Imagine . . .

Yesterday when my book club discussed Blood Done Sign My Name, a powerful history of a racial murder up the road in Oxford, N.C., in 1970, beautifully told by historian-witness Tim Tyson, we were privileged to have the author himself with us. A professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, he's in residence this year at the National Humanities Center. In fact, he's staying in a home just down the street from us.

Even today, stories like this one touch a nerve in cities and towns all across the South. Though few of them will find a chronicler as skilled and compassionate as Tyson, hundreds of such stories are waiting to be told.

On July 4, 2004, the Lexington Herald-Leader issued an apology for failing to cover the civil rights movement in what we would now call real time. Not an oversight or accidental misjudgment at all, it was a deliberately "cautious approach"--so successful that a member of my book club, now a historian in her own right, didn't know what was going on under her nose while she was in college right there in Lexington.

So here's a thought experiment: what if, forty to fifty years ago, twenty-first century computer technology had been available?

"The revolution will not be televised." . . . but what if it had been blogged?

Flicker of sanity

The sanest remark of the campaign so far was when Kerry said we need to get to a point where "terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." It would have been really sane if our government (I almost wrote "we"--hold that thought for a minute) had reacted to Sept. 11 with a "state of emergency" combined with a police action aimed at finding and punishing al Qaida. Can anyone imagine that that could have happened, even under President Gore? Probably not.

But as Tom Friedman agrees, Kerry is right to put it like this now.

Now about that "we": it's how we Americans refer to our government and its actions, and logically so, because our government begins in us: "we, the people." We are a democracy. The state speaks through us. This seems natural enough, although lately for me it's a stretch. I stumble over it. Where am I in the "we" who invaided Iraq? and tolerates torture in prisons?

In a discussion once with Catherine Lutz about her wonderful book Homefront, she or someone pointed out that in other countries whose democratic roots are more problematic, including any country that has ever had a monarchy--France, for example--the citizens don't necessarily have this conception. In France today, long after the Sun King, people refer to "the state." Despite their voting privileges, for the French their government is a separate thing, with a life and a will of its own.

I recommend Homefront to anyone who wants to understand why, in reality, "we" could not have done anything but declare war after Sept. 11. Describing how far (though how insidiously) the militarization of our country has gone, she asks, "Are we all military dependents?"

Kerry's remark was sane--and brave.

Round three

Michael Berube nails it.

God help us

Last night's fascinating Frontline show on Bush and Kerry put me in mind of a stunning story in the New York Times that came out just days after Sept. 11. On Sept. 22, 2001, Frank Bruni reported in a "White House Memo" that the terrorist acts had "wholly transformed" Bush's "sense of himself and his presidency."

One of the president's close acquaintances outside the White House said Mr. Bush clearly feels he has encountered his reason for being, a conviction informed and shaped by the president's own strain of Christianity.

"I think, in his frame, this is what God has asked him to do," the acquaintance said. "It offers him enormous clarity."

. . .

People who have visited the White House in recent days said there was a changed, charged atmosphere there. One of them, Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to Mr. Bush's presidential campaign, said that the president obviously feels that the business at hand "is the country's destiny--and his destiny."

Others who are close to the president said there was a discernible spiritual dimension to his thinking. A senior administration official recalled Mr. Bush's response on Thursday when one of the religious leaders said that Mr. Bush's leadership was part of God's plan.

"I accept the responsibility," the president said.

In his Frontline interview, Dallas News reporter Wayne Slater puts it like this:

In George Bush's world, he believes--as many evangelicals do--that we are engaged in a great drama, and this drama is one in which good is battling evil.

This war gave him a fundamental opportunity to live out something that is very real inside him theologically, and that is "They are the enemy." When he uses the word, "evildoers," he does so in way that resonates beyond rhetoric. It is theological. It is fundamental. It is black-and-white.
He does not give a second thought about the idea that they might have a point of view that ought to be considered. The radicals are the radicals. They are evil. They are the force, in effect, of Satan on Earth. He believes this.
So when he engaged in this conversation with the American people on how to deal in the early hours and the early days of 9/11, he was absolutely in his own element, because he knew he had to ultimately trust God, the fundamental force. He's said so since then--that you ask God what to do in these cases; not that you're following exactly what God says, but you believe that God will lead you. George Bush believed in this moment that he was God's man at a moment of crisis in a battle between good and evil on Earth.

The Revealer points out just how seriously Bush's "prophetic" understanding of his role differs from the way other presidents have engaged with their religious faith:

The key difference is this: Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing and guidance; this president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world. Most fundamentally, Bush's language suggests that he speaks not only of God and to God, but also for God.

UPDATE and antidote: "Mr. Derrida reminded us that religion does not always give clear meaning, purpose and certainty by providing secure foundations. To the contrary, the great religious traditions are profoundly disturbing because they all call certainty and security into question. Belief not tempered by doubt poses a mortal danger."

But somebody's got to do it.

Just back from a two-hour council committee meeting followed by a four-hour council meeting. It's hard work.

(Another Creative Commons gem via Lessig.)

All your base are belong to them.

Politics (video clip via a Berube reader)

imitates

art (ditto via Media Trips, via Lessig).

Breaking the code

As bloggers roil over Bush's astonishing choice to revive a Supreme Court decision on slavery, as many toil to read the coded message in the Dred Scott moment, Eric Muller has a take that seems almost believable. Could it be?

UPDATE: Eric is on to something. Scalia pulled the same trick in his dissent in Stenberg v. Cahart (2000), a case striking down Nebraska's D&E abortion statute (via Lawyers, Guns & Money).

Still remembering Reconstruction

Following Jim Leloudis' narrative of UNC's Reconstruction history, Yonni Chapman made a compelling plea for "seeking historical truth at UNC." He's not asking to tear down the statue of Silent Sam, but rather to supplement the language it speaks:

Let us now look at the construction of memory at UNC. This is a process that reflects our values as well as historical facts. The question facing us today is whether we are going to demand honesty, no matter how painful. As we begin to reassess our history, and to think about making changes in the commemorative landscape, we should be clear on one thing: the movement for historical truth has nothing to do with censoring history. This is a straw man, or woman. It is because UNC’s history is already censored that we are here today.

I love the images Yonni gives us as he reenvisions the campus:

Imagine, if you will, a campus transformed by a sense of social justice. Let’s walk across Franklin Street and enter the campus by Battle-Vance-Pettigrew. The first thing we would see is a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King reaching out to us to help “save the soul of America.” As we walk on, past Silent Sam, we would come to the statue in front of the Alumni Building honoring UNC’s Unsung Founders, the black workers, slave and free, who built Old East and other university buildings. Approaching Saunders Hall we would note a plaque stating that Saunders led the KKK during Reconstruction and served on the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees at the time of the reopening. The plaque would acknowledge and repudiate the university’s participation in white supremacy and would invite all to enter Saunders Hall and view the permanent exhibit discussing the university’s role in slavery, the overthrow of Reconstruction, and the making of the Jim Crow state. Across the quad in Murphy we would visit a comparable display about the impact of the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, and other democratic social movements on UNC. Upon entering Lenoir, we would see a plaque honoring the black workers and students who participated in the cafeteria workers strike of 1969. Featured prominently would be the two women who led that strike, Mary Smith and Elizabeth Brooks. Finally, approaching Davis Library, we would stop and read the words engraved on a black obelisk, written by the “Black Bard of Chapel Hill,” slave poet, George Moses Horton, who published the first book by an African American in the South in 1829. As we continued our walk around the campus, we would notice that the portraits and artwork on the walls honored the heritage and contributions of all those who were formerly limited and denied by the University of North Carolina. Their faces next to the faces of white leaders would send a clear message that UNC truly intends to become the university of all the people.

