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In Everett, history is now history

originally published on Crosscut.com on August 4, 2008

For decades my mother ritually pulled out the Everett Herald sports page, folded it into squares, and inserted it neatly under the cat pan.

It was the family exception that underscored the rule: All parts of a newspaper are equal, but some parts are more equal than others.

For Snohomish County history-philes, the rule was thrown into relief when the Herald abruptly dropped its long-running history feature, Jack O’Donnell’s “Seems Like Yesterday.” Tucked inside the local section below the fold, “Yesterday” delivered a compendium of events, sports scores, and headlines culled from the paper’s archives. It was the local-color touchstone that was, we believed, more equal than others.

Explaining the decision, Executive Editor Neal Pattison wrote:Championship teams see their winning streaks end. Even the biggest hits on Broadway eventually go dark. And every year, it gets harder and harder to find some of our favorite items on the store shelves. The world around us changes. Things end.

It was the nature of that thing’s end that had all the earmarks (and the attendant only-if feel) of an accidental death.

Because of a communications glitch, “Yesterday” was dropped for several days. Its absence, however, didn’t kindle a popular uprising. One reader phoned to complain. O’Donnell understood there were at least four e-mails or calls.

No matter. History buffs, unlike history makers, are practitioners of soft power. With the benefit of hindsight, we should have mobilized a history-phile army outfitted as Wobblies and stormed the Herald newsroom shouting, “One Big Union!”

Again, hindsight.

The demise of “Yesterday” raises a broader, existential question. In the age of dice-your-news Internet and print austerity, how salient is local history? The Herald has yet to stumble into the maw of homogenized wire news. Its local coverage is excellent, and its editorial page easily ranks as one of the best in the Northwest. All the while, most SnoCo-ers don’t run to the Herald for analysis of Darfur or the financial crisis at Fannie Mae. They read it to get the local skinny. They read it because a sense of place and a sense of history hang together.

It’s easy to dismiss features like “Yesterday” as folksy relics, the exclusive reserve of blue hairs with magnifying glasses. Consider, however, the popularity of Web sites such as HistoryLink, with 8,000 daily unique visitors and a “This Week Then” home page that’s essentially a writ large version of O’Donnell. Or consider magazines like Harper’s and The Atlantic that regularly reprint essays from 50 or 100 hundred years ago. More than octogenarians in letterman’s sweaters hunger for this sort of idiosyncratic history.

Neal Pattison is a savvy, experienced editor. He’s pledged that the Herald will continue its focus on local history.

In a spirit of reconciliation (Pattison’s “things end” sentiment qualifies as philo-Lutheran), and on behalf of the outfitted Wobblies agitating for revolution, I beg of you, Brother Neal, please reconsider.

August 4, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

John Anderson’s Pennsylvania postmortem

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 24, 2008

Consecrate a Scandinavian-American in the spirit of Obama-mania and footlight a contradiction: the Audacity of Pessimism.

Consider John Anderson, the octogenarian former Illinois Republican congressman and 1980 Independent presidential candidate (Anderson agreed that his age, 86, was irrelevant). Anderson’s recent Barack endorsement complements another Obama-celebrity booster, former EPA administrator and elder-fish-head statesman, Bill Ruckelshaus.

“I’m nursing my wounds,” Anderson said over scotch, the day after the Pennsylvania primary.

“It’s a little debilitating, but not enough to lose your resolve,” he said.

I was visiting Anderson in Washington, D.C., the day after I moderated a panel noodling a proposed U.S. Public Service Academy.

Only once during our conversation did Anderson exhibit attenuated judgment.

“I’m very proud of my Swedish heritage,” he said.

In the Northwest, Anderson’s 1980 presidential bid ignited passionate support. There was a refreshing courage to his message, from promoting a national gasoline tax to bolster conservation to delivering a speech to the National Rifle Association knocking the organization’s strategy of quashing gun control.

The latter drew hoots from Westerners, Democrats included, but it was arguably more brave than foolish (members of the audience were packing heat after all). That year Anderson managed a politician’s dream, albeit a doomed one, of advocating a vision for America unencumbered by pollsters and special interests.

