I'm such an awful, awful reporter...
At least one might get that impression from reading CA publisher John Wilcox's response to my article about labor disputes at his newspaper.
It may not be professional to engage in this kind of pissing contest, but I've been following this story since late 2003. I've burned a LOT of shoeleather on this one and read contracts until my eyeballs were bleeding.
I'll be the first to admit that I left myself open on a few points, but the attacks were almost entirely semantic and superficial.
Here's Wilcox's letter (in ital) with my responses (in bold).
Flyer writer Chris Davis spoke with Henry Stokes, our director of administration and planning, and got our response to a short list of questions.
But the June 23 article was replete with incorrect statements that we had not been asked about. The source of these errors appears to be union propaganda. Perhaps your reporter was confusing attribution with fairness.
For previous articles I’ve spoken with Warren Funk and John Wilcox about layoffs and the Evergreen clause. I didn’t ask any questions that had already been answered. If Wilcox wants to talk about propaganda maybe I should produce his anti-union memos that I have in my possession but held back .
First, the Guild does not have 371 members at The Commercial Appeal. That is the number of employees covered by the contract -- of which slightly less than half are members. The Guild does not let non-members participate in its meetings or vote on company proposals.
My language “members of the collective bargaining unit” was originally correct but it was altered to “members” in the final edit. Language aside, here’s the simple fact: The Guild represents 371 employees. They bargain for 371 employees.
They arbitrate for 371 employees. 204 are full-fledged members of the Guild, which, if my math is correct, is better than half.
The Flyer story states that in November of last year 8 members of the Guild bargaining team lost their jobs.
The fact is that only one of the Guild bargaining team was laid off.
Wilcox has a point. It should have read eight members of the bargaining “unit” not “team.
” Two members were board members (Guild officers) and one was on the negotiating committee. The word “team” suggests “bargaining committee” giving Wilcox the semantic high ground. This one I’ll eat.
And I’ll be hungry again in an hour because it’s not terribly substantial.
Regarding the “Evergreen Clause,” federal law gives an employer the right to not process post-expiration grievances to arbitration. The Guild failed to abide by the provisions of a side agreement to the contract and then tried to force arbitration in violation of the spirit of the agreement.
The Commercial Appeal had no choice but to go to court to protect our rights.
Federal law MAY give the CA the right not to process arbitration. Given the contract's Evergreen clause that’s no forgone conclusion—Hence the declaratory action suit, which asks for a legal clarification of contractual language.
If Federal law gave them the right there would be no need for the suit, they simply wouldn’t arbitrate putting the legal ball in the Guild’s court. What Wilcox has done here is state his preferred outcome of the suit as actual fact. The Evergreen clause extends the specific terms of an expiring contract that, in this case, includes the right to arbitration.
We’ve given a detailed account of this in past articles and called on Stokes, Wilcox, and Funk to respond---which they have. In the past Federal judges have preferred not to rule on declaratory action suits unless there was a constitutional issue involved but in recent years this type of suit has been used by insurance companies to avoid paying out settlements.
MORE: The “side agreement” Wilcox is referring to pertains to the Community Appeal editors who I believe —and I’m not 100% on this—were hired into newly created positions after the Guild contracts expired.
I do know that the Community Appeal sections rolled out in January of 2004. In September of 2003 the CA sent a letter to the Guild saying that they would not be honoring the Evergreen clause—at least as it applied to arbitration. It appears that the Evergreen and the right to arbitrate were under attack before the Guild presented any challenges, so it’s pretty hard for Wilcox to pretend to be the victim here.
You will note that he uses the phrase “spirit of the agreement” which is cute in its passive ambiguity.
The Flyer states that the police were called when the union has exercised its First Amendment rights by demonstrating at company events. This is not true.
The police have not been called to prevent or disrupt any union demonstrations.
This is close to being a lie. The key word is “Called.
” It may have been better to say that police “arrived.” Four squad cars arrived at the zoo and disrupted a protest during the CA’s employee appreciation day. They eventually let the protest continue.