A campus with reminders like this would send a powerful message. It is the same message that Professor Leloudis' history brings us: our history was not inevitable. There were other directions it could have taken. Indeed, there are other directions it did take that we have, collectively, chosen to forget.

The thing itself (always slips away)

Au revoir, Derrida.

For what does "the bell" toll?

Yonni Chapman stirred up a hornet's nest when he started asking questions about Cornelia Phillips Spencer. Revered as "the woman who rang the bell" atop UNC's South Building to celebrate the reopening, in 1875, of the university after a dark period, Spencer is who UNC turned to in 1992-93 (its bicentennial year) when searching for a name for a new award to be given to an accomplished university woman. The Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell Award has been given annually ever since.

Chapman, a Ph.D. student in history at UNC, calls attention to Spencer's clear opposition to racial equality and her eager support of the overthrow of Reconstruction forces at the university. More than a "product of her times," he and others have said, she was a "white supremacist," an active force in reclaiming and perpetuating as much as possible of the pre-Civl War order. What happens when we forget our history? This spring, a group of university community citizens called for a moratorium on the Bell Award.

Chancellor Moeser responded by asking the Center for the Study of the American South to sponsor a "community conversation about Mrs. Spencer and her life and times." That conversation, at least the first stages of it, took place Oct. 1-2 in the form of a symposium called "Remembering Reconstruction at Carolina."

It was a productive, successful event that should have been better attended. Maybe 50 people gave up their Friday night and/or Saturday to enjoy the 19th century un-air conditioned ambience of Gerrard Hall.

Thomas Holt of the University of Chicago opened the conversation by asking us to consider the Reconstruction period across the South in ways that we surely did not learn it in grade school: from the point of view of the newly enfranchised black voters and politicians who tried to seize the moment. They did everything within their power to create a color-blind democracy, but alas, "they envisioned a nation that did not exist." Being the lions rather than the hunters in the course of events (to cite the proverb Michelle Laws later used), their story has not been fully told.

Reminding us more than once that history "has consequences," Holt told of how in 1957 a junior senator argued strenuously for progressive civil rights legislation on the floor of the Capitol. The senator's "defense" of the bill "was curious," Holt said. "The proposed enforcement provisions included some language referring to its legal precedents from Reconstruction. The young senator wanted to make it clear that the proposed laws had no connection whatsoever to those earlier Reconstruction precedents." Even to Hubert Humphrey, one of the most enlightened politicians of his time on race, Reconstruction was a stumbling block. The legislation that passed, Holt continued, was "fatally flawed" for lack of enforecment provisions--and his belief is that the specter of Reconstruction was one of the reasons for that failure.

Jim Leloudis gave a local version, an up-close picture of Reconstruction at UNC as part of the larger story in North Carolina. Of the many smart talks, this one seemed to me the most relevant to the question at hand. Because this history is so unfamiliar now, I'm including my notes below.

UNC's history is anything but simple; it is bound up with some of the most important questions in American life, not least about the meanings of citizenship and freedom and equality in a democratic society. It is contested, contentious, and still full of significance for our own time.

Where to start? By recognizing that on eve of Civil War North Carolina was much less a democracy than an oligarchy. Political and economic power rested in a network of wealthy slaveholding families; the principles of oligarchy were written into the state's constitution; there were property restrictions on voting until 1850s, and even later on the right to hold high office. Justices of the peace were appointed by the legislature (only two county officers were elected by county residents). So from Raleigh out, this elite formed a tightly knit ruling class.

This university stood at the head of that hierarchical system. They had no doubt about their mission, to make young men into masters. Sons of the slaveholding elite entered from every corner of the South. By 1850s nearly 40 percent of student body was from out of state. This college ranked second only to Yale in size. The university's leaders were uneasy with ideals of perfectionism and reform . . . they affirmed the fixity of human relationships and instilled the habit of command. Young men came to Chapel Hill to confirm their place in society, not to discover a prescription for remaking the world. They viewed learning as a body of established truths. The course of study was fixed. Recitation was the favorite method of instruction. By the time of graduation they had stored away Horace, Cicero, Virgil, Homer, . . . to seek knowledge in the authority of text before their own interrogation of the world. In a world where power was exercised through the word, in the pulpit, the bar, the legislative hall, graduates had acquired at the university the ability to speak and act as a man. This served alumni well in the years before the Civil War.

But the war and emancipation changed everything. When fighting began in 1861, President Swain committed himself to keeping UNC open. He succeeded in winning a draft exemption for may of the students. Even so, the faculty and student ranks dwindled. Remember that the Union strategy was to throttle the Confederacy, taking control of ports, etc. marching north, conquering the remaining inland territories. You see where North Carolina ends up; one of the last section to falls, and as a result it bore a brutally disproportionate share of the war's burden. Nearly one fifth of the Confederate army came from this state.

In 1865, after the evacuation of Richmond, etc., Sherman's troops began a final march toward Raleigh and Chapel Hill. Both were spared when Swain and Graham surrendered the university and capital to Sherman. Swain and North Carolina's old guard managed to cling to power during the early years of presidential Reconstruction, but in 1867 Republicans in Congress took matters into their own hands with passage of military Reconstruction. They set the state up for political upheaval, political revolution. They directed the military commanders in the states to set up elections. A special provision gave black men a limited right (pre 15th Amendment) to vote for delegates to this constitutional convention. The stage is set for revolution, and the seemingly impossible becomes imaginable.

A new state Republican party organized in 1867 brought together former slaves and roughly one fifth of white voters in North Carolina: a larger percentage of whites voting with blacks than in any other state. They recognized a certain complementarity of interests with free blacks. Many of them had come to conclude it was a rich man's fight. This alliance did not erase racism, which was far too deeply embedded for that. But it did hold out for both sides some hope, the promise of an enlarged political voice and grater economic opportunity, those very things that in everyday life made that abstract word "freedom" substantive, made it a lived reality. When voters went to the polls in late 1867 the results were astounding; the Republicans won 107 of 120 seats in the constitutional convention, and 15 of them were black. In 1868 they drafted a constitution to reflect that complementarity of interests; they gave all adult men the right to vote. They established a public school system which, while it remained segregated, promised for the first time to educate, at state expense, white and black children alike. Last but not least, this new constitution revolutionized state and county government, removed the property qualifications for office holders, etc. and let county commissioners be elected by citizens directly.

The context we need to keep in mind is this: there was no inevitable predetermined outcome to reconstruction, there was no one path. There were multiple options among which people did choose. Here's a reminder about making the assumption that "everyone was racist." That could mean very different things across a political spectrum. Race didn't go out of people's heads, but there were important differences, and for us to suggest that everyone was racist was to accord an achievement that white supremacists at their best would have hoped for. If that is the history that has come to us, it is perhaps their ultimate victory.

What's happened here is that political NC has been radically reconstructed. In 1868 William Woods Holden a Republican, was elected governor. Twenty legislators were black, and there were scores of black men in local office. That constitution also brought change to the university. It stripped the legislature of authority to elect trustees, giving it to a state board of election that was controlled by the Republican governor. In the words of Gov. Holden, this was a move to democratize and broaden the university. He wanted to remake it as a people's university open to all and no longer reserved for the few. The university's new trustees declared the support for co-education of men and women and committed themselves to establishment of school for freedmen in Raleigh, a branch of the university [which never opened]. Even so the trustees made no provision for admitting blacks to Chapel Hill and they later actively prohibited it, in response to shrill voices.

In June of 1868 Swain and his faculty were dismissed. Two months later Swain died in a horse accident. That horse had been a gift of Sherman to celebrate the marriage of his daughter to a Union general.

