Opening Arguments: The state of the culture

Shut up, Virginia

Yes, Virginia, , as surely as blah, blah, blah. It was in the New York Sun in 1897 and is probably the most famous editorial ever blah, blah, blah.

My boss made me run that on the editorial page every year. He left, so I quit running it. Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Leo, ho-ho-ho.

I thought I had gotten rid of the silly thing for good, but I got this e-mail just the other day:

DEAR LEO: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says if it's in Opening Arguments, it must be true.
So tell me. Is there a Santa Claus? VIRGINIA.

I guess I have to answer her. We are supposed to be interactive these days.
Dear Virginia: I am very busy right now.

You think I have nothing better to do than answer questions from silly little girls? I have passed your concerns along to a few other people in hopes that they might be able to address your concerns. Following are some of the responses I received.

GEORGE BUSH: Yes, it is true that I originally believed there is a Santa Claus. But if you look at the record, you will see that EVERYBODY believed it, including France and members of the Clinton administration.
TEDDY KENNEDY: It has become obvious that no one over the age of 8 continues to believe there is a Santa Claus.

George Bush lied, children cried.
NANCY PELOSI: Hearings will begin on that issue shortly after the first of the year. We will focus specifically on the question of what ethical considerations might have been violated in connection with any promises that might have been tendered or exacted by the previous leadership in regards to all these gifts.

Rest assured that Christmas will now become a transparent holiday that the American people can once again have faith in.
AL GORE: Certainly he exists, but unless we change our ways, he is doomed. The North Pole IS MELTING as we speak!

!!
GOV.

MITCH DANIELS: It seems a disservice to taxpayers to try to get all those toys delivered on one night by one man. My administration is now in talks with Toys 'R Us, and we should be able to get $1 billion up front for all-day kindergarten and a plan to save horse racing in Indiana.
MAYOR GRAHAM RICHARD: The problem isn't Santa Claus, the problem is that we just haven't made Fort Wayne attractive enough for him to stop here.

We will take care of that in the next phase of our downtown redevelopment plan, which will require us to take over the top floors of all buildings through eminent domain for the installation of bigger chimneys.
THE INDIANA POLICY REVIEW: A study we commissioned by economist Sam Staley indicates that whatever illusion of joy and good will is created by this one day of gift-giving quickly dissipates before the first of the year. Anyone with a minimal understanding of economics will realize that a cost-benefit analysis reveals Santa's mission to be a fool's errand.

NEWS-SENTINEL EDITORIAL PAGE: Santa Claus is merely encouraging dependency among a group of people who should learn self-sufficiency. When they get gifts for free on one day, merely by asking for them, they tend to expect the same treatment from then on, forgetting that they must only expect the benefits of their own hard work.
JOURNAL-GAZETTE EDITORIAL PAGE: Santa Claus is a polite fiction invented by conservative reactionaries who want us to believe that private charities can take the place of a compassionate government that best understands the needs of a diverse population and can redirect its resources accordingly.

INDIANAPOLIS STAR EDITORIAL PAGE: The evidence arguing against the existence of Santa Claus is persuasive, and mounting, but the heartfelt belief of generations of children cannot lightly be dismissed. Much further study is required.
I also received many responses from local bloggers.

A lot of it was gibberish that I couldn't quite make out, but a few comments stood out. Mitch Harper at pointed out that he was one of the first people in this area to support Santa Claus, pushing through a bill when he was a member of the General Assembly that made the jolly old man exempt from the gift tax. Angry White Boy at wonders why Santa, always seeking to have young people sitting on his lap, isn't on a registry somewhere yet.

Robert at observes that Santa is surely a Democrat who secretly sat in at drums for the Beatles between Pete Best and Ringo Starr. notes that, if Santa comes to southeast Fort Wayne, he might need more than a .38 special to protect his milk and cookies.

I haven't heard yet from , but I understand that she has spent five minutes on Google researching everything there is to know about Santa and is prepared to smack down anybody who presumes to write too superficially about him.
As you can plainly see, Virginia, the world has changed. It is no longer the case that one overworked editorial writer will create something that tries to take one specific question from an 8-year-old girl in one city and make it touch a universal chord within all of us.

There is no common ground anymore, Virginia. We are all just shouting into the well, hoping the echo makes us feel good. Go listen to your iPod, Virginia, or put the video of your teddy bear on YouTube.

Some of us have serious personal issues we need to get out there in hopes that we get noticed.
P.S.

I did send your query to Glenn Reynolds at . He sent back 367 links. I don't have time to check them out, but you might find one or two of them of interest.

Tell Your dad to go back to his newspaper and stop being a troublemaker.
Posted by Leo Morris on December 24, 2006 at 07:46 PM | The wonderful thing about this country is that we still allow (mostly) local sensibilities to govern local conditions. If Las Vegas wants to be a wide-open sin city, for example, and Seattle wants to be a politically correct have for lefties, so be it.

Oh, wait, I got that a little wrong. Seattle is the city in which voters just on lap dances and tough restrictions on strippers:

Mayor Greg Nickels, worried that a rash of new clubs might open, proposed a series of rules: Dancers had to stay 4 feet (1.2 meters) from customers.
Patrons couldn't give money directly to dancers. The clubs had to increase their lighting and get rid of any private rooms. In addition to dissuading clubs from opening, the regulations would be easier for vice cops to enforce, the mayor's office said.

Considering that Seattle's rules were relatively strict for a big city to begin with — no alcohol at clubs, no nude women except on stage — the dancers feared for their livelihoods.