Two hours later the police came back. Again, the protest was allowed to go on. Also employees of the Agricenter threatened to call the police and have Guild protestors arrested for hand-billing at a CA-sponsored jobs fair.
It took calls to Mayor A.C. Wharton’s office to clear the guild for return.
I haven’t seen my own paper this week (I’m avoiding almost all media while vacationg) but I understand that the correction says that police actually came to the Agricenter. If so, that’s not right—and I’m pretty sure I explained this correctly. At first I too thought the cops came to both places, but by early afternoon on Tuesday I had the facts 100% straight.
I called it all in so something may have been lost in translation. Either way, if you read the original piece it never specifies when or where or how many times the cops showed up--- it only says that they did—and that’s correct. Since Wilcox was AT THE ZOO I’m shocked that he’s trying to deny this.
The Flyer states that the Guild's bargaining agent was banned from The Commercial Appeal's building. That is not true. We do require that he restrict his visits to an office provided by the Human Resources Department.
He has, in fact, visited the newspaper building to conduct union business on many occasions and as recently as this spring.
I did not ask Henry about this one and that’s my bad. But the Guild’s president, organizer, and lead negotiator all used the B-word.
Maybe I got spun on this one. Perhaps it would have been more correct to say, “access was severely restricted creating an effective ban.” Anybody off the street can have full access to the CA as long as they have an employee escort.
I’ll admit to overstating the fact so long as we all understand that Wilcox is understating the CA’s aggressively anti-union behavior.
No Guild official has been harassed. Personnel actions are private matters between the employee and the company and it would not be appropriate to discuss them in public.
“Not be appropriate to discuss them in public”: Funny, HR issues—like salaries—are only appropriate fodder for public discussion when they benefit the company. You’ll know what I’m talking about if you read on.
The Flyer has inappropriately confused company employee drivers with independent contracted carriers.
Drivers are employees who drive company owned or leased trucks and enjoy the same benefits as other employees similarly situated. Carriers, as long established by federal statute, are independent contractors. They pick up papers at our drop sites and deliver them to homes.
They are paid according to the provisions of their contract. As independent contractors they have control over the means of accomplishing the tasks in their contract. No “part-time employees who once stuffed inserts” were laid off to transfer this work to carriers.
A rose by any other name… In our interviews the “carriers” referred to themselves as “drivers” “haulers” and “carriers” interchangeably. CA Circulation was given many opportunities to respond to this issue but they did not. Henry was given the opportunity but he pleaded ignorance and did not offer to help me reach anyone in circulation.
He did give me the name of the person I was already calling which was, as you might imagine, a great help. You will note there is no mention of the charge-backs, the “master/servant relationship,” terms of the contracts or the possible child labor—the actual meat of this section.
More: I’ve met with SEVERAL carriers all of them claim that the CA once had employees who stuffed classifieds into the paper.
The carriers describe these former employees alternately as “Kids,” “Teenagers,” and. “College Students.” Some of these descriptions were given during a group interview; others were obtained independently while I was at the warehouse.
So who’s telling the truth? My guess: The “stuffers” were independent contractors and Wilcox is playing a word game because I said “part time employees.” You’ll note that he chose to quote that phrase.
Somebody isn't being honest...
maybe it's the carriers, but it seems unlikly.
The Flyer story also features graphics allegedly showing historic “merit pay” at The Commercial Appeal. The newspaper does not have a merit pay system for its union covered employees.
The pay described in the charts is actually "above scale pay” and has absolutely no relation to the merit pay system we are proposing. An employee may receive above scale pay for a number of reasons; a merit based pay system rewards top performers better than non-performers. The charts are based on a “study” conducted by a Washington, DC area consultant that works primarily for unions and uses data provided by the union.
Both sides of this issue were fairly represented.
And CA lawyer Michael Zinser works primarily with Media companies to bust labor unions, so I’m not clear on the Rovian point Wilcox is trying to make here.
Bottom line: Merit pay in this instance is a misleading term.