Over the past quarter century, he’s remained civically active and continues to teach electoral and constitutional law. In 2006, he flew to Tacoma to push Amendment Three to the Pierce County Charter. The amendment established instant runoff elections, a political tool that boosts the viability of independent candidates.

All the while, Anderson was dogged by a former Republican colleague,Burt Talcott, who had “minimum high regard” for Anderson’s advocacy.

In the end, Anderson won.

What of Tuesday’s disappointing returns? “I have not not become hopeless,” he said, despite the Democratic party’s “self-wounding.”

In particular, the recent endorsements of former Senators Sam Nunn and David Boren should resonate with more conservative voters, he said.

Obama-mania notwithstanding, what about the odds of ever electing a “squarehead” President? (slang for a Scandinavian).

“That won’t happen for a long, long time,” Anderson said.

Editor’s note: William Ruckelshaus, mentioned in this article, is one of 18 owners of Crosscut.

April 24, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Popping the question

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 14, 2008

It’s the one question in my brief, unremarkable career as a pseudo-journalist that I’ve ached to ask, and the tempest over question screening at this afternoon’s University of Washington convocation honoring His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides just the opening.

It’s the one question in my brief, unremarkable career as a pseudo-journalist that I’ve ached to ask, and the tempest over question screening at this afternoon’s University of Washington convocation honoring His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides just the opening.

“So, post hoc ergo propter hoc?” I ask.

“Correct,” said Norm Arkans, the university’s director of media relations.

That’s right, it’s the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, or the appearance of a causal relationship between the UW’s decision to nix non-compassion-related student questions with outside pressures to de-politicize the convocation from the university’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association and the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco.

It’s a fallacy that’s generated a predictable beef and cries of censorship.

The issue was thrown into relief thanks to an April 9 P-I blog by education reporter Amy Rolph. The Chinese Students and Scholars Association posted a letter on its Web site inferring that President Mark Emmert capitulated to demands that the convocation remain politics (read: all-things-Tibet-related) free.

“That’s their interpretation,” Arkans said.

Arkans verified that the decision to keep student questions aligned with the compassion theme was made well before pro-PRC pressure groups put on the squeeze.

Still, the temptation is to ding UW honchos for appearing to ape United Nations apparatchiks.

On this one, however, the UW deserves a pass. Conferring an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters to Tibet’s spiritual poobah and president-in-exile is a salient political statement in itself. The Dalai Lama is only the fifth UW honorary-degree recipient in the modern era (he was preceded by Desmond Tutu, Madeline Albright, the late August Wilson, and Bill Ruckelshaus).

His Holiness will have forty minutes “to speak about whatever he wants,” Arkans said.

Most likely, the Dalai Lama will embrace the elephant in Hec Edmundson Pavilion and underline the struggle for political freedom in Tibet. His willingness to broach the subject on Sunday was a positive sign.

Moreover, the university’s on-message dictum shouldn’t preclude questions along the lines of, “How do we advance compassion in Everett, WA, and by extension add teeth to the movement to ensure human rights and self-determintaion in Tibet?” (a stretch, but why the heck not)?

Or a simple, “Is it time to incorporate just a smidgen of Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism into the Tibetan Dharma?”

Thankfully, half of today’s fifteen student questioners will come from colleges other than the UW. They’ll have very little to lose. In addition, as Arkans observed, “They’ll be in front of a microphone.” Nobody is going to stop clever (and perhaps necessary) improvising, especially if the Dalai Lama decides to sidestep politics altogether.

Not that anyone is trying to foster political discussion or suggest non-compassionate questions, mind you.

April 14, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Bring on Lama-Palooza

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 9, 2008

The April 11-15 Puget Sound visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama teases out multiple narratives with quintessential Northwest story lines.

There’s the wireless tycoon with the Paul Allen appetite for the Big Cause; the social entrepreneurs and early learning boosters who’ve inherited a new platform; and the Dalai Lama serving as Dalai Rorschach, a stand-in mirror that reveals the old, the new, and the still-in-progress of Seattle.

Tom Robbins, where art thou?

Lama-Palooza’s man behind the curtain is a driven entrepreneur named Dan Kranzler, a Charles Foster Kane for children and early learning (better that than, say, politics or yellow journalism).