The replacement was Solomon Pool, a math professor from Eliazabeth City, son of Methodist minister, of strong Republican sympathies. Better to close this palace of aristocracy than to have it be the nursery of treason, he reasoned. When Pool and his colleagues opened the university in 1869, they joined a much larger battle over the shape of the South's future and the very meaning of the shape of democracy. They came under fire from critics, one of whom was Cornelia Phillips Spencer. So Cornelia and Samuel Phillips, sister and brother, reveal within bounds of a single family, the fact that there were alternative paths to this historical moment, alternative paths available in the post-Confederate past, and that individuals could make very different choices.

[Samuel Phillips, according to conference presenter Annette Wright, was a Republican who was forced to leave the state when the party lost power; he went to work in the Grant administration. He later joined Albion Tourgee, who had come to Greensboro as a "carpetbagger" in 1865, as one of the legal minds who crafted Homer Plessy's case.]

Cornelia, writing columns primarily in Raleigh Sentinel, a Democratic party organ, described Pool as an arrogant prig and renounced his faculty as motley collection of ex-Negro teachers. And worse. This was a most serious struggle. Pool and his allies shot back that the old UNC had been under control of oligarchs, but not now. The bad press was in many respects the least of the problems. For one thing, the university was bankrupt—because of Confederate bonds that were repudiated. Repudiation was a powerful class issue. By the same token it brought relief and comfort to middling white yeoman who now had assurance that they wouldn't be taxed to pay for a war that had already taken a heavy toll. The legislature might have made up the difference but they refused; they were determine to starve Pool and his faculty out of office.

Pool's university failed to attract sufficient students. The Democratic alumni boycotted the institution; only a handful sent their sons now, while many sent their schools to church schools. Chapel Hill stood near the epicenter of a violent insurgency in the late 1860s that was determined to unseat by force of arms and intimidation North Carolina's biracial form of government. The campaign of terror was focused here in the central piedmont; it was aimed at blacks but also at the whites who had committed racial treason. The KKK were riding openly through Chapel Hill by 1868. Gov. Holden launched a counter-attack, in 1870 calling martial law. But when he requested federal assistance, Grant refused. He and others were growing weary and wary of the unyielding turmoil in the South. That abandonment gave them the ammunition they needed to send a democratic majority to the legislature, to impeach and try Holden and remove him from office in 1871. This was the first successful impeachment of a governor in the United States. Democrats called it an act of redemption, redemption from the unwise doctrine of universal equality.

The trustees then voted to suspend classes and close the institution. Pool and his faculty slowly moved away from Chapel Hill. They were and continue to be actively forgotten in the recollection of the university and Reconstruction. As that memory was erased, so too was the awareness that Reconstruction in Chapel Hill could have ended any other way. After its closing came the forces of an insurgent Democratic party, which took the appointment of the trustees out of hands of board of education and returned it to the legislature. An amendment was ratified in the election of 1873, and in 1874 lawmakers appointed a board of 64 new trustees drawn primarily from ranks of Democratic leadership.

In 1875 the trustees reopened the university according to a plan that really defined the UNC we know today: six colleges, made up of departments, etc. They replaced a fixed course of study with new forms of electives, instructions, infused with the critical spirit of modern science and original investigation. Why? To keep pace with late 19th century march of knowledge, invention, discovery. Their new university was no longer a warehouse for eternal truths but a great metropolis whose ships would explore unknown seas, so the university would explore (create) a marketplace of ideas. . . . economic advancements, a powerful dynamo of change. It was charged with creating a dynamic new South and integrating it back into the life of the nation. But that new South bore many of the hallmarks of the old, particularly in the ways it was built on racial and class inequality. During 1890s they were confronted once more with dynamics of white-black alliance—the Fusion party—brought together by shared suffering. North Carolina was the only state in which such an alliance seized control of both legislature and executive branch.

If they stood a chance, their best chance was here in North Carolina. Again the challenge was met with intimidation and violence. Two UNC graduates, Charles Aycock and Josephus Daniels, were key actors. They championed an amendment to the state constitution, in 1900, that stripped right to vote from black men, and in doing so constrained the lives of black and white citizens alike. This was a loss for all North Carolinians. There would be no biracial politics now that half of any such alliance could no longer vote. Disfranchisement marked the final victory in a counterrevolution that had begun as soon as the civil war ended, and for the first half of the twentieth century, what were its consequences? One-party government. Limited opportunities to challenge the ills that defined the South as a region apart: poverty, illiteracy, ill health, etc. For those who dared to see, this era of white supremacy showed that no people are fully free where some remain unfree.

That's our legacy. At times UNC distinguished itself as a citadel of justice and free inquiry: think of Howard Odom, Arthur Raper, Paul Green, Frank Porter Graham. At other times, though, the university could be slow to change, preferring the comfort of gradualism over more active advocacy. That's our history. Good and ignoble, tested and fraught with contradiction. A history that demands on the one hand that we be clear-eyed and unflinching in our moral judgment; at the same time also a history that warns against self-satisfaction in the exercise of that judgment, that warns against hubris, that counsels humility, lest in the act of that judgment we lose sight of the most valuable thing in these tales: their power to illuminate our own propensity for sin. It's a history that calls for self-examination, one with which we must come to terms . . . to free ourselves to make our own history in our own way.

The conference reached an abrupt and inconclusive end. What to do now? The Chancellor did not ask for a recommendation or even a response. Some people suggested taking our commentary and posting it on a web site. I hope the conversation will continue.

UPDATE 10/19/06: Welcome, Meredith students. As a result of this conference, Chancellor Moeser gave a grant for the creation of a new, comprehensive web site telling a much fuller version of UNC's history than we are used to hearing. The site was launched last week. It's worth visitng.

Who needs an earpiece? Just hone the message.

Even before the suspicion that the President was hearing voices, his rhetoric was being carefully studied. Writing before the first debate, Stanley Fish reported that his freshman English class was giving Bush the rhetorical edge. But that debate changed things. Stephen Greenblatt said Bush could have succeeded like Antony except that the candid camera caught him in "an astonishing range of emotions: confusion, annoyance and something like rage."

That's what happens when he gets off message. My former student Jonathan Riehl published an article in the Congressional Quarterly about the Republican convention. He noted the "relentless repetition" of the message, the "remarkably similar vocabulary and phraseology."

Now this video clip just in (via Jonathan). Who needs a "passive transducer" anyway?

Downtime

A message to my two or three readers: my iBook is in the shop getting a new logic board. There is nothing like seeing your screen disintegrate before your eyes! I hope to be back in business before too long.

Don't read this blog

I don't know if I should tell you this. Since the Republican Convention, even through the debate the other night, I've been keeping something from you. Michael Berube's blog is not for everyone. Think carefully before you read too far. It's an acquired taste for those of us who've overdosed on cultural studies courses. Who else can fake a column from the Weekly Standard and get away with it (not)?

Now there is significantly bad news. Berube has been nominated as one of the "Best Political Bloggers Most of Blogdom Hasn't Heard Of." Readers are already complaining that this unwanted attention will just attract more readers who will flood the comments sections with pointless drivel, launching a whole series of unfortunate events.

Historical revisionism

Yesterday toward the end of UNC's symposium on "Remembering Reconstruction," about which more later, historian Edward T. Linenthal, in the course of talking about his involvement with the National Park Service in a ten-year project of transforming the Custer Battlefield National Monument into the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, said of course this was historical revisionism--"A historian would have to be senile not to be doing revisionism" all the time.