It sounds so good and so right, but there’s no available data suggesting that it has ever been applied fairly. And here’s a little bit of the labor bureau study I left out: “The survey identified 48 of the 70 over-scale employees whose extra pay stemmed entirely or in part from merit pay… among these cases disparity is all the more pronounced and evident… 92-percent were white.”
We are willing to increase the pay of our union covered employees.
However, we strongly believe that the amount of increased compensation should have something to do with performance. We offered to allow the union to try our merit pay system this year so that their members and the others within the bargaining unit could receive an increase. This offer did not preclude the union from continuing to bargain for its own pay plan in the future.
It was merely an opportunity for Guild covered workers to see for themselves how fairly such a system can work. The proposal has an objective set of criteria for employee evaluation and an appeal process if an employee is dissatisfied.
Again, both sides were fairly represented on this.
And lets all face facts: it’s hard to say that a criteria like “attitude” is objective. One manager might be GREAT at evaluating these things, another might suck. Furthermore, even a positive evaluation is no guarantee of merit pay increases.
Finally, we should note that our Guild covered employees are well paid in the Memphis market. The six picketers shown on page 16 of the Flyer on June 23 made approximately $315,000 last year not counting company paid benefits. Under our merit pay plan they would have made even more this year.
Talk about your PROPAGANDA! Many—perhaps all—of the people in question were at the afternoon Guild meeting where the CA's offer of a one time "merit based" salary increase was put on the table. Only qualifying employees that already receive top minimum scale would even be considered for these "merit raises.
" The
$316,000-Men would actually have had a shot at making more money while employees who weren’t making as much would not. The big-money-boys all voted against accepting the raise unless it was extended to the lower scale brackets. They voted against their best interests to protect those who weren’t as well off.
Oh, and I thought it was inappropriate to discuss personnel issues—you know, like SALARIES!
Your honor, the Bush Administration says it would never fix information around a predetermined policy—like the war in Iraq for instance—but I’m here to show you that is simply not the case.
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: Nationally respected Agriculture Department microbiologist Dr. Zahn discovered that hog farms were emitting drug-resistant airborne bacteria that “if breathed by humans, would make them harder to treat when ill.
Zahn presented his findings at a scientific conference in 2000, but the Bush administration stopped him from publishing his data 11 times between September 2001 and April 2002, he said. When Danish researchers sought to learn more about his work, Zahn wasn’t allowed to share his techniques.”
: “A White House official who once led the oil industry’s fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents…[The] official, Philip A.
Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.”
: “In the aftermath of the Sept.
11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available. That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency’s news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.
”
: “The White House and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) made changes to a report from the National Academy of Sciences on the toxicology of mercury, a powerful neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to pregnant women and young children…White House staff made editorial interventions in the report, which was commissioned by Congress to establish the science on the risks associated with mercury. The White House’s alterations downplayed the risks of mercury, replaced specific enumerations of with bland, general references, and introduced additional emphasis on uncertainty.”
: “The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead.
”
: “Interior Secretary Gale Norton substantially altered biological findings from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concerning effects of oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before she transmitted them to Congress, according to documents released October 19 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
” In one instance, Norton’s defense was that she “simply made an error in her testimony — saying ‘outside’ when she meant to say ‘inside.’”
: “The removal from a National Cancer Institute website of a scientific analysis concluding that abortions do not increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer. That move, in November 2002, contradicted the broad medical consensus, and members of Congress protested the change.
In response, the NCI updated its website to include the conclusion of a panel of experts that induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.”
: “During the latter half of 2002, the Administration began removing scientific information, relating to the spread of HIV, from government websites, including those of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Much of the information that was removed contracted [sic] claims made by the administration’s abstinence-only agenda.
”
: Earlier this year, “EPA’s guidelines acknowledge[d], for the first time, that children under 2 years of age are 10 times more likely to get cancer from certain chemicals than adults who are similarly exposed. But the White House Office of Management and Budget undermined that acknowledgment by inserting language in the guidelines that make it easy for industry to block EPA from following them when assessing cancer-causing chemicals.”
: “[The] Bush administration dismissed Dr.
