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Execution: State history offers some hope of ending barbarity

originally published on Crosscut.com on September 9, 2010

Sen. Ed Murray has repeatedly tried to end capital punishment in Washington state. Appeals to moral reasoning have actually worked before here.

Cal Coburn Brown, who was executed early Friday morning, was a death penalty poster child: Overfed, ugly, unrepentant.

In a statement denying clemency for Brown, Gov. Chris Gregoire said, “The post-conviction review by the courts has been thorough. Since Cal Brown’s conviction, the U. S. Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Washington State Supreme Court have reviewed his case and have found no basis to reverse his conviction or to change the death sentence imposed by the jury.”

Gregoire continued:

“The torture, rape and murder of Holly Washa were horrible acts of brutality. My sympathies and prayers are with Holly Washa’s family, who has suffered immeasurably from Cal Brown’s actions. No one can do anything to take away or lessen their pain. As a mother, my heart goes out to them for their tragic loss. I pray for Holly Washa. I will also pray for Cal Brown.”

The only problem with all of this politically and legally sound reasoning is that capital punishment remains a grotesque relic of the Dark Ages. It throws the United States in league with such human rights cretins as Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China. It’s unjust and arbitrary (think of the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, who pled guilty to 48 sadistic murders in exchange for a life sentence). It’s not a deterrent, and it costs Washington State millions.

Professor Hubert Locke, along with the Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, have underlined an especially horrific possibility: the likelihood of executing an innocent person (nationwide, 138 death-row inmates have been released since 1973 after being found innocent, according to the Coalition). The reasons for abolishing the death penalty, both moral and practical, are endless.

All the while, extending mercy to the merciless — and Brown acted mercilessly — runs counter to human nature. Imagine evil incarnate. (Brown even has that giveaway madman signature of three names, like John Wilkes Booth or John Wayne Gacy).

President Reagan’s former Solicitor General, Charles Fried, presents a surprisingly cogent and persuasive argument against the death penalty in his just-published book (co-written with his son, Gregory), “Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror”:Abstracting from everything about the death penalty except the ending of life makes vivid what the death penalty really is: a live person completely helpless in the hands of his captors is put to death without hope or opportunity of resistance or remonstrance. Much more than killing on the battlefield, it enacts the total subjection and subsequent annihilation of one person by another. All moral equality between executioner and victim is denied. The condemned for that moment exists only to be killed. Worse still, it is not only the executioner who has this total power over the condemned, but society as a whole that has organized itself to kill.

Legislative session after legislative session, state Sen. Ed Murray has, like a latter-day William Wilberforce, introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty. And, year after year, Murray has watched his spirited efforts crumble. It’s politically untenable. Citizens support the death penalty.

“Regardless of the hideous crime committed, state-sanctioned murder has never been a deterrent,” Murray said in an e-mail. “It’s regrettable we have a long way to go in Washington towards abolishing the death penalty.”

A winning strategy probably requires that moral sentiment be disguised and recast in political terms. The death penalty translates into millions of dollars for greedy suits, resources that could otherwise go to cops on the street or to locking up career thugs. It’s politics, raw and embellished, with an unexpressed moral end. That’s because efforts to promulgate morality (think Prohibition) generally crash and burn, and no one likes moralizers.

History can, of course, repeat itself. In 1913, state Rep. Frank P. Goss of Seattle introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty. According to a 2003 HistoryLink essay, Goss said on the state House floor, “I deny the abstract right of a government to take a life. I recognize only one right to kill and that is in self-defense.”

It was nearly a century ago, but this time the moralizing took. Gov. Ernest Lister signed the Goss bill into law. Capital punishment was abolished, not to be undone for six years.

Ed Murray and fellow opponents of the death penalty, take heart.

September 9, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Who will speak up for Seattle cartoonist under fatwa threat?

originally published on Crosscut.com

Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris lives with a metaphorical anvil over her head (she is, after all, a cartoonist).

