh, Lord, help us!

NO, HISTORY CANNOT BE ERASED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 8 Comments

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” Abraham Lincoln wrote to Congress in December 1862.

Wednesday night, in her impassioned and reasoned impromptu plea to her colleagues in the South Carolina House of Representatives, fellow Republican Jenny Anderson Horne broke through a logjam of tactical delays so that her state – and the entire South – might finally address history.

We’ve long heard the argument that the War Between the States (there was nothing civil about it) was over states’ rights rather than slavery – a bogus case, at best, when one considers the 1857 Dred Scott v Sanford Supreme Court decision that stripped Northern states of their right t0 defend the human liberty of escaped slaves. No, the South decisively denied states’ rights. Or at least its powerful slaveholders did, when they wanted.

Like Horne, I have Southern roots – not as many or as distinguished as hers, but enough to make me aware of the complications Southern whites faced. On my father’s side, the North Carolina Quaker identity long meant opposing both slavery and the bearing of arms. Theirs was a difficult witness, long before the war and in its destructive aftermath. And I have a copy of the memoirs of another family member, my great-great-grandmother’s uncle, an Ohio farm boy who died from wounds in the Battle of Stones River, one of the deadliest outbreaks in the war. My mother’s side included slaveholders and soldiers, mostly Confederate, along with a wealthy individual not enlisted who gunned down isolated Union troops he ambushed as a guerrilla – one who was apparently hanged, not that we ever heard that story. Instead, it was always my great-great-grandfather’s long walk to deliver the last message of a comrade to his family – the journey that planted the family in Bowling Green, Missouri.

Still, I’ve long been offended by the flying of the Confederate flag. Its intention has been all too blatant … and racist. Period.

If you want another view of the cost of slavery on the South, black and white, look up Wendell Berry’s essay, The Hidden Wound, arising in his own childhood in Kentucky. He saw through any pretense of honor masking at least one prominent citizen.

Most remarkable in Horne’s speech was her readiness to move beyond family identity. As she told the Washington Post after the vote, “It’s not about ‘Oh, my great-grandfather was killed in the Civil War and he gave his life.’ That’s not what we are here to talk about. What we’re here to talk about is what’s in the here and now. And in 2015, that flag was used as a symbol of hatred.”

As she emphasized, “We’re not fighting the Civil War anymore. That war has been fought. It’s time to move forward and do what’s best for the people of South Carolina.”

All the people.

What a contrast to Rep. Michael Pitts, a white Republican, who had told the House earlier in the debate: “I grew up holding that flag in reverence because of the stories of my ancestors carrying that flag into battle.”

Maybe he should have heard the “into battle” part more clearly – battle against freedom for all. Battle, however indirectly, against his black neighbors, as well, and not just the North. And often in battle against the poor.

More telling for me was Rep. Eric Bedingfield, also a white Republican and defender of the flag, in his declaration: “I have wept over this thing. I have bathed this thing in prayer. I have called my pastor to pray for me,” before adding, “You can’t erase history.”

No, you can’t. The history is the war’s over – and the Confederate flag lost. Put it away. Look at the full history, then, black and white, rich and poor. As much as I love genealogy, it fits into a larger story — and rare is the family chart without shame or guilt or human failure somewhere.

History? The Confederate cause has been accurately described as a rich man’s war fought by the poor. I still wince reading of the brutal torture of pregnant women or the elderly at the hands of the Home Guard – in North Carolina, at least, comprised largely of men owning 20 or more slaves and thus exempted from Confederate Army service. We need to break out of the prevailing mythology or fairy tales and instead open out on the wider story stripped of its masks.

As for the prayers, you and your pastor weren’t listening – Moses could tell you about slavery in Egypt and the way Pharaoh’s losing army was swept away in the Sea of Reeds (or Red Sea). Maybe there are good reasons Cairo never bothered with its side of the encounter. Later prophets in the Hebrew Bible could tell you about slavery in Babylon and its emotional burden. It’s all there in the open to be read.

