Tag: Opinion

A QUESTION OF INTEGRITY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

The New Hampshire Republican Party’s recent reiterations claiming the centrality of integrity have me looking at the party’s record of the past few decades in national elections.

Just where does integrity fit in the win-at-all-costs school of politics manifested by Karl Rove and his kind? And where has it been thrown overboard, especially?

Put another way, and not just with politics: Where do words and actions converge? And just where do they diverge?

Integrity, of course, demands convergence – of the head, hands, and heart, as well. Here’s hoping …

TWO ENDS OF THE SAME BUMPER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

At the left side of the bumper was the sticker
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS.

On the right side
TAX IT ALL

presumably as a protest.

I doubt the driver made the connection – and these two are closely related – that the overwhelming preponderance of federal debt and tax money goes to the military for current and past expenditures. I just wish those who support the first connect it to the second. That awareness would cut through a lot of political rhetoric and posturing and maybe lead to some real reductions.

Think it will ever happen?

BOULANGERIES AT THE BASE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Julia Child liked to emphasize technique as the foundation of French cuisine – starting with the ability to create traditional sauces and custards.

But lately I’ve been thinking of something even more basic and yet distinctive – bread. Yes, the transformation of dough into a baguette or croissant. Seemingly simple, yet utterly heavenly when masterfully done – and so often delivered and sold in pale imitations, probably even in France today or more commonly across America. Admittedly, there’s a great deal of technique required in doing these right – along with the unique steam-infused, high temperature ovens designed expressly for the purpose.

Maybe that’s why two of our favorite bakeries – or boulangeries – each share their building with a celebrated New England restaurant, one in Maine, the other in Cape Cod. These restaurants know the importance of bread.

Put simply, let me argue that based on its breads and pastries alone, French cuisine would rank high on any global listing. You can add other categories as you wish – from soups to wines to desserts – but let me return to that moment of sitting on the back porch of the house where we were staying, sipping coffee and white wine and munching on bread and pastries we’d just picked up across the highway before dashing back. We were there, in line, at opening – and when the doors opened a few minutes after the official time, all we got in greeting was cheerful “Bonjour,” sans apologie.

Not that we’re complaining. Definitely not.

We’re both still marveling at the sight we’d caught of a baker transferring the rows of baguette dough from the tray to the rack for the oven. I’ve kneaded hundreds of loaves of bread, and none have ever been so smoothly gorgeous. It was like watching a fisherman with his catch, actually. We can only imagine how each armlike roll feels to the touch or the baker’s gentle caress in lifting it and arranging it anew in its rows for baking.

Coincidentally, my wife’s started reading Bread Alone, Daniel Leader’s eye-opening discoveries as an American who backed into preserving the old ways of French baking artistry. Since then, he’s made a success of it in Upstate New York, of all places. His is a delightful story full of unlikely twists of fate and French characters, along with some definite opinions about flour and approaches and some detailed recipes for the exacting aspirant – or professional baker.

I return to a concept of simplicity as leaving one with no place to hide, no disguises for shoddy workmanship, no excuses. Simplicity instead as a goal of mastery, competence, elegance. In other words, good work.

For now, though, I’ll just savor the delight of what’s fresh, carefully crafted, and unpretentiously good – slices of crusty bread with soft butter and a glass of chilled vinho verde, for instance, to accompany a green salad of lettuce straight from the garden. Well, the homemade vinaigrette might take some finessing.

For me, a perfect summer repast, especially when shared in good company.

WAKING UP, AT LAST, TO REALITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Gee, it’s rather incredible to hear all the new voices finally recognizing that this Supreme Court, with its longest members and majority appointed by their side, is indeed running wild.

Activist? Where were they when the high bench, for the first time in history, crowned a president? Or later transformed our republic into a government by the super-rich, for the super-rich, and of the super-rich, as it has in Citizens United?

Utter silence.

But now, with a few recent flukes in its record, just listen to the outrage. If you’re trying to make sense of their decisions, good luck.

You can count me among the outraged, long ago – when our cries were ignored. When esteemed law school deans and professors warned of the top justices’ threats to our very legal system and its foundations. When we scratched our heads for any underlying sustained rudder in their course from one ruling to the next.

I’d crow now, except that the problem remains.

In its polarized atmosphere, the question keeps coming down to the swing vote — and it’s like watching a pinball machine. Which flipper will sway the course of action? The question everyone asks is who was the swing vote this time?

Who, even before Why.