Last month Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Islamic cleric holed up in Yemen, declared Norris a target for execution. Her transgression? Earlier this year, Norris responded to a censored episode of Comedy Central’s “South Park” that featured the prophet Mohammed dressed in a bear suit (Jesus and other religious figures appeared dressed as themselves). All references to Mohammed were bleeped after the network knuckled to threats by a handful of New Yorkers who dub themselves “Revolution Muslim.”

Norris watched the bleep-filled, image-blanked episode and was repelled. To express her free-speech solidarity, she launched a facetious protest that proclaimed May 20 “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” The faux sponsor’s Twain-esque name? “Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor.”

Sadly, at least among a select class of extremists, irreverence of the cartooning sort is a big no-no. And in the 21st century, satire can get you killed.

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August 27, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Nike move on labor issues is relief for UW

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 26, 2010

Nike has announced a watershed agreement with CGT, the union representing workers at two Honduran factories, Hugger and Vision Tex. According to the terms of the agreement unveiled Monday (July 26), Nike will pony up $1.5 million to a workers’ relief fund that will underwrite social security and health-care costs for laid-off employees.

The Nike-CGT severance resolution, the culmination of nationwide pressure largely emanating from anti-sweatshop activists, students, and professors at the University of Washington and elsewhere, comes at a critical time.

Last December, members of the UW’s Advisory Committee on Trademarks and Licensing voted to put Nike on notice for disregarding the university’s code of conduct. Charges included Nike’s multiple failures to abide by mandated disclosure standards as well as its refusal to pay severance to workers at the Honduran Hugger and Vision Tex factories.

The narrative grew complicated after UW Provost and soon-to-be interim President Phyllis Wise announced her appointment to Nike’s corporate board. Wise said that she would recuse herself from all university decisions involving the company and subsequently reported plans to donate her Nike income to a scholarship fund.

But the timing of Wise’s announcement was, in a word, awful, and it quickly ignited a backlash among campus activists and higher-ed politicos. In January, the UW chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a formal statement calling for Wise to step down from the Nike board. Wise declined.

Finally on June 8, the UW’s Advisory Committee on Trademarks and Licensing (ACTL) voted unanimously to quash the end-of-year renewal of Nike’s university contract. To ratchet up pressure, members of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) along with labor, community, and academic pashas issued a July 15 open letter to UW President Mark Emmert requesting that he act on the committee’s recommendation posthaste.

After Monday’s announcement, however, the Nike tempest looks to be over.

ACTL committee chair, Professor Margaret Levi, said in an email:ACTL recommended the ending of the Nike contract in the absence of the historic agreement reached between Nike and the CGT, representing the workers of Vision Tex and Hugger in Honduras. I am sure the members of the committee share my delight in this outcome, which represents a significant victory in the struggle for workers’ rights. However, the struggle is on-going. Our committee is dedicated to working hard to ensure that licensed goods at the University of Washington are produced under sustainable conditions for workers and for the environment — whether they be provided by Nike, Russell, or any other brand. We shall continue to work to improve the supply chain model or supersede it with a better model.

The agreement is inspired news for international labor and for the UW. For one shining, hopefully long moment, corporate lions and labor lambs (or labor lions and corporate lambs) are lying down together.

“We are delighted at this outcome,” Emmert said in a statement. “More than taking responsibility for correcting the violations of its subcontractors, Nike’s actions chart a responsible course for its competitors to follow in similar situations.”

At the UW, the sword (or Nike swoosh) of Damocles is gone for now. It’s also a sweet coda to President Emmert’s tenure. In the fall, Emmert moves on to run the NCAA.

Said one UW professor, “Sometimes the good guys win.”

July 26, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

How a staffer brought a powerful senator around to reform U.S. Indian policy

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 15, 2010

The following registers a 10 on the chutzpah meter, the platinum standard for subjective book reviews: Noodling a volume about a critical period in the struggle for Indian self-determination — a publication supported by a foundation that I’m involved with — that analyzes the legacy of one of my long-deceased family members. Hmmm.