Today's example I find here via the History News Network:

CONTROVERSY AT THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL
This last week, Washington Post columnist Al Kamen reported on an emerging controversy over the release of a new version of a video presentation at the Lincoln Memorial. According to Kamen, last year, the National Park Service (NPS), under pressure from conservative religious groups, announced that a video presentation shown to visitors at the memorial would be modified to create a more "politically balanced" version.

The old eight-minute video presentation that had been screened since 1995, opens with Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech" and President Abraham Lincoln's condemnation of slavery. However, the video also shows demonstrations at the memorial against the Vietnam War and others favoring abortion, gay, and women's rights. Conservative groups objected and thought the video presentation needed a better balance of Republican presidents and inclusion of footage of pro-Gulf-War demonstrations that also took place at the memorial.

Kamen reports that the NPS has now spent almost $200,000 to make two new versions of this video. However, neither version has been released yet. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an NPS watchdog group, claims that NPS is withholding the release of the new version until after the Presidential election in November to avoid controversy. According to Jeff Ruch, PEER executive director, the first version was finish months ago but it failed to meet the standards of higher up officials, so a second version was created; it also is being withheld from release. Ruch suspects that it most likely "slashes feminists, war protesters and gays from American history." The NPS, however, is claiming that this is not the case.

NPS spokesperson Bill Line states there is "no basis in fact" to the allegation of electoral shenanigans. According to Lane, the final version is still not finished..."When it's ready, we'll let people know."

Moral saints and storytelling

My neighbor Susan Wolf is an award-winning philosophy professor who has been called "one of the most original and distinguished philosophers of her generation." Her a 1982 essay "Moral Saints" is well known (among philsophers) and widely taught.

"I don't know whether there are any moral saints," she begins. "But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them." What she means by a moral saint is someone whose life is dedicated to "improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole." High-minded but humorless, such rare people seem unbalanced:

For there comes a point in the listing of virtues that a moral saint is likely to have where one might naturally begin to wonder whether the moral saint isn't, after all, too good—if not too good for his own good, at least too good for his own well-being. For the moral virtues, given that they are, by hypothesis, all present in the same individual, and to an extreme degree, are apt to crowd out the nonmoral virtues, as well as many of the interests and personal characteristics that we generally think contribute to a healthy, well-rounded, richly developed character.

It isn't simply that the moral saint doesn't have time for foolishness.

There is a more substantial tension between having any of these qualities unashamedly and being a moral saint. These qualities [the "nonmoral virtues"] might be described as going against the moral grain. For example, a cynical or sarcastic wit, or a sense of humor that appreciates this kind of wit in others, requires that one take an attitude of resignation and pessimism toward the flaws and vices to be found in the world. A moral saint, on the other hand, has reason to take an attitude in opposition to this--he should try to look for the best in people, give them the benefit of the doubt as long as possible, try to improve regrettable situations as long as there is any hope of success. This suggests that, although a moral saint might well enjoy a good episode of Father Knows Best, he may not in good conscience be able to laugh at a Marx Brothers movie or enjoy a play by George Bernard Shaw.

In Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder portrays Dr. Paul Farmer as a moral saint--a compelling one to be sure, and not without humor, but a man with a mission so serious, a purpose so grand, that it is hard to respond other than with feelings of distant admiration and inadequacy. The jacket blurb captures the tone of the book:

At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer—brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti—blasts through convention to get results.

Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that "the only real nation is humanity"--a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners In Health. He enlists the help of the Gates Foundation, George Soros, the U.N.’s World Health Organization, and others in his quest to cure the world. At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains": as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.

All of this, and more, is borne out earnestly on the pages within.

What a surprise, then, to be treated to a talk by the real Paul Farmer last night at Binkley Baptist Church in Chapel Hill. Kidder and Farmer both spoke in a reading sponsored by the North Carolina Writers Network that was also a benefit for Partners in Health. Kidder, who read first, was utterly upstaged by Farmer, who was at once self-effacing and sarcastic, full of deadly wit. This is not a "moral saint" on a mountaintop, scanning mountain beyond mountain, though he has walked more mountains than it seems healthy to imagine. Farmer is engaging and approachable, really nothing like the picture that Kidder's book conveys.

That he is, in fact, the same morally grounded person was clear enough, for example when he talked about the recent devastation in Haiti wrought by Jeanne, over 2,000 lives lost. He said he tires of people remarking on what "Mother Nature" has done there. Pointing out that only six lives were lost in Florida, he says it's more like "Father Power." He simply cannot understand the American government's series of policy positions toward Haiti over the years, and he further cannot understand how it can be so different from the empathy and understanding that he encounters from American citizens everywhere he goes. This is the Paul Farmer I read about, but his sparkle and spunk were unexpected.

Remember one thing Wolf says above: "a cynical or sarcastic wit, or a sense of humor that appreciates this kind of wit in others, requires that one take an attitude of resignation and pessimism toward the flaws and vices to be found in the world." Perhaps mockery is Farmer's way of coping with a world in which he figures, in the end, his heroic efforts might sputter out to failure (a possibility that is broached in the book).

With Kidder's take on Farmer proven unreliable or at most incomplete, it might be better to read Farmer's own books, books with titles like Pathologies of Power, Infections and Inequalities, AIDS and Accusation. The questions he can't let go of are structural: how are "social processes and events . . . translated into personal stress and disease"? "By what mechanisms, precisely, do social forces ranging from poverty to racism become embodied as individual experience?" (1)

Pathologies of Power is practically unmediated, "a cry for those whose own shouts go unheard. It is a bitter dose of medicine doled out on behalf of the nameless, faceless millions who have no medicines of their own," said the Boston Globe. Farmer quotes Brecht:

When we come to you
Our rags are torn off us
And you listen all over our naked body.
As to the cause of our illness
One glance at our rags would
Tell you more. It is the same cause that wears out
Our bodies and our clothes.

The pain in our shoulder comes
You say, from the damp; and this is also the reason
For the stain on the wall of our flat.
So tell us:
Where does the damp come from?

Bertolt Brecht, "A Worker's Speech to a Doctor" (2)

It's not a far stretch from Brecht to Beckett, to the self-conscious absurdity of the effort: "I can't go on. I will go on." It's assuring somehow to know that Farmer will go laughing all the way.

UPDATE: Paul Jones has a nice account with more details. Anton Zuiker also reports on the reading, coming to it from the perspective of having been on the edge of Haiti himself, at the Dominican border town of Dajabon. He links to a gallery of some amazing photos by Duke pre-med student Steve Andrawes of his foray into Dajabon. Be sure to scroll all the way to the end (a few blank spaces might make you think there aren't any more).

Don't mind me

Todd Morman is blogging up a storm, after being missing in action for almost two weeks: issues from Alan Keyes' lesbian daughter, to the chemical secrets of shrimp, to the E.L. Doctorow piece currently making the email rounds.

Second take on Amendment One

Even before this thread started jumping like crazy on OrangePolitics, I was having second thoughts about Amendment One. Amendment One is a proposed North Carolina constitutional amendment, on the ballot next month, to allow local governments to issue "self-financing bonds." The bonds are used for property redevelopment projects. They are financed through the (expected) net gain in property taxes of the redeveloped property.

The theme of the amendment initiative is "jobs and progress." There's even a so-called blog for it. But the messages are one-way, top-down, unsigned. Today's posting hearkens back to the Carolina "brain drain" of the 1950s that sparked the creation of RTP. Do we get it? "Amendment One is the tool our state needs. It can help local governments plan and provide jobs that will keep communities growing. Our state must have access to good, solid jobs. The stability of a community is important and having the option to use self-financing bonds can only make the state’s future brighter."