Kranzler is a Bellevue-based wireless executive who founded Mforma, a mobile-entertainment company, in 2001. He was also an InfoSpace investor who used the windfall of the 1990s high-tech gold rush to create the Kirlin Foundation, a grantmaking institution with a self-described vision “of a global society, identified first and foremost by the grace of its empathy and compassion.”

“Kirlin” is an aggregate of the names of the two Kranzler daughters, Kira and Caitlin.

Kirlin’s grant recipients include the Bellevue Schools Foundation, Arts Corps, and other mainstream, child-centric charities. Last year, the Foundation teamed up with the Venerable Tenzin Dhonden, a monk and Dalai emissary, to launch “Seeds of Compassion,” a vehicle to host the Dalai Lama and promote the benefits of compassion early in life.

Seeds of Compassion does not have Form 990s, submitted by nonprofits to the IRS, because it’s an initiative of Kirlin. Kirlin’s last 990 from November 2007 reports net assets of approximately $6.3 million. Consistent with many family foundations, the board is tiny (six members, including Kirlin’s executive director, Ron Rabin, who serves ex-officio).

Because the Seeds initiative is so new, it’s impossible to root out expense figures such as the salary of former Seattle Schools superintendent and executive director, Raj Manhas, as well as the specific amounts donated by organizations, companies, and individuals.

This short term, Masonic-style obliqueness doesn’t suggest anything sinister other than cloaking the obvious, that a generous benefactor is footing the Dalai Lama’s bill.

Fundraisers, volunteers, and dozens of Seeds of Compassion sponsors will challenge this, with various supporters ponying up thousands of the $2.75 million already raised. KING-TV in Seattle is donating air time, and many are laboring 24/7 pro bono, along with more than 1,500 volunteers.

A handful represent a Who’s Who of child advocates, including Pam Eakes, the founder of Mothers Against Violence in America, former Washington First Lady Mona Locke, and former Boeing executive and consummate public servant Bob Watt.

This is the real story, Dalai Lama notwithstanding. Washington state is in the vanguard of foster-care innovations, brain-development research, and early childhood education. What better vehicle to burnish an extraordinary cause, irrespective of religious faith?

Traditionalists might wince at the protean spirituality of Dalai-philes who pick up nuggets of Buddhism like cafeteria Catholics, draping on only those accessories that feel comfortable. Northwesterners know that old religious leaders are supposed to be, by temperament and design, old scolds.

Fear not, me Lutherans: The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is “that life is suffering” and what could be more despairing or inherently Northwestern than that?

Moreover, as the University of Washington’s Kyoko Tokuno observes, the Dalai Lama can’t control those who gravitate to his example of Buddhist teaching. Says Tokuno, a Buddhist scholar and assistant professor in comparative religion: “They came to him and he obliged.”

This is particularly relevant for the Richard Geres, Steven Seagals, and other Hollywood gliterrati who’ve embraced Tibetan Buddhism.

Musician Dave Matthews, scheduled to perform at a sold-out KeyArena benefit Friday afternoon, illustrates the Dalai Lama’s celebrity fix. Thousands will hear the peaceable message of a Nobelist and spiritual icon. All the while, a rock concert feeds the stereotype, at least among squares and skeptics, that Tenzin Gyatso, his Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, is mostly about pop-fluff and the Zeitgeist.

For those fearful of children, repelled by rock and roll, and otherwise flummoxed by the mystery of the Divine, the Dalai Lama’s visit throws light on the political question of Tibetan sovereignty and human rights.

Here things get tricky, as Western and Eastern sensibilities collide.

As Holly Morris writes in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review of Pico Iyer’s new biography of the Dalai Lama, The Open Road, the Dalai Lama “continues to urge a controversial forbearance (rather than direct action) toward the Chinese, even as occupied Tibet is a whisper away from gone.”

Others, such as Patrick French, are more scathing.The Dalai Lama is a great and charismatic spiritual figure, but a poor and poorly advised political strategist. When he escaped into exile in India in 1959, he declared himself an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance. But Gandhi took huge gambles, starting the Salt March and starving himself nearly to death – a very different approach from the Dalai Lama’s middle way, which concentrates on nonviolence rather than resistance. The Dalai Lama has never really tried to use direct action to leverage his authority.

Graft the spiritual Middle Way to the political sphere and let loose the “tsking” of the Academy.