With every ruling, we watch, often with horror. Will it be on the side of broad justice or instead on the side of big money? Will it be for the common American and justice for all? Or for something else, however vaguely defined?

My conclusion? What we’re seeing is not so much a matter of deciding case by case on its merits as it is an imposition of personalities from the bench. An opinion that includes “just ask a hippie” is hard to take seriously, no matter if you agree or disagree with the vote. America needs more judges of the people, for the people, and by the people throughout its ranks — more humanity and compassion rather than pompous circumstance. Not more political ideologues for the wealthy, as Republican senators have been doing in asserting privilege to obstruct presidential nominations. They even cloak themselves in anonymity in doing so without any grounds whatsoever.

When a Senate majority seeks a rubber-stamp to endorse one side only, perhaps an activist court is a foregone conclusion. And as long as we’re stuck with a Supreme Court lacking a stable center, we’ll have to wonder where the real authority is. The kind that endures rather than sways in the wind.

Maybe, in the new outcry, we in the public can come together. Wouldn’t that be something?

 

 

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.

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.

REGARDING THE LATEST GREEK TRAGEDY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Vanity Fair magazine’s October 2010 article, Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, by Michael Lewis may still be the best perspective we have on the events finally crashing along the sunny Aegean and sending shock waves through the rest of the continent.

Events? Do we call them economic? Financial? Political? Social? Moral? Cataclysmic? Truly tragic, as in “taking on the gods and bearing the consequences”?

The Greeks aren’t alone in trying to make sense of money issues. Apart from monetary policy itself – a highly esoteric field – any discussion of money soon wades into emotionally laden assumptions regarding wealth, possessions, time, labor, even food or family or religion. These are the grist of my ongoing Talking Money series at Chicken Farmer I Still Love You. I hope you join in — the category can be found under the Contents tab.

One of the easily overlooked realities about money is that it is essentially an elaborate IOU – one that allows us to store excess productivity or labor over time and space. Eventually, though, any promises come due, and you better have something that will back the debt up. That’s as true for nations that print the bills or banks that move them about as it is for individuals. And that’s what we’re seeing in Greece.

As I write this, I have no way of anticipating what will play out. The lack of a single nation to enforce the necessary regulations that would back the euro had me skeptical of its success from the very beginning, though I’ve long admitted to being a neo-Luddite. Still, the history of state-issued currencies in the United States in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War illustrates the pitfalls of currency that is insufficiently backed up. Prudent Pennsylvania proved to be the big exception to the trend and maintained its value.

We watch the present drama, then, hoping the action remains confined to the stage in the amphitheater. There are no guarantees – no double your money back – for anyone as the plot thickens.

Any predictions? Or counsel? We’re all eyes and ears.

ANSWERING THE CALL OF DEMOCRACY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s started. It’s definitely started. The 2016 presidential race.

Those living in New Hampshire can assure you by one indicator, the sudden rise in home phone calls. If you’re registered to one political party or the other and have a number listed somewhere, you’re getting invitations to meet its hopefuls — even the ones who haven’t yet filed. And if you’re registered as an independent, you get them all. And everyone’s asked to express opinions, though not all of the surveys are scientifically neutral. Did I mention the pleas for donations?

We view it as our quadrennial state sport – as well as an obligation to serve as guinea pigs for the rest of the nation. We’re not as rural as many think — much of the state’s really an outer suburb of Boston, so we get our share of big-city problems. And we’re more diverse, as well. We’re small enough to give deserving underdogs an ear – rather than just those who already have the most money. In face-to-face encounters, some of them in neighbors’ living rooms, we work to look through the mass-media image – and often we see somebody quite different than what you’ve assumed. Some highly qualified individuals are warm and witty in intimate settings but stiffen up in front of a big crowd or the television cameras — while some who look great on a tightly scripted screen are truly uncomfortable, even incoherent, in an everyday setting. We’re diligent enough to recognize the congestion of clown cars can be wildly entertaining, so we pay close attention. Besides, we know that just because these hopefuls can pay the registration fee doesn’t mean they can manage anything, but we still hope they enjoy their extended vacation in New England. They do put the rest of the crowd in perspective.

I’ll let folks in Iowa weigh in with their version of this winnowing process, but this is something we in the Granite State take seriously, no matter how eccentric or even lunatic the messenger. It’s a job somebody has to do, and staying informed isn’t always easy. We’ll be ready to kick back when it’s over.

Oh, would you excuse me? The phone’s ringing again. It just might be …