Elizabeth Blackburn, a leading cell biologist, and Dr. William May, a prominent medical ethicist, from the President’s Council on Bioethics…[Blackburn] was removed from the panel soon after she objected to a Council report on stem cell research. In an essay in the April 1, 2004, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr.
Blackburn recounted how the dissenting opinion she submitted, which she believes reflects the scientific consensus in America, was not included in the council’s reports even though she had been told the reports would represent the views of all the council’s members.”
: Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton “pioneered” an oil-drilling technique that “can contaminate drinking water supplies with carcinogens and is therefore required by law to be regulated by the EPA.” Halliburton has spent years trying to get the federal government to exempt the technique from environmental regulations.
” A senior Environmental Protection Agency recently revealed that “the EPA [initially concluded] that the technique can be dangerous to public health, but then [deleted] the conclusion after Cheney’s office demanded it.” Furthermore, six of the seven EPA panel members who decided that the technique was “safe” had all come from the energy industry.
And of course .
Any patterns appearing here? Any M.O.
?
I'm guessing I won't be blogging again until Tuesday so here's the latest future of Rock and Roll edition.
And if you want to hear some classic Country music my band The West Coast Turnaround is at Automatic Slim's tomorrow night at 10:30. I don't have a poster so here's the set list.
I don't know how to respond when a group that believes homosexuality is both a psychological abnormality to cure and a sin to wash away asks me to be .
It curdles the brain.
Rumor mill says there will be national press. Here's the release with comments to follow.
MEMPHIS, Tennessee, June 15, 2005: Love in Action International, a Christ-centered Memphis-based international recovery treatment center, is calling upon the community to extend open-minded consideration and tolerance towards young people with same-sex attraction who are currently undergoing the organization’s youth program called Refuge.
Controversy over an individual’s right to self-determination and choice in sexuality has recently been the subject of current debate. Also under assault is the right of parents to determine appropriate therapeutic intervention for minor children according to social and personal conscience.
Community and youth leaders, as well as individuals, who have been through the Love in Action International program, will address these issues at a press conference being held tomorrow.
Okay, did it really say, "Controversy over an individual’s right to self-determination and choice in sexuality." No they didn't.
NO THEY DIDN'T!
Next on the menu:
"Also under assault is the right of parents to determine appropriate therapeutic intervention for minor children."
I don't think that's ever been the question.
The question is, "is there something wrong with the kid?" Because if the answer is "no" (the medical and mental healthcare communities say no overwhelmingly) then this is an unnecessary surgery. It's like turning little John into little Jane because you always wanted a girl.
And "Therapy?" I think this could be the all important tell: Hey love in action, show us your academic bona fides!
Because-- and I might be wrong here but I don't think I am -- Love in Action is a ministry, not a clinic.
John Smid's title is Reverend not Doctor.
Look, if you want to raise your kid to be a niggerjewfag-hating crackerass cracker, that's your business and there's not a thing anybody can do about it and that's how it should be, I fucking guess. But if you get breast implants for your 5-year-old, maybe there's something wrong with YOU.
Our children aren't pets and they aren't toys to be
My guess is that they will be showing off some reformed gays who are "community leaders" which I'm sure means "teaching Sunday school in Mumford."
The most dangerous words of ALL:
"Appropriate therapeutic intervention for minor childrenaccording to social and personal conscience."
Personal conscience?
Sure, I suppose. But "Social conscious? That's--- and I hate to say this because it's so overdone---Nazi talk.
Fucking hell.
UPDATE: I can't believe I didn't snark on this the first go round: " has recently been the subject of current debate."
Recent and current.
That is SO "Right now."
I promised I'd share a few quotes from John Smid, the Director of Love in Action.
Instead I'll just share the first couple of paragraphs from my Flyer column that's coming out tomorrow.
How does God make a gay man straight? In 1997 John Smid the ex-gay Director for Love in Action, a homosexual conversion center located in Memphis, tried to explain this mystery to the Memphis Flyer.
He said he would use non-Christian terms, to make it easier for secular types to understand.