Notwithstanding my credibility-defying baggage, Mark Trahant’s The Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars: Henry M. Jackson, Forrest J. Gerard, and the Campaign for the Self-Determination of America’s Indian Tribes, is very much worth a gander. It illustrates better than anything I’ve read in years that politics is not a Skinner Box or series of algorithms. Politics revolves around human nature, egos, and ambitions seen and unseen.

With this history, Trahant, the former editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, sets the burst of 1970s legislative progress affecting Indian Country within the broader context of major misfires, in particular the odious policy of “termination” that aimed to liquidate tribal sovereignty across the land.

Forrest Gerard, an unsung congressional insider and member of the Blackfeet tribe (who eventually became an assistant Secretary of the Interior during the Carter administration), is the tale’s hero. Gerard had the credibility, bureaucratic savvy, and political smarts to convince his boss, the bete noire of Indian Country, that it was time for a wholesale shift.

Henry “Scoop” Jackson is the boss and Interior Committee chairman, the unmovable senator who moves. And Abe Bergman, the Seattle pediatrician and star of Ric Redman’s The Dance of Legislation, is the gadfly finagler for Indian healthcare. Throw in presidential ambitions, Bobby and Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, James Abourezk, an Oklahoma senator’s wife, turf battles, the National Congress of American Indians, and the farsighted (you heard me) leadership of Richard Nixon and his aide, former Seattle land-use attorney John Ehrlichman. The first line of Trahant’s book could have been, “No one could have made this stuff up.”

Termination was conceived during the Truman Administration and found full expression during the Eisenhower years. The mission was to assimilate American Indians by paying off outstanding claims and neatly extinguishing — terminating — the special government-to-government relationships.

There was a progressive, fix-it undercurrent to the new paradigm that resonated with members of both parties, although most leaders in Indian Country knew that termination spelled cultural genocide. Jackson, who helped create the Indian Claims Commission in the 1940s in a similar fix-it vein, quickly embraced termination. In 1958, he sponsored the Senate companion bill to the notorious House Concurrent Resolution 108 that enshrined the policy.

At the time, most Indian issues fell within the purview of the Senate’s Interior Committee, which conflated America’s first inhabitants with questions of natural resources, territories, and national parks. It was a systemic reality reflecting the federal government’s patronizing approach: Just lump Indians in with minerals, mines, and public lands.

The beginning of a sea change came with New Mexico Sen. Clinton Anderson’s failure to stop the return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblos. With even President Nixon and Colorado’s Rep. Wayne Aspinall advocating the return of the sacred lands, Anderson came up with an ill-considered last hurrah, a bill to give the Taos Pueblo Indians use of the area while denying them the title to it. Scoop, Anderson’s successor as Interior chairman, unwisely followed his mentor’s lead (the transfer was, nevertheless, approved in a 70-12 vote). Trahant frames this as an issue of personal loyalty within the gentlemen’s-club culture of the United States Senate (Disclosure: In the 1960s, Anderson introduced his recently divorced twenty-something secretary to a middle-aged Scoop. At least one of its byproducts is grateful for that).

Scoop’s voting on the Taos Pueblos’ question is a stickler, one that fuels cynicism about American politics. Consider, similarly, Sen. Dan Inouye’s support a few years ago for opening the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. Was it a thoughtfully considered move or evidence of brotherly piety for Ted Stevens? Both? Loyalty shouldn’t trump the greater good, we know. We also know that men aren’t angels and governing involves compromise, sometimes too much, in fact.

Enter Forrest Gerard, a former Congressional Fellow steeped in federal Indian policy. Gerard was hired by Senate committee staffer Bill Van Ness to replace James Gamble, who was considered an obstacle in Indian Country. Gerard refused to play the token “brown face” and quickly emerged as a trusted and persuasive advisor to Scoop. At that point, hell started to cool and Jackson began to turn.

The Gerard example illuminates a not-so-secret secret, that congressional staffers are often the incubators and movers of policy. They write the legislation and do all the leg work while members of Congress lead the parade. As JFK reminded us, “Life is unfair.”