Because they don't obligate the "full faith and credit" of the government body, they don't have to be voted on. But if the project doesn't succeed, then the taxpayers could be left to pick up the slack. So it isn't a tax subsidy necessarily . . . but it easily could be that. The Common Sense Foundation objects to the name "self-financing bonds," calling it a euphemism. In most places, it's called "tax-increment funding." Call it what it is, says common sense:

"Tax-increment financing" (TIF) is what most states call the scheme that would be established if Amendment 1 passes on the N.C. ballot this fall. . . .

North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry (NCCBI), the state's premier business lobbying group, so abhors the word "tax" that it now refers to "tax-increment financing" by a new name: "Self-financing bonds."

"Self-financing bonds" would be a laughable euphemism if it weren't so dangerously misleading. Naming a public policy after its best possible outcome gives the impression that that outcome is a given; in fact with this type of scheme, the results are not always good and can be devastating.

The Chapel Hill Town Council endorsed a resolution in support of Amendment One. Only Mark Kleinschmidt voted against it. At the time, my thoughts ran to places like the Loray Mill in Gastonia, historic site of a deadly labor strike in 1929, which, through the efforts of Preservation North Carolina, is lively again, to the tune of a $50 million mixed-use development. The sad fact of life in North Carolina now is that there are dozens of old mills that could be put to new uses. But those projects can get done--with the help of historic preservation tax credits, for example. In Chapel Hill we've even established that our redevelopment of two downtown parcels of real estate can be accomplished without "self-financing bonds." I don't have a ready answer to the Common Sense Foundation's assertion that "There should be an honest debate about TIF without misleading monikers and outlandish claims from its proponents."

What sealed it for me was an item that came in this weekend's mail: Southern City, the publication of the North Carolina League of Municipalities: "Amidst all this political noise, we must not forget a 'green' issue that is on the ballot--Amendment One." Nice try.

Mad as a law professor

I just added The Legal Reader to my blogroll. I note the Reader has a whole category on its blogroll for "Law Professors Gone Mad." But don't worry, Eric, you're among friends there.

". . . the mentality of a gated community"

Laconic blogger George Entenman posts an argument for Kerry by a frustrated environmentalist, Chuck Bowden.

Sore eyes?

The Museum of Bad Art has what you're looking for, from inspiration to personal services.

Motor City

What goes around comes around? For car ownership, Detroit is the most expensive city in the country.

If we really understood what our cars were costing us, we might be quicker to find a way out of them.

Our cars, ourselves

Yesterday was "car-free day" in Chapel Hill and some 1,400 other cities, part of an international movement. As Elisabeth Benfey, a transplanted European, pointed out to me, European cities have had an "In town without my car!" initiative for a number of years. This whole week is "European Mobility Week," focusing on issues of the environment and sustainable ways of getting around.

I forgot to pledge--and would not have been able to do better than "car lite." I did carpool to Raleigh for an argument in the Court of Appeals. There was nothing "car-free" about I-40 at 8 a.m. These days, every time I have to go to Raleigh I'm reminded how nice it is that I no longer have that commute. Even as the construction goes on, we surely know that building more and wider roads is not the answer.

"A lot of public health issues have resulted from not using your legs," said Sen. Ellie Kinnaird at Carrboro's celebration for car-free troopers, where a Segway was demonstrated.

In Paris, where the first "car-free" day was held six years ago, a major international auto show is about to begin. Under President Chirac, "the car-free day . . . is in decline. In 2002, 98 French cities and towns participated. Last year, it was 72. This year, there [were only] 50." According to the Paris report, only Montreal in Canada was to participate, and "only a handful of Japanese cities." Rome and Berlin were not participants.

UPDATE: Three reports (scroll down).

A useful reminder

At TalkLeft they're talking about the negotiated release of Yaser Hamdi, who in June got the Supreme Court to declare that enemy combatants could not be detained indefinitely. One of the conditions of his release is that he renounce his U.S. citizenship (he was born in Louisiana).

One commenter says no big deal, "Hamdi is an American citizen only by accident of birth."

To which another responds, "From one's own point of view we are all American by an accident of birth?"

I was wondering about this

In Florida, Michael Froomkin checks weather data.

Wired's Creative Commons concert

Paul is up in NYC with Larry Lessig and many others for the Creative Commons Benefit Concert at Town Hall. Live webcast starts in six minutes!

Welcome the SouthNow blog

SouthNow is the publication arm of the Program on Politics, Media and Public Life within the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill. They've recently set up shop to blog the campaign season. According to their email announcement, "The primary mission of SouthNow Blog is to provide a look at the presidential, U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races in the South as seen through the lens of major news media in the region."

We can expect good analysis here, as demonstrated by Eric David's take on North Carolina women voters and their treatment in the media.

A frameable moment

Daily Kos is blogging this week about George Lakoff and his notions of "framing" (Ruby will be glad to know). Toward the bottom of a long set of comments is this small window into the editing process at the NYT:

In this A Closer Look at Kerry's Record on Taxes , the following appears (italics mine) "Some of these savings are rather vague, like money saved from reducing corporate welfare tax cuts, OK? `corporate welfare' sounds kinda tendentious closing tax loopholes and improving government efficiency."

The author of this post wonders if we are seeing an editor's comment. When you look at the story now (edited since this poster saw it), you see that the answer is yes:

Some of these savings are rather vague, like money saved from reducing corporate tax cuts, closing tax loopholes and improving government efficiency.

Is this an example of editing in favor of the more neutral or "objective" word, or are some frames (for example, "improving government efficiency") just more naturalized than others?

A comment that Jay Rosen makes in his recent interview of Dan Gillmor comes to mind. Speaking specifically of the "war on terror," he observes that reporters are often in an uncomfortably difficult role simply for being the messenger:

But after [Sept. 11], another kind of problem set in. And in my mind it has to do with the question of, are American journalists American, and what is their connection to the political community? What makes them citizens of the United States as well as journalists in the United States? And particularly in an age when we're in a permanent war against terror. Terrorism is not only a big issue to cover for the mass media, terrorism incorporates the news media. The bomb doesn't terrorize until news of it is reported. And the fear and panic and reactions spread in the United States after September 11th were a reaction to the news, to what we saw on the news.

My own sense is that deep within their professional conscience and personal awareness, journalists understand that they are actually part of the regime of terror—just by doing their jobs. And perhaps have to be part of the fight against it as well. But this doesn't conform to existing wisdom in the press about detachment, and being the watchdog, separate from the society we report on. I don't think the American press has really worked out or worked through its relationship to the country and how that might be different after 9/11. And that seems to me to be a critical question for journalists to examine. But I don't know if they have necessarily the resources to do that.

From bringing the message to framing the message is not a far distance, as this example shows.

NNA winners

Of course, my mother was a big winner--more about her as soon as I can post a photo or two. I'm tremendously proud of her and her career as a community journalist. Other NNA winners included best newspaper web page for dailies

The Southeast Missourian, Cape Girardeau, Mo.

and best for non-dailies,

The News Register, McMinnville, Ore.

UPDATE: The Gilmer Mirror coverage of Sarah Greene's award.

They should have had Ed Cone

If Dan Gillmore was tied up, the NNA should have at least extended an invitation to Ed Cone.

Now blogs are really coming of age as news generators and movers of the traditional media. They won't replace newspapers or television, on which they rely heavily, but they will change them for the better.

NNA conference report 5

More or less to wrap up: in more than one session I picked up on a sense that there is, indeed, something amiss with contemporary journalism, something that keeps it from being really connected to its readership in the way that it should (given its important function in a democracy). It has to do with a felt distance between reporters and their audience, which in turn seems to be implicated in the polarization of everything.

According to Arthur Sulzberger, the bloggers are at fault: "too many [bloggers] simply contribute to the sense that we're in the midst of an opinion-ridden free-for-all." But some journalists recognize that their own learned habits might have something to do with it.