And is the city that passed tough new restrictions on lap dancing, just upheld by the Nevada Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court's majority opinion, written by Justice Nancy Becker, upholds an ordinance that states no erotic dancer shall fondle or caress any patron, and no patron shall fondle or caress any dancer.
In upholding the city code, the high court noted its wording was identical to a county ordinance in Washington state upheld by a federal circuit court of appeals 20 years ago.

Justices said the Las Vegas ordinance properly attempted to strike a balance between protected expressive conduct - erotic dancing in this case - and negative secondary effects such as prostitution, venereal disease or drug- and alcohol-related crime.
The high court also said the rule doesn't violate a requirement for alternative channels for communication of the message conveyed by the expressive conduct.
Even if the erotic dancers' message is slightly less effective without caressing and fondling, their message is not significantly impaired, Justice Becker wrote.

In both cities, the expressive conduct argument was made, although it was taken to exquisitely absurd extremes in the Nevada case, which just shows what a joke some are willing to make of the First Amendment. A provision seen as vital to protect the political give-and-take necessary in a constitutional republic has been reduced to a justification of groin grinding in strip clubs.
Given what is now prohibited in Las Vegas, by the way, many of us have apparently had a mistaken impression of the purpose of lap dancing.

Posted by Leo Morris on November 14, 2006 at 05:33 AM | I haven't seen Borat and don't intend to, so judge my remarks about it accordingly. I'm squeamish about that kind of humor, which sets out to deliberately deceive people, then invites the rest of us to laugh at the fools who have been duped. Apparently, I'm one of the few people who feel that way.

The movie made $50 million in eight days and seems on track to be the highest-grossing comedy ever. It's being praised from those across the political spectrum; here's a conservative :

Of course in our modern era of political correctness this is a rare phenomenon, which makes Cohen all the more funny and startling. Compare him to the so much blander Comedy Central duo Stewart and Colbert.
It’s hard to imagine either of them with anything close to enough guts to do something as outrageous as the now famous nude wrestling scene in Borat. I also couldn’t imagine them making a group of real life New York feminists seem like complete idiots. Cohen does the same thing later in the film with a right-wing rodeo rider as well.
He is an equal opportunity destroyer. And we know they all deserve it.

They deserved it?

I don't think so. We all behave foolishly now and then. If they deserved it, we do, too.

I understand that cruelty is the foundation of much humor, which helps us rise above human weakness by lampooning it. And much of the humor is directed at specific individuals -- you won't to read very far back on this blog to find people I've made fun of. But this type of humor, based on inviting trust then violating it, seems over the top.

But maybe that's just me. I even felt uncomfortable while watching -- and laughing at, along with everyone else -- Candid Camera.
Posted by Leo Morris on November 13, 2006 at 05:28 AM | Poor , having to confess to being a deceiver and a liar -- and who apparently had sex as well -- must now redefine the rest of his life, in public.

But some good comes from all tragedy. His ordeal has had the positive effect of encouraging to confess who he really is:

Neil Patrick Harris is gay and wants to quell any rumors to the contrary. (I) am quite proud to say that I am a very content gay man living my life to the fullest, Harris tells People magazine's Web site.

Doogie is gay? I'm shattered. One of these days, I swear, we're going to hear from a gay Hollywood icon, who will confess that he's been secretly having sex with a woman for all these years and thinks George Bush is, all things considered, a pretty good president.

It will really hit the fan then.
Posted by Leo Morris on November 6, 2006 at 05:44 AM | In my last vacation post from Texas on Friday, I lamented the left-right camps we let ourselves get pushed into during campaign season, an exercise in political extremism that is at odds with the way I think most of us live our lives, which is to assess each issue as it comes, making the best decision we can based on the available evidence. A case in point, for me, is gay marriage, which is in the news again because of , and which President Bush has brought up :

Activist judges try to define America by court order, Bush told the crowd of 4,000 at Silver Creek High School, flanked by local Rep.
Mike Sodrel, R-Ind., who is running for re-election. Just this week in New Jersey, another activist court issued a ruling that raises doubt about the institution of marriage.
We believe marriage is between a man and a woman.
At that, the crowd went wild, members shouting USA, stomping feet and shaking pompoms*.

I have both libertarian and conservative instincts, and same-sex marriage is one of those issues where my instincts are battling it out, with no clear winner yet.

The libertarian part of me says that what two people want to do, if they are harming no on else, is none of government's business. But my conservative nature says that marriage has been defined in one way for all of human history and we ought to be careful before we start messing around with it. Where that leaves me, for now, is that recognizing civil unions, giving gay couples the same rights that any other two people have by right of contract, is pretty much a no-brainer.

But going the next step and recognizing actual gay marriages, with the government's imprimatur, is something we ought to take very slowly, through a state-by-state legislative process rather than by judicial fiat.
That seems to me to be an issue over which we might have a rational, logical debate, and I would very much like to participate in such a discussion. But in today's climate, it seems almost impossible.

To many on the right, even acknowledging that there might be gay couples desiring to be treated with respect is a rejection of all sacred American traditions. To many on the left, refusing to move beyond civil unions is proof of a hardhearted indifference to the plight of all downtrodden people everywhere.
*The term, fellow journalists, especially those of you at the venerable New York Times and Washington Post, is pompon, not pompom, which is a bigger gun than most of you have seen.