It wasn’t a road-to-Damascus conversion for Scoop, although teaming with Gerard yielded dramatic results: the Indian Self-Determination Act, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, the Indian Finance Act, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, to name a few. The Senate’s sponsor of HCR 108 was also the sponsor of its repeal.

On the 99th anniversary of Custer’s defeat, the National Congress of American Indians presented Chairman Jackson, its onetime enemy, with an award for his good works. Go figure.

Collectively, these weren’t toothless laws, Trahant observes, but meaningful, game-changing policies. So what drove Scoop? This is the great unanswerable. It might have been a calculated effort to clean up a questionable record before running for president. Or perhaps Gerard’s influence was the capstone to a long process. Or perhaps, like all good politicians, Scoop evolved.

Radical change flows from a kind of managed serendipity. Absent Gerard, none of these laws would have come together as rapidly and effectively as they did

Trahant notes that irrespective of his motives, Scoop did an amusingly poor job of broadcasting his achievements, even when speaking to tribal media. It’s a reminder that inspired lawmaking and self-promotion don’t necessarily cohere.

Trahant, a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation and a writer whose work sometimes appears on Crosscut, leavens analysis of his hero and friend, Forrest Gerard, with enough anecdotes of political horse trading to avoid hagiography. This is a story about failure, hubris, political creativity, and trying, whether sincerely or not, to make things right.

The final, broader takeaway to Trahant’s book: Politics (but no one tell academe this) is not a science. It’s what makes Trahant’s story as rich as human nature is inscrutable.

July 15, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , ,

The teen-bandit saga: It’s hard to turn away

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 12, 2010

The Colton Harris-Moore saga is flypaper. It insinuates itself, an umbrella-drink version of Bonnie and Clyde.

After his capture on Sunday in the Bahamas, the Camano Island fugitive foregrounded the news. Don’t turn away: The Northwest’s teen bandit will quickly muscle past bulletins on Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning.

At the same time that Harris-Moore was collared by police, the White House’s David Axelrod was on CNN backpedaling on the Obama Administration’s promise to close Guantanamo Bay by the end of 2010.

You won’t find news about Guantanamo Bay or Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani on Page One of this morning’s Seattle Times. Killjoy topics, we know, alienate readers.

Is Harris-Moore, like Lindsay Lohan, who headlined ABC’s once-venerable “Nightline” last Tuesday, emblematic of the decline of Western culture?

Well, maybe just a little bit.

Or it could just be a sign of Preston Sturges Syndrome. In Sturges’s 1941 film, “Sullivan’s Travels,” Joel McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a movie producer who longs to create a socially relevant film that captures the Steinbeckian dignity of the struggling masses. What does McCrea learn after traveling in the shoes of the shekel-less? People seek comedy and spectacle in hard times, not droll morality tales.

Fluff stories cheapen the public sphere. All the while, we shouldn’t fret over escapist schmaltz. According to one scholar, in fact, culture is independent of the more serious, critical issue of human rights.

In June, Jack Donnelly, the Andrew Mellon Professor at the University of Denver, lectured at the University of Washington’s Tacoma and Seattle campuses (a visit sponsored in part by the UW’s Law, Societies, and Justice program and the new Center for Human Rights). Donnelly’s core message is that social structure, not culture, is decisive to the exercise of human rights. The link between human dignity and human rights, something Westerners take for granted, is a relatively recent phenomenon, he argues.

It’s an elegant thesis, catholic in scope, that rings true because there’s something to rattle everyone. The pre-modern West and the pre-modern East were both inegalitarian (oh no, the fallacy of moral equivalence)! The “Asian values” excuse for sidestepping human rights is invalid (oh no, cultural imperialism)!

Let’s hope that Donnelly is right: It means that at least for now we can have our “Barefoot Bandit” and human rights too.