The Middle Way is not a political strategy but a philosophical foundation, Tokuno notes. “He is a religious man. Strategy is a political term.” She says the value of patience and noodling issues over the long term are consonant with the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist heritage.

The burden of moral leadership, however, is also the burden of unintended consequences. Kindle hopes for political freedom sans teeth and political leverage in the same year as the Beijing Summer Olympics, and Tibet risks repeating the tragedy of Hungary in 1956.

This may reflect the arrogance of a Western lens, but it’s the only lens most of us know. Our orientation is Aristotelian – man as a political animal. “It’s a cold world,” the great Northwest poet William Stafford reminded us. Stafford also happened to be a committed pacifist.

To proffer a political critique of the most gentle and beloved spiritual leader on the planet is to invite decades of bad karma. Let’s begin:

Professor David Bachman, a respected University of Washington China scholar, fears that the Dalai Lama’s visit will not necessarily translate into anything meaningful for the people of Tibet.

“He does have to strategize now,” Bachman says, noting that the Dalai Lama has had since his 1989 Nobel Prize to magoozle a political solution to the Tibet crisis.

One recommendation from columnist Nicholas Kristof offers a solution.The Dalai Lama is the last, best hope for reaching an agreement that would resolve the dispute over Tibet forever. He accepts autonomy, rather than independence, and he has the moral authority to persuade Tibetans to accept a deal. The outlines of an agreement would be simple. The Dalai Lama would return to Tibet as a spiritual leader, and Tibetans would be permitted to possess his picture and revere him, while he would unequivocally accept Chinese sovereignty. Monasteries would have much greater religious freedom, and Han Chinese migration to Tibet would be limited. The Dalai Lama would also accept that the Tibetan region encompasses only what is now labeled Tibet on the maps, not the much larger region of historic Tibet that he has continued to claim. With such an arrangement, China could resolve the problem of Tibet, improve its international image, reassure Taiwan and rectify a 50-year-old policy of repression that has catastrophically failed.

Let’s hope that the Dalai Lama takes time to commiserate and pray with fellow Nobelist Desmond Tutu, who is also scheduled to participate in the Seeds of Compassion program. Tutu may represent a Western paradigm, but he understands the nature of peace, the import of direct action, and the realities and limits of human nature.

Herein lie the roots of Northwest cynicism: that Puget Sound vendors will sell out of “Free Tibet” bumper stickers while that distant land with its indigenous population, emboldened by the spirit of the well-intentioned, burns.

April 9, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

This just in: Boomers ruined America

originally published on Crosscut.com on March 26, 2008

On Monday night I went to see Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, an animated/snatches-of-newsreel documentary on the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots and subsequent Chicago Seven conspiracy trial (the filmmaker rounded the seven up to ten to include attorneys Bill Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass as well as Black Panther leader Bobby Seale).

On Monday night I went to see Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, an animated/snatches-of-newsreel documentary on the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots and subsequent Chicago Seven conspiracy trial (the filmmaker rounded the seven up to ten to include attorneys Bill Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass as well as Black Panther leader Bobby Seale).

It’s an ode to the glory days of dope-addled bomb throwing that filled my non-Boomer, truth-in-history heart with dread: Somewhere in the Midwest, I imagine, a textbook editor is pasting a photo of a stoned and hirsute Abbie Hoffman beneath a caption that reads, “Ending the War, Fighting for Civil Rights.”

Nooooo, please, sister, stop!

Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, et al. delighted in radical chic (and its attendant windfall of easy sex) LSD, and comic relief. They’re a part of the 1960s narrative, but not a substantive part. If anything, they kindled a backlash that gave us Richard Nixon and six more years of bloodshed in Vietnam.

Make no mistake: If I weren’t preoccupied with learning to crawl in 1968, I likely would have been rioting and getting my noggin’ cracked by Chicago’s finest. And like most privileged, male protesters, I would have monkeyed an excuse to sidestep the draft while my less-connected compatriots in Everett, WA went off to serve and die.

It’s all those Midwestern textbook editors who should take note that counterculture jesting not eclipse Hoffman and Rubin’s predecessors who made up in courage what they lacked in glitz.