Posted by Leo Morris on October 30, 2006 at 05:37 AM | Long before the Baltimore Orioles passed out lipstick and the Red Sox and other baseball teams began selling pink hats, ``ladies-night giveaways have been a fixture of America's pastime.
But a California lawyer, denied a free hat at an Oakland A's game because they were reserved for female fans, has filed suit against the team to put a stop to the practice. Alfred Rava calls such giveaways ``sex discrimination on steroids.

He is also suing the Los Angeles Angels for giving away tote bags to women only on Mother's Day.
Don't ever say the frivolous-lawsuit lunacy is as bad as it can get.
Posted by Leo Morris on August 23, 2006 at 06:07 AM |

Hot enough for you, honey?

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now it is bare legs that are more likely to get people hot under the collar. As temperatures soared last week and office workers stripped off to brave the sweltering walk to work, a heated debate was ignited in the business press, one leading female commentator declaring a bare-flesh epidemic and decrying the raunch culture that has arrived in the British workplace.

This is the one positive thing I've seen result from the heat wave. Bring on that global warming!
Posted by Leo Morris on July 18, 2006 at 06:02 AM |

June 20, 2006

When I started college, I think my parents were disappointed I went to IPFW.

What, you're still going to live at home? When I quit after a year and a half and joined the Army, I could almost read their minds. Ah, a little peace and quite at last.

How times change. Parents now have so much trouble letting go that universities such as Indiana and Purdue have to conduct on it.

The tendency for today's parents to hover is so prevalent that experts coined a nickname: helicopter parents.

Possible factors contributing to the behavior range from rising tuition costs -- parents see themselves as a customer -- to cell phones, which provide instant access.

DeeDee Siniard, Bedford, is the first to admit old habits die hard. The Bedford mother fished out a cell phone during IU's orientation last week and sent a text message to her daughter, Shalana: R u ok?

And this is obviously a , as this report from Florida (with a wonderful headline: Mommy, tell my professor he's not nice!) indicates:

The worst of them - those who do unethical things, like write their kid's term papers - are branded Black Hawks, a nod to the souped-up military helicopters.
I also call them tether parents, says Heaton, who directs FSU's freshman orientation program.
It's like a leash. Students are afraid to make decisions about classes or anything without calling home.

Posted by Leo Morris on June 20, 2006 at 05:42 AM | 1.

Are probably white,
2. But don't feel sufficiently guilty about it.
, from The Michigan State University Web site, will set you straight.

You are so privileged, you see, that you don't even recognize how privileged you are. Now, go out and apologize to everybody who isn't white for the circumstances of your birth.
Posted by Leo Morris on March 24, 2006 at 05:31 AM | You know, if you go through life thinking mostly in terms of victims and victimizers, you probably see yourself as victim rather than victimizer, so you're likely to be unhappy most of the time.

That's my take on we published by Judy Harris, an adjunct faculty member in women's studies at IPFW. She quotes approvingly the work of another academic, Rose Brooks of the University of Virginia School of Law:

Based on social psychology research, happy people tend to rely on “heuristic shortcuts” in their task-performance and decision-making processes. In other words, they make simplistic assumptions and “rely more on ethnic and social stereotypes and political ideology in lieu of analysis,” as compared to unhappy people who recognize the complexity of circumstances and think them through.
The naive ways of looking at the world can act as insulation from contemporary humanity and its many realities. There is a desire to hold on to a romanticized past in which life appeared less complicated and easier to control. The recognition of the intricacy and interrelatedness of issues and problems and the application of critical thinking, as opposed to effortless-cliché approaches to life, do have a tendency to somewhat reduce the happy mentality.

I'f I'm reading that right, it's the old if you're happy, you must be stupid argument. The smarter you get, the unhappier you are, because you realize this crazy old world is a lot more complicated than the goofy simpletons realize. Unless, of course, you are one of those evil conservative, Republican religious types, because then you out there every day trying to figure out how to screw everybody else.

You are naturally the happiest people of all, because you are blind to the racial and gender inequities that occurred and still persist.
I could go on and on about the politics of all this, but that's well-trod ground. And besides, I think Harris and Brooks are just plain wrong on a fundamental level:

We need unhappy people in our world and our town.
Unhappiness and discontent inspire movements for change. Living in a comfort zone, the environment of what we deem to be happiness, does little to help entertain or initiate solutions for inclusiveness of all.

I don't think unhappy people contribute to anything.

Unhappy people just sit around and stew in their own misery, paralyzed by their feelings of inadequacy. Progress and innovation, both evolution and revolution, come from people who are both dissatisfied with the way things are and driven to change them. That combination results in reslessness, which unleashes creativity.

Unhappiness and discontent are not the same thing.
I hate to sound like a damn self-help book, but happiness comes from within. As Martha Washington said, The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances.

Posted by Leo Morris on March 7, 2006 at 05:12 AM | US President George W. Bush signalled his opposition to a South Dakota abortion ban that forbids the procedure even in cases of rape or incest, saying he favors such exceptions.
But Bush declined to predict the outcome of any legal challenges to the legislation, which would make it illegal to terminate a pregnancy except in rare cases when it may be necessary to save the life of the mother

Either a fetus is an innocent, unborn baby, or it is a clump of cells of no more importance than any other clump of cells.

If it is an innocent life, it deserves the same chance to be born as any other fetus, however it was conceived. If it is a clump of cells, giving it rights of any kind is pointless.
I find this position as incomprensible as the Kennedy Catholic I personally believe abortion is murder but support your right to do it stance.

Can someone clarify it for me?