July 12, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Marysville School Board member’s bias echoes state’s sad history

originally published on Crosscut.com

Michael Kundu, the Marysville School Board member who circulated an email earlier this month linking race and brain size to explain the achievement gap, may be a garden-variety bigot. The Everett Herald reports that in 2000 Kundu referred to the Makah Indian Tribe as a “cryptic and dying culture.” (He apologized when he ran for the board a few years later.) Nevertheless, Kundu’s use of Canadian writer J. Philippe Rushton’s bogus race science adds a narrative twist that aligns more with old-school eugenics.

It’s the flat-earth racialism of eugenics, a signal belief of American progressives a century ago, that’s so insidious. Ideas have consequences. Think war, immigration, and the forced sterilization of the mentally ill.

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June 21, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , ,

UW committee advises end to Nike relationship

originally published on Crosscut.com on June 11, 2010

In a move that reaffirms the University of Washington as a bellwether of workers’ rights and anti-sweatshop elbowing, the UW’s Advisory Committee on Trademarks and Licensing voted unanimously on June 8 to sandbag renewal of Nike’s lucrative university contract set to expire Dec. 31.

The committee’s recommendation, the administrative equivalent of a post-quarter exam, will test the mettle of the university’s NCAA-bound president, Mark Emmert, and his likely interim successor, Provost Phyllis Wise, who sits on Nike’s board.

Nationwide, colleges have led the way in needling Nike and other apparel companies to safeguard fair-labor standards. It’s a student- and faculty-driven trend that looks to be growing (Cornell, for example, is considering similar action).

Presupposing that President Emmert approves the committee’s decision (thus far Emmert has accepted all committee recommendations), the UW will become only the second university in the United States, after Wisconsin, to sever ties with the Oregon corporation based on human rights and transparency concerns.

Last December, members of the same UW committee voted to put Nike on notice for disregarding the university’s code of conduct. Charges included Nike’s multiple failures to abide by mandated disclosure standards as well as its refusal to pay severance to workers at two Honduran factories.

Dr. Margaret Levi, the committee’s chair and Emmert’s former professor, wrote in a June 8 email:In the absence of evidence that the workers of Vision Tex and Hugger: a) receive the terminal compensation owed them under Honduran law; or b) have, through recognized and legitimate representatives, reached a settlement agreement regarding terminal compensation, ACTL advises the University of Washington not to renew its collegiate licensing agreement with Nike when it comes up for renewal in December 2010.

The Committee feels strongly that it has done its due diligence re Nike’s actions and proposals. It also feels strongly that we have waited long enough for Nike to meet its responsibility re the workers in its supply chain. We urge you to accept our advice.

The crux of the matter for Emmert will be whether or not to embrace the committee’s recommendation and drop a collegiate-apparel colossus before heading to the NCAA. If Emmert gives the okay, it will stand as a gutsy coda to his nearly six-year tenure as UW president. If not, the decision will rest with his interim successor. However, if the conventional wisdom is correct and that successor is Provost Wise, the decision will need to be kicked down the ladder to sidestep any real or perceived conflict of interest.

It’s this Rube Goldberg shuffling to ensure a Nike firewall that has some professors huffing.

In a June 7 letter to the committee chair and co-chair, President Emmert wrote:As you know, Provost Wise has recused herself from all matters pertaining to the University’ꀙs relationship with Nike due to her service on Nike’ꀙs Board. Were the Regents to appoint her as interim president, we would need to re-position the Committee elsewhere within the administration. Obviously, this will need to wait until the Regents make their decision.

One UW observer responded in an email that if such an internal move occurred, “sweatshop issues will be effectively demoted and the person in charge of making the tough calls on such matters will report to a president on Nike’s board!”

Despite student and faculty backlash as well as pressure from the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to resign from Nike’s board, Wise has said that she will continue her service while giving voice to campus concerns and agitating for improved corporate behavior. It’s a “corporation whisperer” philosophy, not without merit, that Nike board membership by a university administrator enhances and informs corporate policy.

For UW pashas, the Nike saga is a catch-22 that brings into focus broader questions about the evolving mission of a public university.