In "Community-Building through Interactive Mass Communication," Jack Morris of Loyola hit on the subject. Unhappily, his paper was so full of communications theory jargon that I doubt it got through very well. He did cite the right sources, though--standard texts like Daniel Yankelovich's Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy work in a Complex World (Syracuse 1991)--to argue that objectivity might itself be part of the problem:

In their professional competition to be the most objective, . . . many journalists apparently have objectified their readers, too, even though in most cases they are not observing their readers but trying to communicate with them. Journalists systematically overlook readers' values because they are systematically trained to be concerned only with objective facts.

And further,

to remain detached from sources and readers, journalists routinely rely on experts, who also tend to objectify the public. Every side of an issue has its own experts, and every side tends to overstate its point of view so that public issues often are presented in the media as polarized conflicts. . . . [Objective journalism's] preoccupation with conflict has led to reporting dominated by extremists.

This analysis sounds a lot like what Brent Cunningham of the Columbia Journalism Review has to say about objectivity, which I cited in an earlier post on the subject. It is not enough for a journalist to quote on authority ("he said") and turn to a competing authority ("she said") and stop there. This is lazy; and yet it seems that journalists fear going any further, for fear of sounding biased. What's missing is real news analysis. Writes Cunningham, "[W]e need to free (and encourage) reporters to develop expertise and to use it to sort through competing claims, identify and explain the underlying assumptions of those claims, and make judgments about what readers and viewers need to know to understand what is happening."

That's exactly what the best bloggers I know are doing.

But in two and a half days of conferencing, I didn't get much of a sense that the member papers of the NNA were interested in this other world. What little attention there was to using the web was almost all from the top down. It was not reassuring that the man who seemed to get it the most, Dean Singleton, is a media mogul.

Dan Gillmor, whose book I finished on the plane home, should be a must-read for all newspaper folks. (The entire book is downloadable for free.) I wish he had been at the NNA conference rather than where he was, at the Journalism Professors Conference in Toronto. Isn't that preaching to the converted? Maybe not yet entirely, but surely there are fewer in need of conversion there. Gillmor writes,

Technological advances always threaten established business models. And the people whose businesses are threatened always try to stop progress. Cory Doctorow is an online civil libertarian and science fiction author who published two novels and also made them freely downloadable online the day they were in bookstores. "The Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had one hundred percent control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had zero percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing," he told me. The performers, in other words, wanted to prevent new technology from disrupting a successful old business model.

The winners in the future of journalism will be the ones who understand that the old business model won't do.

Moyers speaks of Gillmor

Bill Moyers praises We the Media:

The debate over who [is] and isn’t a journalist is worth having. . . . You can read a good account of the latest round in that debate in the September 26th Boston Globe, where Tom Rosenthiel reports on the Democratic Convention’s efforts to decide “which scribes, bloggers, on-air correspondents and on-air correspondents and off-air producers and camera crews” would have press credentials and access to the action. Bloggers were awarded credentials for the first time, and, I, for one, was glad to see it. I’ve just finished reading Dan Gillmor’s new book, We the Media , and recommend it heartily to you. Gilmore is a national columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and writes a daily weblog for SiliconValley.com. He argues persuasively that Big Media is losing its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet – that “citizen journalists” of all stripes, in their independent, unfiltered reports, are transforming the news from a lecture to a conversation. He’s on to something. In one sense we are discovering all over again the feisty spirit of our earliest days as a nation when the republic and a free press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit–just a few hundred dollars–to start a paper then. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840. They were passionate and pugnacious and often deeply prejudiced; some spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes, and land-grabbers. But some called to the better angels of our nature--Tom Paine, for one, the penniless immigrant from England, who, in 1776–just before joining Washington’s army–published the hard-hitting pamphlet, Common Sense, with its uncompromising case for American independence. It became our first best seller because Paine was possessed of an unwavering determination to reach ordinary people–to “make those that can scarcely read understand” and “to put into language as plain as the alphabet” the idea that they mattered and could stand up for their rights.

More about NNA after a good night's sleep; for now, happy to be home.

Sulzberger speaks of blogs

I'm grateful to Wanda Cash of the Baytown [Tex.] Sun, president of the Texas Press Association--just about the only person I've talked to at the NNA with a positive, welcoming impression of bloggers--for tipping me off to Romenesko's citation of Arthur Sulzberger's recent address at (of all places) Kansas State (sponsor of many of the programs I've heard in the past two days). I think his take on blogs and bloggers would be mirrored by many people here at the conference:

This takes us to another important on-line phenomenon, the rise of bloggers. These individuals publish web logs that offer an ongoing narrative of their thoughts and observations. Some are professional journalists, but the vast majority of them are just folks with something on their minds.

While some of these individuals are making a serious and thoughtful contribution to our global dialogue, too many simply contribute to the sense that we're in the midst of an opinion-ridden free-for-all.

While this new medium requires innovative analysis and creative application, companies must still find a way to instill their core journalistic values into their on-line activities, especially given how important this medium is for the teenagers and young adults.

The newspaper industry is clearly on the cusp of a major, major transition--the rumblings are here though the direction is not well understood. I often think of one of my favorite journalism professors for imprinting on me, many years ago, this saying: "As Eve said to Adam, we live in an age of transition."

NNA conference report 4

This morning's plenary session led off with Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He introduced us to his school's new Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.

Funded by a $31 million grant, the institute will aim, in Mills' words, "to bring together citizens and journalists and researchers aimed at tightening that link between citizens and journalists, a link that has been severely damaged over past couple of decades." Mills said he thinks the community newspapers represented in the audience "could give larger newspapers a lot of lessons in how to stay tightly connected to your community." Through the a fellowship program, "journalists and scholars from all over the world [will] tackle the problems connected with journalism, figuring out ways to help journalists serve citizens better," and to help citizens better interact with journalists.

Echoing Dean Singleton, he emphasized the importance of emerging technologies: "We will become a national testing center for new technolologies in gathering and delivering journalism." Plans include a "high-tech research and demonstration center" that will serve to "figure out ways to use those technologies in ways that make journalism more relevant and useful and acceptable to citizens."

Then, to breakout groups.

1. "Newpapers on the Web . . . It's the Franchise," moderated by Steve Haynes, Oberlin [Kan.] Herald.

Haynes is CEO of four northwest Kansas papers. He pointed out from the start that he is the corporate presence, not a hands-on newspaperman. What was fascinating is that his daughter was in the room, too. She is a 30-year-old woman who works in advertising and web design for Morris Communications, in Augusta, Ga., which has been described as a "small market-media empire." The generational divide here was fascinating and I think telling.

Father starts the session by saying: "I want us to talk about intergration of the internet and us and other media. We are looked at in our communities as prime source of information. That's our franchise. There are people out there who would like to move in on our franchise. We have to learn how to defend and protect and grow our franchise." (Didn't sound very blog-friendly; I tried mostly to listen in this session.)

But the conversation quickly shifted to the question of how to make money on the web. The issue is charging for page views or not. The underlying issue is whether there is value to an online presence apart from the direct financial return.

Mr. Haynes favors the teasing approach: put just enough on the web so that people will have to buy a subscription. This has a lot of support in the room. Some small papers do like the Wall Street Journal and give online access only to hard-copy subscribers. The object is not to undercut the paid subscription base.

An interesting topic is obits: whether to offer them in full online or not. One approach is not to, because people really buy the papers for obits. Another approach is to make them available for a fee. Yet another is to offer them in conjunction with ads from florist shops! This approach is much endorsed by Mr. Haynes' daughter.

The daughter is generally more in favor of putting content online for free and relying heavily on advertisers. That is what the internet users expect, and that's what it has to be about, in her view.