Posted by Leo Morris on March 2, 2006 at 05:06 AM | OK, enough; the Christmas wars are getting tiresome. I like that strikes a plague on both their houses attitude:
The only thing more annoying than the killjoys who want to keep creches off town greens is listening to Bill O'Reilly or John Gibson rant about how it's all part of an insidious plot, cooked up in some secret lair where Barry Lynn, John Shelby Spong and the editorial board of the New York Times gather to guzzle eggnog and plan the destruction of all that is good and holy.
To the extent that the real meaning (or the original intent, if you will) of the season has suffered serious damage, the PC nonsense is just a flesh wound - the real de-Christianization of Christmas is being carried out, as it has been for some time, by the frenetic pace of modern life, and the crassifying tendencies of commerce.
Posted by Leo Morris on December 21, 2005 at 05:57 AM |
December 20, 2005
The modern world rolls on -- a new way to cheat, a new way to :
Indiana colleges -- and even some high schools -- have reached the end of the semester armed against a surge of student cyber-cheaters who would rather copy, paste and plagiarize than spend all night on a term paper.
Educators have spent thousands of dollars on firms that catch copycats.
They have tweaked teaching strategies, stepped up penalties and asked students to sign codes of conduct.
These kids today, I tell you . .
. when I was in school, cheaters had to sit next to the smart kids and hope they didn't cover the answers. If they don't get caught before they get good at it, by the way, the cut-and-pasters can grow up to be bloggers.

Posted by Leo Morris on December 20, 2005 at 05:04 AM | Did anybody really think same-sex couples entering would get the relationship thing down any better than the rest of us?
A Vermont lesbian couple who entered into the nation's first same-sex civil union are splitting up amid allegations of violent behavior.
Posted by Leo Morris on December 16, 2005 at 05:33 AM |
I'm not hateful, just sick
Prejudice as ?
My first inclination is to call it just plain silly. But this person says it better:
I think it's absurd, said Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and the author of PC, M.D.
: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine. Satel said the diagnosis would allow hate-crime perpetrators to evade responsibility by claiming they suffered from a mental illness. You could use it as a defense.

Posted by Leo Morris on December 13, 2005 at 05:38 AM | If cursing is a problem in schools today -- anybody prepared to say it's not? -- there are two extremes we can approach in trying to :
Students in Hartford, Conn., now have to pay for what they say - literally.

Under a new plan, 2,800 students at two high schools in the district could be subject to $103 fines for uttering profanity on school premises.
Or, we can go the other way and follow the just go with the flow approach:
At Boca Raton high school in Florida, principal Geoff McKee says that some words, in certain contexts, carried much harsher connotations years ago and no longer require out-of-school suspensions. They revamped their policy accordingly.

As one person notes in the article, The problem is not so much the words themselves, it's the negative attitude that accompanies them. Students who cross the curse line are deliberately testing the limits set by schools. The latitudinarian approach does nothing to address that underlying reality.

Posted by Leo Morris on December 13, 2005 at 05:17 AM | Well, if this is what are going to be like,
Gone are the nights of photocopying one's bare buttocks, groping interns and hauling home a gift bag full of goodies,
then what's the point?
And just to completely get you in the holiday spirit, know that ticks some people off.
Posted by Leo Morris on December 12, 2005 at 05:09 AM | A Seattle-area school district recalled its December lunch menus for 23 elementary schools because they were printed with the greeting Merry Christmas.

The recycled 11,500 copies of the calendar-style menu and reprinted it with the greeting Happy Holidays, The News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., reported.
Posted by Leo Morris on December 9, 2005 at 06:02 AM | This case should give you pause, no matter which side of the abortion debate you're on.

Whether it is better never to have been born at all than to have been born with even gross deficiencies is a mystery more properly to be left to the philosophers and the theologians, the New York Court of Appeals wrote in a 1986 decision rejecting a similar wrongful life claim. The implications of any such proposition are staggering.
Posted by Leo Morris on November 21, 2005 at 06:04 AM |
The seed of matricide?
I know a lot of people are praising for being brave enough to take drastic action to change her daughter's behavior. But I think the girl's reaction -- Coretha, a soft-spoken girl, acknowledged the punishment was humiliating but said it got her attention. 'I won't talk back,' she said quietly, hanging her head.
-- probably masks a seething resentment. If I were that mom, I'd be sleeping with one eye open from now on.
Posted by Leo Morris on November 18, 2005 at 05:28 AM | If you don't understand the , you don't know television history, and if you don't know television history, you're missing a lot of the current state of American culture.

We all know that the CSI franchise is a lot more serious than the old 77 clones. William Petersen, David Caruso, and Gary Sinise almost never smile, except ruefully, rarely chase women they aren't trying to put on death row, and their partners are no longer exclusively male because the secretaries and cabaret singers have been promoted to professional status, which means they don't smile either.
I think it would be kind of cool to see some crossover episodes on some of the nonfiction shows.
We see a man on Oprah, talking about how he's working through his inabiltiy to deal with women. We next see him on Dr. Phil, having failed to work through the issue, flanked by his wife, who tells Dr.
Phil about all his shortcomings. Next we see him on Jerry Springer, attacked by his wife and her lesbian lover. Next stop: COPS, with perhaps a short detour through Judge Judy's courtroom.

Of course we already have the ultimate crossover show: Its' called the news, with the networks and 24-hour cable operations all giving us the same three or four stories endlessly until we're sick of them. Can't wait for the next pretty, young blonde woman who gets in trouble overseas.
Posted by Leo Morris on November 9, 2005 at 06:43 AM | Are we becoming less polarized?
Or maybe that polarized to begin with:
But Fiorina argued in a book, Culture War? , that the notion of a polarized America was a myth to begin with. The true polarization, he said, was always in the politicians - offering starkly different choices to voters - and in the media, eager to portray a conflict and more exposed to political junkies in New York and Washington.