If anything, the decision to remove the rebel battle flag from the state capitol dome can be seen as a response to the flood of prayers in the aftermath of the Charleston church massacre. In the eyes of many, a photo of the accused killer and the flag said everything. In contrast to my fellow citizens — or my fellow Christians.

The reality could no longer be ignored. It was all about racial hatred.

The Post report continues: “Some call it the war between the states, some call it the Civil War,” Pitts said, defending the Confederate flag. “Growing up, in my family, it was called the war of Northern aggression; it was where the Yankees attacked the South, and that’s what was ingrained on in me growing up.”

Hidden in that defense is a slap at the rest of the country. Black and white. Along with a denial of what the North experienced as escalating Southern aggression in the decades building up to Fort Sumter.

You can’t erase history. You can’t escape history. You can get trapped in it, when it’s distorted, the way propaganda does.

You can, however, make history. And break free.

The way Jenny Anderson Horne has, for us all.

OF FIREWORKS AND FLOWERS AND MY SHORT FUSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

A well-designed fireworks display can be a thing of beauty. No matter its scale – whether vast as Boston over both banks of the Charles River – or small-scale like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, around its old mill pond or Needham, Massachusetts, assembled on the long lawn of its high school, the intelligent use of an imaginative palette and the use of the sky as a canvas canopy reaching from the ground to its zenith can turn into a piece of breathtaking performance art, a combination of fleeting painting and wordless theater.

What too often turns up, unfortunately, is largely senseless bang-bang-bang without any subtlety of timing and proportion. Think of a standup comic who can’t tell a joke. No pauses, no phrasing.

In contrast, I think instead of the revelation of a single burst of color – perhaps a small tulip, in the terminology of pyrotechnics – followed in the same spot in the sky by another and then another. In the process, the shots run through the color wheel like slivers of rainbow. And then it’s repeated, with two identical bursts side by side – red turning to orange turning to yellow turning to green turning to blue turning to purple. Simple, elegant, commanding.

Do that right and you’ve announced that what follows will be amazing. You’ll lead the eyes all over the sky – up and up, out, back down, just over the crowd, and back up again. Small that expands beyond the ability to take it all in — or the opposite, leading your eyes to a vanishing point. You’ll create movements the way a symphony or sonata does – each one distinct yet playing off the one before. (Well, Boston’s was traditionally designed to fit music – each section, a song or overture or dance. Now that’s impressive! Oh, and we’d listen along with our radios — everywhere, tuned to the classical station.)

Think, too, that many of the traditional fireworks are named for flowers – blooms that open and then fade, often into another. Hyacinths to chrysanthemums to … well, to see how it works the other way, try this link to flowers arranged to look like fireworks by Sarah Illenburger. Pretty amazing. I appreciate her illustration of how fireworks don’t have to be gaudy greens, reds, and yellows. The more sophisticated designers blend colors into dark brooding as well as shimmering pastels. One memorable show consisted largely of silvers and golds. What was I saying about imaginative design?

A pyrotechnics show works in another dimension as well – it’s a time of public gathering and celebration. Apart from whatever’s happening on your blanket in the dark, there’s nothing private about it. (And we’ll assume you’re jammed in with others.) You can’t do it in your house, at least safely. So it’s a time of community spirit. Even pride. And in the United States, that means the Fourth of July. (The northern half of the country’s just too cold during much of the year to assemble outdoors at night, so this one comes at a perfect time of summer. Not that we don’t try.)

For Dover, where I live, though, the event points up one of the geographic shortcomings of my city. We just don’t have the right spot to mount the event, much less to design it to do much more than the old bang-bang-bang honky-tonk.