On the one hand, the public and legislature don’t cotton to academics divorced from the real world. It was this perspective, in fact, that made President Emmert’s appointment so inspired. Here was a hometown boy from Fife who attended Green River Community College and as UW president served on the boards of both Expeditors International and Weyerhaeuser. It seemed that Emmert understood policy, how to speak in non-jargonese, and how to shake dinero from the dinero tree.

It was only as the state budget tanked and the UW got pegged for arrogant overreach with its stadium demands that the honeymoon ended. To compound matters, declining state support for the UW had become a multi-year pattern.

State lawmakers, facing another $3 billion budget gap on top of the $12 billion deficit of the past two years, aren’t amused. “The University of Washington is at a historic juncture as one of the premier institutions of higher education in the world, and we need all hands on deck to build a stronger coalition of students, parents, faculty, alumni and administrators going into next year’s budget season,” said state Rep. Reuven Carlyle of Seattle. “The provost’s lucrative position on Nike’s board just doesn’t seem in tune with the cold, hard reality facing our state during this great recession.”

At the same time, academy corporatization seems to aggravate the divide between UW higher-ups and professors and deans saddled with cut-to-the-marrow budgets. The resentment is palpable. Do we price out students with higher tuition or cut quality? Are the two mutually exclusive? Should corporate connections, and the attendant revenue generated from those connections, be a prerequisite to lead a large, public university like the UW or not?

If the corporatization model is in fact the new paradigm, then the UW may be ahead of the curve on that issue, as well as on workers’ rights. Neat trick.

June 11, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

McKenna is in the land of strange bedfellows

originally published on Crosscut.com on March 30, 2010

It’s the Great Schism, Northwest edition: State Attorney General Rob McKenna, emblematic of Washington’s Vital Center, gets excommunicated for joining a multi-state lawsuit challenging Obamacare (a kind of reverse version of David Frum’s explusion from the American Enterprise Institute).

Reasonable people will disagree about McKenna’s judgment. A Profile in Courage a la Nebraska’s George Norris, or an ill-considered suck-up to the ubiquitous Tea Baggers?

In the Seattle Times, Former U.S. Senator and state Attorney General Slade Gorton lays out a persuasive argument that McKenna acted within his authority as an independently elected official. The Attorney General should take comfort in Slade’s elder-statesman imprimatur. As for others trumpeting the lawsuit, well, let’s just say that it quickly slides into strange-bedfellows country.

Last Tuesday, for example, the Senate Republican Caucus issued a statement by state Senators Val Stevens of Arlington and Janea Holmquist of Moses Lake underlining their support for McKenna’s “leadership and courage in fighting this unconstitutional bill.” Stevens and Holmquist represent what journalist E.J. Dionne calls the “new nullifiers,” embracing a states’ rights agenda that would resonate with Southern voters circa 1832.

Stevens, in particular, has introduced an eclectic array of bills this session. Here’s a sampling, for entertainment purposes only:

S JM 8020, Requesting that Congress amend the Seventeenth amendment of the United States Constitution (Read: end the popular election of U.S. Senators. Seriously).

S B 6567, Collecting biological samples for DNA analysis from illegal aliens. (Let this be a warning to all of you job-stealing, undocumented Swedes mulling around Darrington: Senator Stevens demands a sample of your precious bodily fluids).

S B6475, Exempting firearms and ammunition from federal regulation under the commerce clause of the Constitution of the United States (I’m pretty sure that exemption from the U.S. Constitution is otherwise known as “secession” from the union).

S JM 8018, Claiming state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment (Rolling back the principle of federalism. Think of it as the Lester Maddox/George Wallace Memorial).

S B 5187, Requires proof of U.S. citizenship on voter-registration applications. (Why would all those undocumented Swedes even bother voting after the 17th Amendment has been overturned)?

Yes, politics is a curious beast. Beware some of the new kids in class, Rob.