I’m thinking of the Greensboro lunch-counter protestors, and MLK, and the self-immolating Buddhist Monks in SE Asia, even Oregon Senator Wayne Morse who was one of just two U.S. Senators to oppose the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution. These were passionate, risk-taking folks: Sober, intense, unyielding.

Pretentious movies, of course, call for pretentious Northwest asides: When it comes to radicals, the Seattle Seven were infinitely more compelling than their Chicago counterparts. For heaven’s sake, we had Michael Lerner, he of Tikkun and Bill and Hillary-braintrust fame.

Maybe it’s the baby-boomer schmaltz that triggered my inner-hardhat. Halfway through Chicago 10, I struggled to erase flashbacks of a 2006 Simpsons episode, written by Tim Long, in which Abe “Grampa” Simpson decides to be euthanized. To enhance his final minutes on earth, Abe asks to hear the music of the Glenn Miller Orchestra while watching footage of cops beating up hippies.

So wrong, Grampa, but somehow resonant, given the times.

The truth-in-history narrative even extends to Barack Obama’s speech on race. On March 18, Obama was introduced by a graying statesman named Harris Wofford, a former university president and (briefly) a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. It was Wofford who introduced Martin Luther King to the non-violent resistance tactics of Mahatma Gandhi and who shepherded the Peace Corps during its formative, early years.

Still, Harris Wofford won’t get stopped on the sidewalk and asked for his autograph. Wish I could say the same for Tom Hayden and Bobby Seale.

March 26, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Reporters, 50-ish, continue aging

originally published on Crosscut.com on March 13, 2008

It happened twice in 2007 and again this past February: A journalist asked my age for a news item. No matter that youth is irrelevant in a meritocracy. Age has emerged as one of those nervy, reflexive questions that only third graders and professional scribblers are comfortable asking.

It happened twice in 2007 and again this past February: A journalist asked my age for a news item. No matter that youth is irrelevant in a meritocracy. Age has emerged as one of those nervy, reflexive questions that only third graders and professional scribblers are comfortable asking.

Maybe I wouldn’t be as sensitive if I hadn’t hit the big “39” (give or take). Nevertheless, except for public figures, shouldn’t age be ancillary or even a quasi-zone of privacy?

A Fourth Estate axiom on the appropriateness of asking or citing an individual’s age likely exists, but it’s not the sort of question a writer casually raises with Crosscut Editor Chuck Taylor, 77? or Publisher David Brewster, eightysomething.

Better to check with the not-getting-any-younger reporter class.

“We typically don’t ask a person’s age unless it has some value to the reader,” said Mike Seely, 33, managing editor for the Seattle Weekly. “Like if how old they are runs counter to what people believe is the appropriate age for a profession or way of life, for instance.”

Seely’s response contrasts slightly with practices at the Tacoma News Tribune. Longtime columnist and reporter Peter Callaghan, boyish but nevertheless 50, said in an e-mail, “Generally we ask for people’s ages. If they don’t want to give it, we don’t check with the Department of Licensing or anything. I don’t think it is a hard rule or style issue.”

Callaghan continued: It is a piece of info that is of some interest in certain types of stories. Certainly a profile will include age. Crime stories generally do. It places the person generationally. In community journalism where a lot of people know each other, they want to know if it is the father or the son or whether that’s the Bob Smith they went to school with. Old people don’t think young people have anything worthwhile to say, and young people don’t care what old people say.

KPLU’s Austin Jenkins, 34, who also serves as a Crosscut scribe, observed that age references make little sense with radio.

“I don’t think we ever do the age thing unless it’s relevant to the story. But that’s mainly because it would sound odd: ‘Peter Jackson, age 39, said …'”

“That said, I wonder where and why the practice developed. I’m not even sure most newspapers do it anymore.”

“I, for the record, am going to be 35 in August,” Jenkins noted in his e-mail. “And I wish I could put the brakes on time!”

Alas, Brother Jenkins, them brakes are indeed broke.

True enough, I may be a wee consumed by issues of mortality. When a friend celebrates a birthday, I always raise my cup of aquavit like a pre-battle Viking and quote from Ernest Becker‘s seminal The Denial of Death.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,” Becker wrote more than thirty years ago. “It is a mainspring of human activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”

It’s this kind of hopeful patter that boosts my appeal at funerals and other celebrations.