Some years, it’s launched from the top of Garrison Hill, where the shots can be seen from much of the city – if trees, houses, or other obstacles don’t block your view from below. Some years, it’s at the high school, but that’s not centrally located. Since few people can walk there, that creates a traffic problem and erodes much of a small-town feeling befitting its scale. Dover’s not an unfocused suburb the way this site suggests.

Downtown along the river would be ideal, if there were only a proper spot. The riverfront park is narrow, though, and too near the old mills, the nearest one once the scene of a disastrous fire. One possibility a little downstream is a gravel-strewn lot awaiting development, but it has little easy access. One elementary school that might do is in a residential area that would not welcome a crowd.

So here we are. If I watch the show, I’ll just get angry, knowing what could be done with the resources in the right setting. As I was saying about the single tulip? It needs the right setting to be appreciated.

CHECKOUT EXPRESSION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

The supermarket checkout express lane can trigger some hot buttons for me.

One, of course, is the customer who plops 15 or 20 items on the conveyor belt when there’s a state 12 Items max limit. The poor clerk’s not going to bounce them. It’s simply the rudeness to the rest of us that bugs me.

Another is the use of credit cards, when permitted. It slows everything down.

The other day, though, there was a geezer who cut in front of a girl with a shopping cart. She was, from appearances, a quiet teen.

“Excuse me,” I said, “There’s a girl in front of you.”

“I can’t hear you,” he replied.

So I repeated the situation.

“Mind your own business,” he retorted.

We were all shocked.

“You can go in front of me,” she finally said.

Any suggestions for how to handle this?

He’s an embarrassment to all geezers, am I not mistaken?

I’m still miffed. Whatever happened to manners?

 

EVERYTHING HAS A PRICE?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Driving back from the coast along a rather honky-tonk stretch of highway the other night, my headlights flashed across this sign:

INTEGRITY
— —
FOR SALE

At least, that’s what I think it said. The two blanks, I’m finding, may have said Residential Brokerage.

Still, considering our public life today, the message is disturbing.

How do you read it?

CRACKLING IN OUR AIR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

In blogging here, I’ve generally tried to steer clear of current events, as in political and economic news. Even my reflections on the weather have been, I hope, along a larger or more timeless horizon than mere day-to-day changes. Think of watching the grass grow.

But I do live in New Hampshire, and the campaigns for the November 8, 2016, presidential election are already generating daily front-page headlines here. Remember, that’s nearly a year-and-a-half away.

The primary is tentatively set for February 9, but that could move up, depending. We hate when it clashes with Christmas.

The point is, politics is already crackling in our air. How can I possibly avoid it?

ANOTHER REPRESENTATIVE SCANDAL

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Even his own mother and sister are rejecting his claims about the money.

Frank Guinta, who represents half of New Hampshire in the U.S. House of Representatives, is in hot water over $355,000 an investigation by the Federal Election Commission has documented as campaign finance violations.

How serious is this? His explanations from 2010 on have been tangled, leading to Tuesday’s damning FEC report.

As for serious, the right-wing editorial page of the Union Leader, the statewide newspaper based in Manchester, came to the conclusion yesterday: “For the New Hampshire Republican Party, there also remains no choice. It must call for Guinta’s resignation and sever its ties.”

Quite simply, he “received illegal campaign contributions … for the purpose of stealing a Republican primary and a general election, then repeatedly lied to the people of New Hampshire to cover it up.”

In other words, it’s about maintaining the viability of democracy. Both sides of the aisle. And it’s about serving the voting public, regardless of their identity. Without that, we’re left with raw power — and its abuse.

The editorial emphasizes, “The party cannot stand by a politician who has revealed himself to be wholly unworthy of the public trust. Political parties are supposed to stand for ideals, not merely tribal connections. … The party can either lead by integrity or it can stand by Frank Guinta. It cannot do both.”

This is a small state where you often get to meet or question your public representatives. Even when you don’t agree with them, they’re not from another planet, as it can feel elsewhere.

In this case, Guinta serves from my House district. And it hurts.