The quick finding is, if you look at people's positions, there's not that much difference, he says.
Posted by Leo Morris on November 8, 2005 at 06:03 AM | When I was around 8 or 9, I inadvertently saw that year's Christmas presents at the back of a closet. I kept pretending for a couple of months, but that was the real end of Santa Claus in my young life.
I had learned an adult secret before my parents were ready to let me in on it. It seems overly simplistic to admit it now, but the discovery brought a profound sense of disillusion.
That was back in a time when parents really did believe they could keep their children cocooned in innocence, at least for a time.
They closely monitored what their kids saw on TV, what movies they went to, what music they listened to and who their friends were. They tried to hold back as long as possible the time when adult evils such as drugs and random violence and thoughtless sex came crashing in the door. It was a never-ending job, but most people thought it was manageable.

Too many people, especially in my profession, seem to think we still live in that more rational era. You don't like that racy TV program? Why, just lock it out so the kids can't see it, and quit whining about something the rest of us want to see.
Those rap lyrics are just too explicit? Silly you, that's why there's a warning label. But for every one thing parents block or prevent, there are a hundred more.
The popular culture -- including, and maybe especially, that aimed at young people -- is saturated with crudity and sleaze. Parents can't monitor everything all the time.
On Oct.
21, I took my 10-year-old daughter to see the movie “Dreamer” at the Rave theatre in Fort Wayne. This is a PG-rated, feel-good family movie. Unfortunately, the previews were not.
The Rave showed a preview for a movie about child prostitution. This appalling clip openly talked about children having sex and being sold for sex, showed a grown man pulling the top off a young girl and had several other young girls half-naked on a bed with men approaching them. My daughter looked up at me and said, “Dad, should I close my eyes?
” It was disgusting and inappropriate to display at a movie made for kids and families.
Sadly, my daughter, as well as countless other young children, will now have sexually explicit images forever burned into their memories. What I received in return was a disingenuous apology and the promise they will continue to rely on feedback from their customers instead of taking precautionary measures to actually ensure sexually explicit material does not end up in their movies for children.
Thanks for nothing, Rave; your system really works!
The letter is so sad not because of the single episode it describes, but because it symbolizes the whole mess of a world we've created for our children. Parents try to keep their kids in a PG world as long as possible -- they pay attention and do all the right things -- only to have to R-rated world forced upon them when they least expect it by other adults who can't see beyond their own selfish pursuits.

Lord knows there were problems with the let the children be children as long as they can approach. Too often parents didn't want to deal with the issues at all -- putting off those talks about sex and drugs until it was too late -- and left their kids unprepared for the adult world. But it seems far worse to me to steal childhood by pouring adult sludge into young minds not ready to deal with it.

That's why there was such outrage from parents over the Janet-Jackson-at-the-Superbowl incident. It was just one thing too many, the wrong crude thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. And those who tried to fly the freedom-of-expression banner at the FCC's swift reaction ( Michael Powell was at the opening baseball game and threw out the First Amendment, ho-ho-ho) seemed utterly clueless about the losing battle parents are still trying to wage.

As it happens, I liked the movie Bad Santa, starring Billy Bob Thornton at his raunchy best. Just don't show the trailer for Bad Santa II at a showing of the next remake of Miracle on 34th Street, OK?
Posted by Leo Morris on November 7, 2005 at 02:26 AM | If a public education is supposed to be a collaborative effort between parents and the society at large (and some of us still hold on to this belief), what are we to make of , which basically tells parents they have no say in the matter?

The three-judge panel of the full court further ruled that parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students.
Because the case is about sex, I think a lot of people will overlook the deeper, more troubling implications. I think this critic is not overly alarmist:
What the court did here is declare parenthood unconstitutional.
It's long been the liberal view that it takes a village to raise a child – but never before have the 'villagers' been elevated, as a matter of law, above mothers and fathers.
No wonder home schooling is such a growing movement.
Posted by Leo Morris on November 4, 2005 at 05:23 AM | Hawaii is going to begin issuing report cards for its elementary students, which will replace the familiar letter grades with ME (meets with excellence), MP (meets proficiency), N (approaches) and U (well below), along with four pages of details parents are sure not to understand.
It seems to some people. It sounds like edubabble to me.
Say what you will about the old grading system, we all understand it.
Everybody knows what you mean if you say so-and-so is just doing C work or gets an A for that report. Its part of our common language. And whatever words are used, people are still ranked according to their performance.

Posted by Leo Morris on October 25, 2005 at 06:23 AM | I have to wait until my Newsweek comes to get any real news. This item was tucked in the back of the latest issue, under Newsmakers:
Just because her name is Madonna, does she have to take being a mother so seriously? It's one thing to keep Lourdes, 9, and Rocco, 5 from watching TV -- they might catch Mom kissing Britney Spears.
But what does she have against magazines? Or milk and ice cream, which are also banned. When Daddy gets home, they get chocolate, Madonna says.
I'm the disciplinarian. And heaven help Lourdes if she leaves her laundry on the floor. We take all of her clothes and put them in a bag, and she has to earn all her clothes back by being tidy, Madonna says.
She wears the same outfit every day to school until she learns her lesson. That's one way to make sure your daughter doesn't turn into a material girl.
You know how former smokers are the biggest anti-smoking Nazis?
I'd say this applies here, about a lot of things. Another Mommie Dearest in the making.
This is the same issue, by the way, that has the cover story about How Women Lead, accompanied by a picture of Oprah (or O, as I like to call her), not to be confused with the photo on the same page as the Madonna item showing the three blondes posing with the boyfriend older than all of them put together, Hugh Hefner.