"I'm looking at that wall and suddenly I say it's blue,” Smid said pointing at a yellow wall. “Someone else comes along and says, `No, it's gold.
But I want to believe that wall is blue. Then God comes along and He says, `You're right, John, [that yellow wall] is blue. That's the help I need.
God can help me make that [yellow] wall blue."
You don’t have to be a psyche major to recognize that Smid’s metaphor for gay conversion is the dictionary.com definition of delusional: “A false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence.
”
As you can see, the goal isn't to take sick people and make them well, it's to take perfectly normal people and fuck them up.
I may never sleep right again.
..
Please dear lord above, let this post I read at Whiskey Bar be nothing but a bad, bad, bad, bad dream.
Lincoln has developed a unique service which provides campaign managers and their staff with concise actionable information in order to understand their candidate's time and events, media planning, voter interest, issue positions and several other factors . . .
This service is restricted and available only to select clients.
Billmon is having tinfoil visions--and in the Lincoln start-up ,I think I'm seeing what he sees. It's like a Frankenheimer flick.
Wooguh!
We have a tiny start-up venture, controlled by persons unknown, that suddenly materializes in late 2003 doing "private equity" deals in the middle of a war zone, and then obtains a huge PR contract from the Pentagon, and then hires a bunch of unemployed GOP campaign operatives to execute that contract, and then is absorbed by a shadowy DC company that specializes in corporate and political detective work and that may have close ties to both the Republican Party and the intelligence community, which then is awarded an even bigger contract to produce even more Pentagon propaganda. Now maybe that's just the way business is done in George Bush's government, but it doesn't make me any less creeped out by what I was able to dig up with a few online searches.
You don't have to have too much of a taste for paranoid conspiracy theories to imagine scenarios in which such contracting relationships could prove very useful for the Bush administration and the GOP machine.
Shit + Fan = Hey, look over there, is that Paris Hilton?
So the question is Will this freaking bombshell wake up the American media?
MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.
The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.
The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.
This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.
“US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.
The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6.
The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.
The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.
“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.
The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war.
The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.
The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.
There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times.
A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.
The White House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.
The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.
John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.
He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons programme.
Frustrated at the refusal by the White House to respond to their letter, the congressmen have set up a website — — to collect signatures on a petition demanding the same answers.
Conyers promised to deliver it to Bush once it reached 250,000 signatures. By Friday morning it already had more than 500,000 with as many as 1m expected to have been obtained when he delivers it to the White House on Thursday.
, another website set up as a result of the memo, is calling for a congressional committee to consider whether Bush’s actions as depicted in the memo constitute grounds for impeachment.
It has been flooded with visits from people angry at what they see as media self-censorship in ignoring the memo. It claims to have attracted more than 1m hits a day.
, another website, even offered $1,000 (about £550) to any journalist who quizzed Bush about the memo’s contents, although the Reuters reporter who asked the question last Tuesday was not aware of the reward and has no intention of claiming it.
The complaints of media self-censorship have been backed up by the ombudsmen of The Washington Post, The New York Times and National Public Radio, who have questioned the lack of attention the minutes have received from their organisations.
This is interesting. You'll remember that a few months back three opponents of privatization went to one of the president's Bamboozlepalooza events and by someone who they were told was a Secret Service agent, even though they did nothing to disrupt the event in any way.
(It later emerged that the reason they were ejected was that they came in a car with a 'No Blood for Oil' bumper sticker.
To the best of my knowledge no one now disputes the fact that the three did nothing to merit ejection, even by the most draconian and Bush-true standards of president-fealty. And in Colorado have condemned what happened.
The three involved as well as their supporters have been trying to find out since March just who the official was who ejected them, what the justification was and who he worked for.
At this point, the Secret Service has confirmed that the person in question did not work for them. And the White House has conceded that Mr. X was working as a volunteer for the White House.
Both know the identity of the man. But both refuse to divulge the who he is or reveal any more about what happened.
Here's a in today's Rocky Mountain News on the latest.
And here's from the Denver Post.