Mike Henderson, 60, a UW Journalism professor, Crosscut contributor, and former Everett Herald columnist, offered a cogent, meditative reply to my question. “Only if age is germane,” he said.

Henderson turned 60 on March 4, so belated happy birthday, Mike. Statistically, an otherwise healthy sixty-year-old, white, U.S. male should live another 15.2 years, with at least thirty months or more of relative lucidity. God willing.

Regrettably, Henderson seems to exhibit some classic Becker-ish death-denial traits, noting that J-Lo, at age 38, just gave birth to twins and that Hal Holbrook was nominated for an oscar this year at age 82. Even more disturbing and denial-ish, Henderson claims to write as if he’s only “58 1/2.”

A good excuse to review the written record and confirm with the Department of Licensing.

March 13, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

The Lazy B’s blue funk descends

originally published on Crosscut.com

It’s as if the serotonin god turned down the rheostat: Neighbors shuffle. Playgrounds have emptied.

For the denizens of Snohomish County, Wash., Boeing’s loss of a $35 billion aerial-refueling tanker contract a week ago, to a consortium of Northrop Grumman and EADS, the European parent of Airbus, marked the beginning of an official Period of Mourning.

The reason for people to mourn in this the urban-suburban-rural area just north of Seattle, where most of Boeing planes are made, is not solely because the Lazy B got a rude awakening. More on that in a moment.

First, though, it should be pointed out that the Pentagon will get its comeuppance. Wait until the Air Force takes possession of its first KC-45A, only to discover baguette crumbs gumming the navigation system.

Short-circuited altimeters? Well, maybe the Defense Department should have thought of that before enlisting the French with their on-the-job carafes of Bordeaux.

Everett-ites reach for gallows humor while the emasculating voice of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Jean Girard, from the movie Talledega Nights, echoes like a bully. What’s dat, Ricky Booby? You no like ta be beataan by dar Franch?

Lawmakers wasted little time heaving red meat to the vanquished.

Continue reading →

March 8, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Ask not who wrote the words, ask whose words are rote

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 26, 2008

Photographs, like language, draw strength from subtext.

The Internet pic of Barack Obama dressed in African garb sets a trip wire that a turban (even one presented as a goodwill gift from another country, mind you) is synonymous with terrorism. Hillary Clinton’s “ready from day one” mantra is code for the other guy ain’t got the goods when the enemy comes a-knocking.

The cruelest subtext of all, however, at least for America’s hermetic community of speechwriters, is Sen. Clinton’s suggestion that words are cosmetic. Beware the silver-tongued lawmaker, all sound and fury.

How sweet to witness a politician’s anti-rhetorician rhetoric fizzle.

During her Feb. 21 Texas debate with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton revealed her finesse, or lack of finesse, as a lobber of the acid broadside.

“Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in,” Clinton said, referring to Obama’s ballyhooed use of lines from his pal, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. “It’s change you can Xerox.”s

Ouch. Clinton’s rapier-ish zinger drew boos, and for good reason: It rang too cold, too scolding, too rehearsed. It also begged the question: Did Clinton’s Xerox nugget spring, whole and unblemished, from the depths of her wordsmith soul?

Oh, if only. Chances are that in some murky, speechifying cubbyhole, a hungover twentysomething conceived this ditty. She handed it to her boss, who handed it to his boss, who handed it to a campaign pasha, who handed it to Sen. Clinton with a triumphant, “Here’s our ‘Where’s the beef’!”

As David Greenberg wrote in Sunday’s New York Times, “Audiences don’t kid themselves that politicians invent the words they speak.”

For speechwriters, this new conventional wisdom is shattering. Not because audiences realize someone else is writing the script – speechwriters figured everyone knew that, at least intuitively. The shattering flows from the Clinton thesis that leadership and persuasive rhetoric are disconnected. Think of Willie Stark from Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men: Before you know it, we’ll have a demagogue in the Oval Office.

Piffle. During my brief and undistinguished career as a speechifier, I picked up the essentials: Don’t try to make someone they’re not; don’t quote from writers your speaker has never heard of (Wallace Stegner excepted); keep it short with sentences no longer than a full breath; aim for a joke or two or three; and, when appropriate, steal from others.