A newspaperman from a suburban market says that circulation in his market "stopped growing because certain demographic groups have found out you can get it for free, and so why pay for it?"

Seems to me that this supports both the father's and the daughter's points of view. It could be a great sales pitch for advertisers.

The father is in support of "broadcast integration," "to get our brand out in as many ways as we can."

We had to quit just as it was getting interesting--the daughter readily conceding that she and her father had major disagreements about all of this.

2. "Environmental issues and the newspaper's role," with Jan Laitos, professor, Univ. of Denver College of Law.

Sockless in Weejuns as he was, I liked this fellow immediately. The session was much about the environment, very little about journalism. Prof. Laitos regularly does TV commentary in Denver on environmental issues--which he said was hard to get the privilege to do, hard to sell the fact that the environment was as much of an issue as car wrecks and crime--so he has little exprience with print media.

If you're looking for stories, he said, there is no shortage of environmental topics. He then went through a depressing litany: (1) our dependence on nonrenewable fossil fuels in the face of common sense, with particular attention to the Asian market which is huge and heedless; (2) dependence on electricity as produced by coal and natural gas, both very problematic energy sources, with coal responsible for significant mercury poisoning of rivers that people, including pregnant women, drink out of; (3) particular to the western U.S., several disturbing trends, for which I'll turn to the professor's own words:

What is happening in the West, in this country, is the end of commodities as the primary economic driver: minerals, timber, ranching, grazing, oil development, etc. Why people are moving to the west now is because of what is called landscape values, and landscape values are because you have this revulsion in places like Denver--to live in this concentrated seething city of a million people where you can't drive down the interstate without road rage. People are moving outward.

They're moving to the exurbs: that location that is beyond the suburbs. In Colorado the classic example is Dillon, Summit County, where the ski areas are, people are living there and commuting down I-70 to Denver because they want to get away from Denver and they'll do anything to do so. Now that interstate is like a parking lot 5 days a week--because of the landscape value. It's near forest service land, BLM land, beautiful vistas, clean air.

What are they doing with their time there? This is the second big development: they are not looking for gold mines, or oil wells, or to cut trees. What they are doing is, they are the biggest industry in Colorado: recreating. Multiple levels of recreation. That is the new driving force for the West. The recreation can consist of low impact, I just want my house with the wildernesst, or people that want to take their mountain bikes.

There's another real issue here, the motorized uses of our public lands, the west, ATVs, four wheel drives, jet skis, snowmobiles. What we're discovering in the law, the fastest growing area of litigation in federal courts is not between sierra and mining companys. Those days are gone. The commiodity users have lost. They are gone. What is happening is you have disputes between competing recreational users. Motorized recreational users going after forest service decisions to open up this land only for hiking. Check out the web sites of these motorized vehicle associations. Because America has leisure time, money, and the space now to do it. That's what the battles are.

Finally, he mentioned adequate water supplies as another major environmental issue in the West. "And the legal dimension of all that," he said, "is that the current water law doctrine that has existed in this country for years is completely inconsistent with the idea of conservation.It is based on one thing only: use it or lose it. If you conserve it you have abandoned it. There is zero incentive to conserve."

Prof. Laitos taught Gale Norton and many of her employees in the current administration. I would venture to say he has not historically been a Democrat. He was working under Antonin Scalia in the President's Office of Legal Counsel when he was asked to research and draft a presidential pardon for Ford to use with Nixon. He considers now-Justice Scalia to have been about as fine a mentor as you can imagine. Yet he excoriates the Bush Administration for its environmental policies.

Where are the environmental journalists? This sesison was very poorly attended.

NNA conference report 3

To clarify why Byers was interested in The Great Good Place: he was picking up on Oldenburg's observation that many people live in one place, work in another, socialize in another, and feel connected to none. This poses a dilemma for the community newspaper in the bedroom community where these people live. How to figure out how to serve them, to reach them? Byers understands social capital. He understands social networking. But his solution—for the news staff to be sure to circulate in the community—stops just short of actually engaging with these diverse communities through their online voices.

The next paper in the community-building symposium, by Maria Raicheva-Stover of Washburn University, struck off in a different direction from Putnam's work. Using his definitions of social capital as a starting point, she wrote a dissertation that tried to figure out whether mass media is contributing to the decline of social capital or to its improvement.

According to her research, consumption of hard news corresponds to increased levels of social capital, while consumption of soft news corresponds to decreasing levels. As an example of the latter, a survey respondent might say that she only reads the arts section to figure out which movie or art exhibit to go to (by herself). On the other hand, consumers of hard news are people more likely to be active in politics or other activities involving lots of people acting together. Most interesting, I think, is her finding about the watchers of sit-coms and reality TV. She found that viewers of those kinds of shows had a high level of social capital. I'm greatly oversimplifying her paper and not doing it justice.

Many of the papers I'm writing about, including hers and Byers', are part of a special "community building symposium" that is going on within this NNA program. It's the 10th annual symposium sponsored by the Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media at Kansas State. If the past is prologue, this year's papers will be online eventually.

Later in the day, Raicheva-Stover noticed my copy of We, the Media and took down the name. I asked her why it seemed that the folks at this conference weren't too interested in blogs. She said it was a good question, and that she herself was going to be incorporating them into her teaching very soon.

Thursday p.m.

Because the subject of potential advertiser control over journalistic content came up at the Piedmont Blog Conference, I paid special attention to the presentation by Lori Bergen (co-authored by Soontae An) of Kansas State on "Advertiser Pressure on News Contents: The Dilemma between Business and Editorial in Community Newspapers." The most interesting finding of this research is not that such pressure exists—that is no surprise—but that small, independently owned papers are less likely to give in to such pressure than are large, corporate-owned papers.

Her concluding remark was sobering: "Media companies will not have trouble staying in business, but the challenge will be staying in journalism."

NNA conference report 2

I did note that Singleton never exactly talked about blogs--everything but. In the next morning session, it was kind of the same way.

Stephen Byers, from the Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, spoke on "Beyond demographics: Understanding who your readers are and how they communicate." He tackled the very real issue of how to find the communities in a newspaper's audience when people are abandoning traditional communities--the "bowling alone" phenomenon. I was glad to hear that he's not so hot on everything Putnam has to say and that he likes Ray Oldenberg's The Great Good Place.

He talked a lot about finding ways to reach out to discover these invisible communities--for example by hanging out in coffee shops where moms with small children talk about what's important. But he didn't mention engaging with the blgosphere, and nobody else did either.

NNA conference report 1

No wi-fi that I can find in the Adams Mark hotel, but free ethernet connection in the rooms. The weather here is clear and beautiful, making it all the harder to believe the destruction going on elsewhere. Sure wish I didn't have to fly back into Ivan's aftermath on Saturday.

The Adams Mark is on the 16th Street Mall, a beautiful pedestrian mall used also by hybrid electric alternative fuel-powered buses that are so quiet and un-smelly that you hardly know they're there.

Wednesday p.m.

The first conference session I attended was an update on libel law. In response to one sad story of a man who had a legitimate claim that he had been defamed, I remarked that "he needed a blog!" (The speaker had said that the man had declined the chance to submit his own verison of the story because he feared it being edited, and "he'd been edited enough" by that paper.) My comment was met with silence.

We we adjourned, one publisher of a weekly paper told me that blogs had no crediblity with him. His theory is that bloggers have nothing to risk therefore they can and will say anything regardless of truth value. He knows bloggers can be sued for libel, but they don't have assets or insurance. To his mind, that is what makes establishment journalists more reliable: they have a real fear of being sued. The bloggers that might be realiable and good, he said, he can't understand why they do it. They must be people who have too much time on their hands or can't figure out what else to do with their lives, he said.