March 30, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Our man in Snowmaggedon

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 7, 2010

A Yard-Man Snow Blower looks like a lawn seeder. It has a swing handle that helps rooster tail the powder, and it sometimes tommy guns like an outboard. This I know because I’m shoveling (or, more accurately, snow blowing) for my supper.

I’m in DC for a conference and a board meeting and now I’m the Bartleby-like house guest who ain’t budging. “I’m overstaying my welcome,” I say. “No worries,” my hosts say. They pause and look at each other. “You can shovel for your supper.”

Thankfully, snow blowers aren’t carbon neutral, so I have the consummate Northwest excuse. (“Carbon footprint” sounds more meaningful than an ungrateful, “I prefer not to.”) It’s a get-out-of-work strategy not without risk. Let me put it this way: My hosts serve drinks in wine glasses that read, “George Bush President’s Dinner, June 13, 1991, United States Tobacco Company.”

“It’s an electric snow blower,” my hosts reply. I get handed an orange utility cord and the Yard-Man and off I go. Should I confess my fear of death by snow-blower shock? Not if I’m hungry.

The two feet of snow that dropped on Washington, quickly dubbed “Snowmageddon,” is something to behold. Stranger still is the quiet circulation in the city, the low-metabolic hum of snow plows, of delivered newspapers (at least The New York Times), and of a route-limited, closing-early Metro system that’s nevertheless moving people.

A massive snowball-fight meetup at Dupont Circle was scheduled on the Internet. The camaraderie, the volunteers with four-wheel drive shuttling patients to hospitals, the neighborly service ethic — all offer some evidence for Rebecca Solnit’s >thesis in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Disaster and trauma stir the best in us, Solnit argues. Washington’s Snowmageddon isn’t utopia, but there’s something un-Hobbesian and communitarian and worthy about it. At least for now.

And so the dormer window flies open. My hosts’ 12-year old son shouts, “Shovel for your supper!” I can’t feel my skin. It’s very sweet. Sort of.

February 7, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Sen. Cantwell and Sen. Dorgan’s musical chairs

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 10, 2010

It took a reverent nanosecond after Byron Dorgan announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate last week for the political-corpse-is-cold-enough speculation to begin: How will the power and committee dominoes fall?

One likely outcome, as first reported by The Hill newspaper, has Washington’s junior Senator, Maria Cantwell, assume Dorgan’s chairmanship of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in 2011 (a prospect that assumes Democrats maintain their majority). Under this scenario, Cantwell leapfrogs more senior committee members Daniel Inouye, Kent Conrad, Daniel Akaka, and Tim Johnson because each currently chairs or is in line to chair other committees.

Cantwell’s 2011 assignment would be a fitting coda to her 2000 election squeaker when she unseated incumbent Slade Gorton (full disclosure: I worked as a Cantwell speechifier that year). Gorton was considered an Indian Country adversary in part because of his defense as state Attorney General in U.S. v. Washington, what subsequently became known as the Boldt decision.

Sensing Gorton’s vulnerability, Northwest tribes rallied around Cantwell, providing financial and organization support crucial to her tweezer-length 2,229 vote margin.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, formerly under the rubric of the old Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, was established as a select committee in 1977 and made permanent in 1984. Past chairs include Senators McCain, Inouye, and Ben Nighthorse Campbell.

“I personally believe Sen. Cantwell would be an excellent chair,” said state Rep. John McCoy, a member of the Tulalip Tribes and director of Quil Ceda Village. “Her home state has 29 federally recognized tribes, and she and her staff have listened to tribal members as well as all the citizens of Washington. The senator has worked in a consultative manner to help resolve issues in Indian Country.”

McCoy’s supportive but carefully parsed reaction might be a clue to the minefield Cantwell is stepping into. Committee issues, from trust responsibilities to land management, are often controversial and extremely complex.

An aide acknowledged that Cantwell does not have a record or signature policy focus beyond trying to listen and respond to tribal concerns. “That will change once she becomes chair,” the aide said, “She’ll quickly find her footing.”

January 10, 2010 phjackson Leave a response , ,