The Colorado ejectees weren't acting up, they were merely sporting the wrong bumper sticker. Longtime readers will remember that Empire coffeehouse owner John Gasquet went on the record as saying that he was contacted by someone claiming to be a Fed and warned against posting anti-Bush signs.
Josh says they know the name of the fake Fed in Colorado but aren't ready to divulge.
Some time back I heard from a reliable source that Gasquet knew (or had a very firm idea) who made the calls to Empire, but wasn't ready to divulge.
I'm not saying that were talking about the same person but perhaps a connection.
Hmmm. Strange rumblings in our corner of blogtopia.
Rumblings are all they are at the moment as I'm piecing this narrative together from various ticks, shudders and twiches I've noticed in the online community.
The thrust of my theory is this. Somebody thinks all mentions of our wrongfully committed amigo Zach and all links to his website should vanish.
Protests should continue quietly outside the media's greedy eye. This is to protect 16-year-old Zach. Sounds good and on the surface even I’m almost snookered by it.
PINK ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: all of this began with Zach’s post on his own website: a mournful missive to the universe wherein the teen claims a fascination with killing his mother and himself.
Who is the protector here, and who is the protected?
This fuse was torched in cyberspace, a region both vast and intimate where private thoughts are gifted to the public domain.
The story has been told. The media is aware and Zach's troubling blog entry is still online for anyone to discover.
My dear old pappy once put his arm around his wayward son and with a tear in his eye he offered this caution, "Remember this dear child of mine: you can't unscrew a midget.
" As was the case with many of my pappy's sayings, I still don't understand what it means but somehow I think it applies.
Maybe I'm misreading the signs, and misunderstanding the colorful bird guts floating in my teacup. Maybe nobody's trying to kill the messengers before they arrive.
All I know for a fact is this:
In this freaky, freaky time so curiously reminiscent of the Middle Ages The God infected are trying to assert authority over science. Lives are crushed in the conflict between reason and magic: diseases go uncured; the sane find themselves walled up in a madhouse. The stories that need telling most aren’t stories of ideology; we need human stories.
As I’m trying to figure out how this should be covered I’m tossing this out for debate.
** No midgets were harmed in the making of this post
If any little people were offended, I can’t help what my pappy says. And if you were being put into a center to turn tiny people tall through Christ, I’d be out there slugging for you as well!
Leon Gray, the even-keeled voice of progressive talk radio in Memphis, once looked at me and grinned from ear to ear. It was a paradoxical grin, completely sad, but entirely self-amused.
It was the kind of grin you might see on a suicidal circus freak musing on his own deformity “What do you do with John Ford,” he asked helplessly. “He’s like something out of a folk story.”
Leon was right.
Ford’s over-the-top antics have often worked in his favor. He never lived in district 29, or any other voting district for that matter. He was a creature of the hyperreal.
The cartoonishness made him no better, but easier to digest: a replica of the real deal. As the French economist turned philosopher Jean Baudrillard might suggest that made him all the more powerful and impossible to know. He became Buffalo John: a legend.
And legends are never "true." So nothing they say about John Ford can be "true," can it?
That’s the bitch of it all.
That, a record (deserved or un) of solid constituent services, and the rule of Habeas Blingis kept the man in office. A less colorful figure might have flamed out years ago.
There are yahoos in Blogtopia (and in The Flyer parking lot, I understand) crying “hypocrisy” when Ford is Liberally flogged and simultaneously begging for the emergence of Pro-Forders they can subsequently (and easily) (and rightfully) dismantle.
It’s difficult for me to do anything more than sit on the fence and watch it all play out.
I’ve heard a few grumbles among nervous lefties who despise Ford personally but will miss his “reliably progressive” voting record. As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing reliably progressive about a man who carries water for deadbeat serial-dads.
But there are a few good bites in John Ford’s rotten bushel and they should be savored even as tar and feathers are applied. Like my buddy Bill says, “The evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” So let us now praise Buffalo John for all the good things he’s done—and bring on the dirt!
I feel like a long-time herpes sufferer on the day scientists announce a cure.
Bless his heart.
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