Thursday a.m.

Good news: Dean Singleton gets it. Singleton, who began working as a reporter at 15, and bought his first newspaper at 21, is CEO of the MediaNews Group, the seventh largest newspaper company in the United States. As a major player in the major media field, active in the Newspaper Association of America (the trade association of the large-scale papers), he brought one message to this convention of community newspapers, many of which are weekly or semiweekly: You too can, and must, enter the 21st century through much more sophisticated and interactive use of technology. Some of what he said:

We have tended to look at online services as a financial story, but what is really happening is a social revolution. The nature of relationship, al kinds of relationships, is changing on a scale never seen in history, or imagined. With 149 million Americans with web access, being online is simply becoming a part of how we live. A massive transfer of power. As more people have access to more information, the reatlaionship with those who used to own and disperse information is dramatically altered--no matter who is the owner. We must be part of this shift. We need to be so immersed and intertwined that we are both a driver and beneficiary of change. We do that by accelerating and refining the synegeries beweteen the web and print. There is major potential in interactivity. If you run a story about a proprety tax increase, readers can go online and find out what it means to their house. If there's a wreck on highway readers can go online to find drive times. We have to move and move faster from a passive experience where our readers can just scan the screen to getting them actively involved in the process and at same time involved in our newspapers activily. If we just transfer the content of old media to new media, that' not going to cut it. We got blindsided by first wave of the internet and it took along time to catch up. We can't afford to get smacked again.

There is no obstacle I can see that prohibits smaller newspapers from replicating the same things the big ones are doing, and I think you can do it better.

Another part of what he had to say involved a pitch for greater "media consolidation"--the joint ownership of print media, ratio, TV, the works. That is a major part of what he does. I'm not so with him there . . . but I'm very glad he said what he did about interactive communities.

Off to Denver

Tomorrow I'm headed for Denver to celebrate with my mother as she receives a lifetime achievement award. From the Gilmer Mirror:

Mirror Publisher to Receive Prestigious NNA Award

Mirror publisher Sarah L. Greene will receive the Emma C. McKinney Award from the National Newspaper Association when it convenes in Denver, Colo., Sept. 15-18.

Mrs. Greene, publisher of the Gilmer Mirror, will receive the Emma C. McKinney Award, which was established in 1966 to honor the co-publisher and editor of the Hillsboro (Org.) Argus for 58 years. McKinney was also dean of Oregon newspapermen and women in 1954 and was inducted into the Oregon Journalism Hall of Fame in 1982.

Mrs. Greene followed her parents and grandfather in the newspaper business, publishing the paper that her grandfather purchased in 1915. She was TPA president in 1995, only the second female president in the association's history.

In a letter supporting Mrs. Greene's nomination, Lynn Brisendine, publisher of the Brownfield News, wrote, "Sarah L. Greene is one of the outstanding newspaper women of Texas. Her dedication, knowledge and work ethic continue to inspire all of the men and women who make newspapering their profession, not only in Texas, but all across this great country."

The NNA represents non-metropolitan newspapers--the real community newspapers. After the interesting discussions about the relationship of blogging to journalism at the Piedmont Blog Conference, I'm looking forward to some good discussions here. But even though the theme is "the power of community newspapers," I don't see a single thing on the schedule about weblogs. Perhaps some of us in the audience will offer a shift in focus. If I can find a way to connect, I'll try to do some live-blogging.

My spouse brought back from "FOO Camp" Dan Gillmor's We the Media. I'm taking it with me.

I notice we're to be entertained by Baxter Black, the cowboy poet--local color I guess. Says here his column "On the Edge of Common Sense" is "the most widely syndicated agricultural column in America." Imagine that.

Would you pay $300 for this?

How Appealing is keeping tabs on the eBay bidding wars over one Sandra Day O'Connor bobblehead doll after another. One recently went for $300. The current auction is creeping up rapidly, already at $265 with more than a day of bidding to go.

Live from northern California

My better half is live-blogging from "FOO camp" (for friends of Tim O'Reilly).

In memoriam

The thing I'll never get over about September 11, 2001, is what a clear, cloudless morning it was, a hint of fall, one of those days that make you glad to be alive. It was that way all up and down the eastern seaboard. The 9-11 Commission Report begins like this:

September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work. Some made their way to the Twin Towers, the signature structures of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Others went to Arlington, Virginia, to the Pentagon. Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run.

For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey.

My friend John Mason was in Carrboro. He did not die on September 11. It was almost a year later before his cancer finally claimed him. But when I think of that fateful morning, he comes to mind as clearly as that clear blue sky. Here's an essay I wrote about him that was published in November 2002 in the Urban Hiker.

A thousand faces

Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

--A.E. Housman, Last Poems

Resilient city

Though the "tall buildings" exhibit at MOMA seems to Herbert Muschamp to illustrate the polemical point that yes, it's OK again, after three years, to think about skyscrapers in New York, urban planners have been counting on the city's resilience all along.

Looking to history, planners at MIT held a conference in February 2002 called "The Resilient City." San Francisco after the earthquake, Chicago after the fire, "cities have endured trauma and violence for millennia," said Tom Campanella, "much of it far worse than that unleashed by Mohamed Atta on September 11. Any study of the city in history will reveal that human settlements possess an essential ability to resurrect themselves in the wake of devastation."

Larry Vale offered a similar faith in urban regeneration, but he wonders about the process of memorializing what was lost. Whose stories get told, and whose are elided? "It is not enough to ask general questions about urban recovery; we must ask who recovers which aspects of the city, and by what mechanisms," he argues. "The process of post-disaster recovery is a window into the power structure of the society that has been stricken. Similarly, to ask about remembrance is to inquire how what is remembered gets constructed, when, and by whom."

As the process of memorializing and rebuilding has gone forward, at least in these still early stages, the tension does not seem to be so much about what is remembered: perhaps in 50 years, or 100, others will look back with dispassionate and critical eyes on the particular way in which Americans chose to memorialize the senseless murder of several thousand people in the context of waging preemptive war. By my lights, the memorial, a "simple articulation of the footprints of the Twin Towers," promises to be a powerful and lasting symbol of loss, inviting thoughtful reflection. But even now, "the power structure of the society"--or at least of New York--is fairly well laid bare in the struggle over the rebuilding of the rest of the site.

Two great architects, Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, have been thrown together to work out the one design for the new "Freedom Tower."

More layers of political and ideological tension are involved in the process of rebuilding the World Trade Center site than I can fathom. One of them seems to be a personalized debate over style and process between two high-profile architecture critics: Muschamp, of the Times, and Paul Goldberger, of the New Yorker--as suggested in a review of Goldberger's book Up from Zero.

Another comes out of sheer politics, power and money: Libeskind won the design competition, but developer Larry Silverstein wanted Childs. Hence the arranged marriage. In Goldberger's view, Libeskind's singular design is at risk.

Building in New York City has always been a matter of money and politics as much as architecture, with predictably mediocre results. But it seemed, for a while, that the city’s usual way of doing business would be suspended during the rebuilding of Ground Zero, since public sentiment demanded something more high-minded than the conventional New York real-estate deal. Hiring Daniel Libeskind was a good start. In the last few months, however, it has become clear that Ground Zero is not going to be remade as Libeskind would wish it to be. He is being made to conform to the city’s modus operandi rather than the other way around.

Still, he is hopeful:

By accepting the demands of the Port Authority and Larry Silverstein for office space, Libeskind forfeited his claim as a visionary, but he managed to synthesize the symbolic and the commercial in a design that can still be called avant-garde, which is no small achievement. And he might get at least some of the thing built.

You can see it going up--on a live web-cam! The resilient city.