All the bases covered, as usual.
Posted by Leo Morris on October 19, 2005 at 06:06 AM | It's hard to argue with Brother Kenneth Hoagland, principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School, about the of proms today. Conspicuous consumption was once thought to be a rather scandalous claim to make against somebody; today, it's a quaint expression.
Why wouldn't high school students also want to do everything bigger, flashier, riskier?
Fed up with the revealing evening gowns, flashy tuxedos, stretch limos, alcohol, drugs, sex and rowdy house parties that have become an increasingly common part of the dinner-dance scene across New York's Long Island, Kellenberg administrators canceled the prom this year as a way to end the excesses that precede and follow it.
I wonder if his solution is the best one, though.
He's getting the school completely out of the picture, which leaves students and their parents free to have their own big bashes. As the story indicates, parents have been more than a little involved already. Wouldn't it be better for the school to offer a saner, tamer alternative?
It can never control what goes on before or after school events. But at least it can keep trying to instruct by setting its own standards.
These kids today, I tell you.
Why, I remember the proms in my day.
Oh, wait, that's right. I was a backward doofus.
I didn't even go to my prom. I just stayed home and went to bed early.
Posted by Leo Morris on October 18, 2005 at 04:49 PM | I'm not crazy about Oregon's assisted-suicide law.
For one thing, it's dangerous to do anything to make suicide an easy first option instead of a desperate last one; that's the wrong thing to add to the culture, considering how many teens consider suicide and don't need that much encouragement. For another, inviting physicians to participate takes that profession where we shouldn't want it to go. People have always committed suicide when they felt they had no other choice, and many of them have been helped by friends and loved ones and, yes, even the family physician, but on an informal basis.
Let's keep the law out of it.
But that's Oregon's call (one I hope and trust we will never make in Indiana). It's called federalism, and the states are supposed to be our laboratories of democracy.
Washington's with federal anti-drug laws is cynical and opportunistic, akin to outlawing medical marijuana on the grounds that it somehow affects interstate commerce.
Posted by Leo Morris on October 13, 2005 at 08:10 AM | Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to have a Hoosier pervert off the streets.
But how much money is ? What about murderers and rapists instead of just child molesters? Can you imagine the poor snooks who turn their friends into Crime Stoppers now and have to settle for a pitiful few hundred dollars?

And by the way: There has been a rash of burglaries very near my block in the past few weeks. For just a few thousand bucks, I can hire someone to watch my house while I'm at work.
Posted by Leo Morris on October 13, 2005 at 06:38 AM | In the , it's all about the money or the fame, or maybe the money and the fame:
The very rich--John D.
Rockefeller and powerful people of his era--used to pay press agents to keep their names out of the papers. But today one of the things money buys is a place at the table beside the celebrated, with the celebrities generally delighted to accommodate, there to share some of the glaring light.
Posted by Leo Morris on October 11, 2005 at 07:18 AM |
!
@#$ you, we're British
We may be getting too politically correct here in the colonies, but at least we don't have to worry yet about being :
In 1999, Parliament gave British police special powers to issue ASBOs (anti-social behavior orders) for drunk and disorderly behavior, noise, graffiti, littering, aggressive panhandling, riding bicycles on sidewalks and even failing to maintain a tidy garden. Such acts were deemed likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress, according to the government's crime-prevention website.
Over the past six years, more than 4,600 ASBOs have been issued.
Penalties for serious infractions such as multiple counts of harassment can reach up to $35,000 in fines or five years in jail.

On the other hand, anything that makes clean up his act is probably a good idea.
Posted by Leo Morris on October 10, 2005 at 07:04 AM |

Where's my Kryptonite?

I'm an ardent advocate of civil liberties and all, but couldn't we have sterilized or something?
Posted by Leo Morris on October 4, 2005 at 07:33 AM |

What's for dinner?

I think most of us would agree that has not been good for us, and it's nice to think that bringing it back could cure so many of our ills.

But as the columnist himself hints at near the end of the piece, it's a lot more complicated than that. The diappearance of the dinner hour isn't the cause of the loss of family cohesion but the result of it.
Posted by Leo Morris on October 3, 2005 at 07:28 AM | I thoroughly enjoyed the two-part Bob Dylan documentary on PBS Monday and Tuesday nights, although it seems odd that all the recent Dylanmania focuses on his first few years when he's had a career lasting more than 40 years.

for such '60s wallowing, as post-boomer critic David Greenberg points out in a Slate article:

One part of the answer is that Dylan shares a problem with the 1960s as a whole: Scholarship and popular commentary alike are shaped by the baby boomers who lived through the period and have never quite transcended their own youthful enthusiasms.

(Lots of interesting links in the article, too)
Posted by Leo Morris on September 29, 2005 at 07:42 AM | Would you believe Don Adams was run over by a rabid elephant? No?

Would you believe he fell into a gravel pit? No? Well, would you believe he just got old ?

His goal was to die when nothing else was going on, so he could get better play. Missed it by THAT much.
Adams may not have liked Get Smart, but a lot of the rest of us did.