I don’t mean steal verbatim exactly. I mean identify cadences and patterns. Look for the music and write down the notes. Mimic others when their message resonates and cite passages with attribution.

True, if politicians understood the formula, scribblers everywhere would be out on the streets tin-cupping it. It’s the speechwriter equivalent of broadcasting ICBM telemetry codes to the Russians, but here’s our secret, as summarized by former Nixon scribe William Safire: “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; then tell ’em; then tell ’em what you told ’em.” Simple enough.

Regrettably, over time, political language has lost its kick because of focus groups and professional polling. The “tell ’em” rhetoric inevitably knits together words like “moving forward” “new” “leadership” and “our families” with various slogans du jour.

That’s what makes Obama so appealing: His language crystallizes the country’s appetite for change in a manner that sounds imaginative, original, and unvetted. He thinks and writes clearly, a pensive rhetorician from the land of Lincoln.

The Northwest has never produced anything close to an Obama-style orator, alas. Idaho Sen. William Borah was a persuasive stump speaker. He also may have been the political exception.

The best gabbers, arguably, have come from the ranks of organized labor and radical offshoots like the Industrial Workers of the World: Big Bill Haywood, Harry Bridges, and Dave Beck.

Could it be that they benefited from not having speechwriters?

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom explores the challenge of poets grasping for the original while standing on the shoulders of past greats. I’m pretty sure most speechwriters don’t feel inhibited by an anxiety of influence. Hell, influence is our lifeblood.

One of my favorite patterns is the “reversible raincoat” line, a technique of JFK’s Ted Sorensen, who likely stole it from someone else. It’s the “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” line. Substitute a word or two, say “Department of Transportation” or “taxpayer,” and voila! you have yourself a hook line.

The hope is that listeners will absorb the rhythm like a subliminal message. Any chance that they’ll equate the speaker with a JFK or a Lincoln or a Churchill?

Like I said, it’s subtext.

February 26, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

It’s Presidents Day in Washington: So whom can we claim as ours?

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 17, 2008

Presidents Day evokes a chafe-inducing question: The Northwest has produced a president or two, yes?

The reflexive answer – that we’re too authentic to churn out presidents and, by the way, California ex-pats hail from Nixon country – is too 20th century. It’s time we adopt a president as One of Ours, someone who actually lived and labored in the Northwest.

Thankfully, at least one chief executive meets the worked-here criterion, a depressive Army captain stationed for 15 months at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. He was a whiskered, under-appreciated alcoholic, a failed businessman, a Mexican War hero who condemned the imperialism of that conflict, an advocate of our nation’s first national park, and a vigorous supporter of civil rights for African Americans.

Presidents Day evokes a chafe-inducing question: The Northwest has produced a president or two, yes?

The reflexive answer – that we’re too authentic to churn out presidents and, by the way, California ex-pats hail from Nixon country – is too 20th century. It’s time we adopt a president as One of Ours, someone who actually lived and labored in the Northwest.

Thankfully, at least one chief executive meets the worked-here criterion, a depressive Army captain stationed for 15 months at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. He was a whiskered, underappreciated alcoholic, a failed businessman, a Mexican War hero who condemned the imperialism of that conflict, an advocate of our nation’s first national park, and a vigorous supporter of civil rights for African Americans.

I speak, of course, of the Northwest’s very own Ulysses S. Grant.

Shush now. Grant had an extraordinary public career. He was committed to serving his country, however mediocre his West Point class rank. Like so many Westerners, Grant dabbled and failed miserably in the private sector. In a 2003 HistoryLink essay, Kit Oldham writes:Like many soldiers of his day, Grant attempted to go into business for himself on the side. However, in a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, the business ventures he entered with fellow officers proved to be failures despite his high expectations for them. The officers cut ice on the Columbia and shipped it to San Francisco for sale, but it melted before arrival. They rounded up cattle and pigs to ship to San Francisco, but lost money on the enterprise. They leased land and started a farm, but a river flood wiped out most of the crops. They rented space in a San Francisco hotel to run a billiard club, but the manager they hired absconded with their money.

Grant’s subsequent redemption dovetails with a broader Northwest narrative: Through bust and boom and post-presidential bust, character matters. Grant was a depressive who fought the KKK, saved the Union at the Battle of Vicksburg, and, to ensure that his family avoided the poor house, scribbled the best-written presidential memoir in American history, despite suffering the ravages of throat cancer.