It sure beat most of what was on back then. Spoofs, series whose point is to make fun of existing genres, are hard to pull off. Two classcis were Police Squad, which lasted less than a season in 1982 but spawned the very successful Naked Gun series of movies; and Sledge Hammer from the late '80s, which was so good it seemed to spoof movies that hadn't even come out yet.

Some shows walked the line so finely that sometimes you couldn't tell if they were meant as spoofs or not -- Maverick, for example, or The Flintstones. Today we have shows like The Simpsons and The Family Guy that spoof so many genres at once that it's hard to keep up.
Posted by Leo Morris on September 26, 2005 at 04:58 PM |

OK, a reprieve for PBS

No phone calls , OK?

Posted by Leo Morris on September 26, 2005 at 07:18 AM | Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.
Two interesting insights in the article: 1) Cursing helps us get rid of stress and anger. 2) Cursing helps us relax -- the people we feel most comfortable with are the ones we're most likely to curse in front of.

At The News-Sentinel, we're in the midst of reviewing and updating our profanity policy, which is more or less like those of most newspapers. Reporters aren't to use stuff on the forbidden list unless it is deemed crucial to the story and is approved by a senior editor. Most of the list isn't surprising, though the inclusion of damn with all the Carlin-type words seems a little too much.

Profanity policies might seem a little quaint in this day and age, especially since newspapers are now online, which means we link to all kinds of Web sites with all kinds of language. But consider the universal nature of profanity and the way it has been used in all cultures to sort out what kind of relationships we have and how loose we are with certain people. No one who writes for any mass medium, be it print or blog, should assume he's writing for just his best friends.

Most of the readers will be strangers. We wouldn't feel comfortable cursing in their presence, so why would we just because we aren't there to gauge their reactions?
Posted by Leo Morris on September 22, 2005 at 08:38 AM |

September 20, 2005

It's fine if these people fundamentalist offense-finders just to protect the bottom line, but what about the sensitivities of the rest of us?

Why are they allowed to keep calling the place Burger King instead of Burger President or Burger Committee Chairperson?
Posted by Leo Morris on September 20, 2005 at 09:34 AM |

Go ahead, make me cry

Reams and reams could be written on from the movies than make men cry and the movies that make women cry (click on the chart to see the complete lists). But you know what?

I won't touch it, except to note that Schindler's List being at the top of the men's list and Ghost heading the women's says a whole lot.
Posted by Leo Morris on September 20, 2005 at 08:17 AM | They're taking a break in the Judiciary Committee, and Edward Kennedy is being interviewed on Court TV, saying that what both Democrats and Republicans want is a justice who is in "the mainstream." In the first place, that's utter nonsense.

Each side wants someone who will do with the court what that side thinks should be done with the court. And in the second place, exactly what is the "mainstream"? Prevailing legal opinion?

What a majority of Americans think? What does any of that have to do with constitutional interpretation? Now Kennedy is trotting out Katrina again and how that proves that "equal protection" is not a reality, blah, blah, blah.

Well, I've been poor and . . .

Ok, "not so poor" is as far as I've climbed . . .

but I know this: Poor people don't have it as easy as rich people. Fact of life -- get over it. Or else just say what you really mean, which is that you want all wealth to be taken by the government and redistributed by your formula, and you want the Supreme Court to help you.

You've never believed in "equal opportunity" in your life. "Equal results" is your religion. The quality of commentary on Court TV has just dropped.

Nancy Grace is a twit, sucking up to Kennedy and saying it's an outrage that Roberts is ducking questions. Posted by Leo Morris on September 13, 2005 at 12:43 PM |

Still in Kansas, Dorothy

If we allow one theory of intelligent design of the universe into science classrooms, wouldn't we then have to let in as well?
Posted by Leo Morris on September 13, 2005 at 06:14 AM | The Republican governor had indicated in previous statements that he would veto the bill, saying the debate over same-sex marriage should be decided by voters or the courts.

But in our republic, such momentous decisions are supposed to be made by legislatures, acting on behalf of the people. The idea of a representative democracy is that decisions are made one step removed from the passions of the people. And courts, in any rational system of governance, should arbitrate, not legislate.

Supporters of the bill accuse Arnold of pandering to evil, rightwing conservatives, but he's really pandering to a much bigger group. Californians voted for Proposition 22, which said, Only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. As far as Arnold is concerned, that's the end of it; the people have spoken.

California is one of the states -- thank God Indiana isn't one of them -- that encourage mobocracy, the ability of the majority to stamp their feet and say they're just not going to take it anymore. One day they might decide to made carrots the state vegetable, and the next they might decide all redheads should be taken out and shot.
Arnold is, unfortunately, right that the issue will probably be decided in court -- rule by the elite, the opposite but equally troublesome path from rule by the majority.

Civil unions are now recognized in Vermont and same-sex marriages in Massachusetts by judicial fiat. And Proposition 22 was aimed at stopping California from recognizing gay marriages authorized in other states. That conflicts with the full-faith-and-credit clause of the Constitution, which is why this issue will ultimately be decided by the U.

S. Supreme Court. Just one more reason to pay attention to the confirmation hearings for John Roberts set to begin on Monday.

I confess to not having made up my mind on same-sex marriage. The time for civil unions, I think, has come. There is simply no reason to give numerous contractual rights to some couples and not to others.

But gay marriage is a much bigger step, and I find the libertarian part of me and the conservative part of me at odds. On the one hand, state recognition of any marriage puts government and religion in bed together in a way we wouldn't accept on any other issue. On the other, marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been society's standard for all of time; that's a powerful thing to casually toss aside.

On any given day, in a mobocracy, I would go one way or the other, based on which passion was controlling me.
That's why such issues belong in legislatures rather than courts or referendums. A legislature is the unit of government closest to the people, but not too close.

Legislators can listen to the people, but then vote their own consciences and understanding of the legal and philosophical issues after long, vigorous and -- it is devoutly to be wished -- informed debate.
Posted by Leo Morris on September 7, 2005 at 06:52 PM | On the death of , some interesting trivia about Gilligan's Island in the New York Times obituary: The relationship of Gilligan and the Skipper was based on Laurel and Hardy. Gilligan's first name, seldom used, was Willy.

The Minnow was so named in homage to FCC Chairman Newton Minnow of vast wasteland fame. And the show was cancelled after three seasons, though still high in the ratings, so that CBS could stretch Gunsomke from a half-hour to a full hour.
The thing is, Denver died on Friday, and America wasn't told until Tuesday, causing millions of Gilligan fans pain and anguish, whether or not they want to admit it.

Certainly we can put some blame on the family, and on local government officials who didn't get the word out despite the family's wishes. But let's be blunt: Where was President Bush?
Posted by Leo Morris on September 7, 2005 at 06:11 AM |

Round, round, get around

A piece on THE .

Like most pop criticism, it's overthought and overwrought, but it's right that the Beach Boys' importance and Brian Wislon's talent often get overlooked. And I defy anydody to find better driving-around music.
Posted by Leo Morris on September 6, 2005 at 08:04 AM |

August 20, 2005

If there are so many ways in such small niches, maybe Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame should be reduced to a minute or two.

On the other hand, if you want to and make me a little bit famous, I wouldn't mind. One of the people in the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame is someone I once worked with. He used to boast that, when letters to the editor started slowing down, he would write a fake letter and publish it -- all stray dogs should just be shot was one of his favorites -- just to get readers worked up and writing again.

Fame doesn't mean worth or quality. It just means made his mark.
Posted by Leo Morris on August 20, 2005 at 07:40 PM | Can a panhandler's ability to ask for money be restricted, but a firefighter's right to stand by the road and raise money for charity be upheld, without somebody's rights being violated?

Such questions are important to ask, but every time the issue is brought up, advocates always find a new right nobody ever thought of before. A proposed in Atlanta has some claiming it is a civil rights issue, since many of those begging are black. And because a similar proposal would have an exception for street performers, you just know somebody had to think of it as discrimination against the talentless.

And when to put some restrictions on begging a few years ago, it became a First Amendment issue.
This is just one area in which people are trying to make that balance individual rights with quality-of-life expectations in an urban environment. Courts have apparently been OK with very specific bans, such as those prohibiting carefully defined aggressive panhandling, but more negative toward very broad bans.

If the comeback of downtown Fort Wayne is ever successful, we'll probably have to deal with some of these problems. It's instructive that we don't have to right now.
Posted by Leo Morris on August 15, 2005 at 10:05 AM |

The road goes on forever, and .
. .

The prime directive of libertarianism and a pretty good restatement of the Golden Rule: Just don't stand on anybody's head.

Not sure I buy this marriage of conservatism and , but it's a fascinating read. For sure, more people on the right are fans of Jerry Garcia than of . Joke I heard once: What did the Dead Head say when he ran out of pot?

You know what? This music sucks.
Posted by Leo Morris on August 11, 2005 at 07:07 AM |

Coming soon: One medium, on-line

This shows that broadband Internet users watch TV two hours less a week than those who aren't connected.

Some might say that on-line time isn't any more productive than boob-tube time, but it's at least not as passive. Such distinctions will mean less as the Internet becomes faster and encompasses both TV and movie watching, radio listening and who knows what else. Interestingly, Internet use seems to slightly affect the time people spend reading but not the time they spend listening to the radio.

Posted by Leo Morris on August 5, 2005 at 06:12 AM |

A Friend in need, indeed

Well, enough about the shuttle and terrorism and the death of that important guy over in the Mideast somewhere. Now we get to the uff that we've all been waiting for:

Am I lonely? Yes.
Am I upset? Yes. Am I confused?
Yes. Do I have my days when I've thrown a little pity party for myself? Absolutely.
But I'm also doing really well.

Shocking, simply shocking.
Posted by Leo Morris on August 3, 2005 at 06:14 AM | Well, are you going to call Comcast and demand that it carry ?

Gore is aiming his programming at young people and must not think highly of their attention spans:

Based on material previewed on its Web site, Current TV at first glance seems like a hipper, more irreverent version of traditional television newsmagazines.
Most of its programming will be in pods, roughly two to seven minutes long, covering topics like jobs, technology, spirituality and current events. An Internet-like on-screen progress bar will show the pod's length.

Some critics say Gore's concept -- letting viewers provide much of the content -- might be obsolete before the network really gets off the ground. AOL's recent airing of the Live 8 concerts is a hint of the true cutting edge of communications, Web menus that let viewers choose from an almost limitless range of programming. But digital-media expert J.

D. Lasica has this to say about that: lying on a couch still beats sitting at a desktop. Boy, that's not too cynical, is it?

Posted by Leo Morris on August 2, 2005 at 06:23 AM |

You know how to hiss, don't you?

One of the nice things about old friends is that you don't feel the need to fill all the conversational voids with mindless chatter. You can just enjoy each other's presence in companionable silence.

Favorite movies can be like old friends.

Keywords: Santa Claus, New York, High School, Every Day, Fort Wayne, Editorial Page, Supreme Court, First Amendment, New York Times, George Bush

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