Who better to call one of ours?

February 17, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Microsoft, Yahoo, and betrayal in China

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 4, 2008

With all the chin scratching over the latticework of a Yahoo-Microsoft merger, what better time to flag the killjoy issues of human rights, search-engine filtering, and collusion with bad-guy governments?

Cooperating with hegemons and censoring Internet search words like “democracy” and “dissent” aren’t quite as tangible as the swashbuckling abuses of the United Fruits and ITTs overthrowing unfriendly governments in decades past.

Simply picturing Chinese dissidents rotting in jail will need to suffice.

As Human Rights Watch reports, Yahoo has been especially egregious when it comes to coughing up user data and handing it over to Chinese authorities. This collusion led directly to the arrest and 10-year prison sentence of Shi Tao, a dissident journalist and poet.

The issue of Shi Tao, whose family subsequently settled with Yahoo, triggered the following exchange between House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, and company General Counsel Michael Callahan during a Nov. 6, 2007, committee hearing:

Chairman Lantos: Why is it such a complicated issue to help a family whose breadwinner has been imprisoned because of Yahoo’s cooperation with the Chinese police? What is so complicated about that?

Mr. Yang: Mr. Chairman, as I said to you, I think that Yahoo should do more. I personally should do more.

Chairman Lantos: You couldn’t do less, you couldn’t do less.

Mr. Yang: I take your point, and we will do more as we go forward in helping and understanding what is our role in this.

Mr. Callahan: If I may, sir.

Chairman Lantos: Yes.

Mr. Callahan: In addition to the efforts that Mr. Yang described, we have advocated with human rights groups and with the State Department specifically for the release of the dissidents in question.

Chairman Lantos: That is not help to the family. You are not viewed as the champion human rights advocates in the world in view of this episode, so your chiming in with people who are devoting their lives to human rights is not that impressive. My question was a very specific question: Why hasn’t this gigantic corporation of enormous wealth reached out to the family to help the family? And I have no answer. I just get equivocation.

Mr. Callahan: We have pursued advocacy through other channels, but not directly through the family, sir, you are right.

This was not grandstanding by Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor serving in the U.S. Congress. To the congressman’s non-parochial credit, Yahoo is headquartered in his district.

At the end of the hearing, Lantos concluded:It is mainly important to the committee, gentleman, but it ought to be a great deal more important to your own conscience. Don’t accommodate the committee. Look into your own soul and see the damage you have done to an innocent human being and to his family. That is what you should respond to. Don’t propitiate the committee. It will make no difference to the committee what you do, but it will make you better human beings if you recognize your own responsibility for the enormous damage your policies have created. That should be your guide.

According to Human Rights Watch, Microsoft sidestepped collaboration with Chinese police by offshoring its Hotmail servers. At the same time, Microsoft permitted its Chinese MSN blog titles to nix pesky words like “freedom,” a policy it has since liberalized, it says.

Apologists still float the concept of “constructive engagement,” the Reagan-era policy used to rationalize business with baddies. Oppressed people will learn by watching us, the argument goes. Democracy by osmosis.

It only took decades of repression in Apartheid South Africa to underscore the moral bankruptcy of go-along/get-along strategies.

Ironically, desktop publishing and Internet access were supposed to be antagonists to totalitarian regimes, samizdat hooked to the world’s biggest megaphone. Search-engine censorship and data sharing undermined that covenant. Now, the Internet serves as much as an instrument for tyranny as for pluralism.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be reading about merging business cultures, the propriety of hostile takeovers, Steve Ballmer’s personality quirks, and questions of antitrust enforcement. We need to add human rights to that list.

Lawmakers should start by conditioning a Yahoo-Microsoft merger to adding teeth to an Internet/human rights agreement. I don’t mean more of the “we have advocated with human rights groups and with the State Department specifically for the release of the dissidents in question” mush. I mean yield, or this merger sinks.

Just as the upcoming 2008 Beijing summer Olympics provides a chance to leverage China on releasing dissident writers, now is the perfect time to squeeze Bill and company.

To bastardize LBJ, when you got ’em by the merger glands, their hearts and minds will follow.

February 4, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , , ,