One of those things I just don’t get...

Got a letter from a disgruntled reader this morning:

Your page 15 Sheriff’s calls from this week’s paper had a pretty appalling story regarding the “condom.” My wife and I have 3 girls in the Sisters School district, 2 of which are HIGHLY encouraged by the middle school teachers to READ the Nugget every week.

Can you imagine how likely it is we are going to allow them to freely read the Nugget on their own after a story like this is allowed to be published? Of course, we realize the Sheriff Calls are meant to be ironic and poke fun at some of the stuff in the life of a small town. However, will you please consider that kids in this community are reading your newspaper when making a decision about what content to include?

Our hopes are you will cease from publishing any further content of this nature for the sake of all of our children here.

The offending entry:

• A man reported finding a condom hung on his door knob. There are no suspects. The man disposed of the condom - and cleaned his doorknob.

Honestly, folks, this is one of those things I just don’t get. “Sisters sheriff’s calls” also includes people getting jacked up on booze and hitting their wives or girlfriends, and The Nugget also has run stories about local men being arrested for sex abuse, etc., etc.

And the mention of a condom on a doorknob is what someone gets spun up about? I mean, yeah, it’s obnoxious and gross, (so is a bag of burning poop on the porch, which has also been featured in SSC) but are the implications really more “appalling” than somebody beating up his wife?

Whenever something like this comes up, I think of it as another “pixelating Apollonia’s breasts” moment. I came upon “The Godfather complete and uncut” one evening on TNT. I’ll watch “The Godfather” any time, so I tuned in.

Yep, there it was, in all its horse-head-in-the-bed glory. No editing of the brutal slaying of Sonny Corleone on the turnpike. But WAIT! Michael and Apollonia’s wedding night. The shy Sicilian girl demurely lowers her blouse and... her chest is pixelated.

I laughed aloud. Apparently it’s OK to show Sonny being chopped to hamburger by machine guns or a movie producer slimed with blood from the severed head of his prize racehorse, but god forbid that anyone see a female breast.

I'm not trying to get on a high horse about violence in media here; just noting a curious disparity in response. There's an discussion to be had over what constitutes gratuitous, but it's beyond the scope of this particular piece.

I, too, have a daughter in middle school. She reads The Nugget — mostly to hunt for hidden vocabulary words and for stories about horses. She also knows that if she reads or sees something in any media that upsets or bothers her, she can ask about it and her mom or I will talk to her about it.

Of course I recognize that people react differently to the same things and obviously the condom on a doorknob thing bothered the writer to a high enough degree that he took the time to e-mail his displeasure. Fair enough. There’s a constant weighing of where to draw the line in this business and it’s good to know where some of our readers would like to see it drawn.

But I remain flummoxed by the consistent degree to which people react so negatively to anything with any hint of sexual content and yet give the casual violence of everyday life and its media interpretations a pass. And the American media responds: buckets of blood, but no boobs please.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Love and a TEC-9

About a third of the way into Ben Affleck’s heist movie “The Town,” I realized I was watching a chick flick.

I’m okay with that — especially since it also has firefights with ordnance expenditure on the level of a battle on some Pacific atoll and a spectacular car chase on the claustrophobic colonial-era streets of Boston.

It’s also sharply written, with some surprisingly funny bits that grow out of the characters and the story and don’t feel tacked on. In a season of real celluloid stinkers, that’s something to celebrate right there.

So, what makes it a chick flick? The center of the story is the redemptive power of love. Like Chris Knight says in the song: “Love and a .45/One will kill you one will keep you alive.”

The premise is simple: Doug MacRay (Affleck) and his crew of garishly disguised Townie heist experts knock over a Cambridge bank, briefly taking an assistant manager, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) hostage. Just to make sure that she can’t tip the crew to the feds, MacRay keeps tabs on her.

And... well, you know what happens.

Affleck is immensely appealing as MacRay — and he has to be to get you rooting for a career criminal to “make it.” MacRay is part of a Charlestown subculture that produces more bank robbers and armored car heisters per capita than any other place in the U.S. He’s good at the job, yet in Claire he sees the possibility of something else, something more.

But everything in Doug’s world — from his floozy sometimes-girlfriend Krista (Blake Lively) and his best friend, the sociopathic Jem Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), to some old-school ex-IRA gangsters — conspire to hold him to the old neighborhood and a way of life that only has one end with two variations: death on the street or death in prison.

That subculture itself is a major character in The Town.

The key to making the whole chick flick aspect work is Hall. Her Claire comes across real and genuine. An easy casting of some flashy A-list actress would have blown the whole thing. The emotional turmoil of her circumstances could easily fall into clichés; Hall’s performance leaves room for inner conflict and ambiguity.

“The Town” is lighter fare than the far superior “The Departed,” which works some similar turf and themes and some of the narrative choices mute its impact. But it’s a solid movie, way better than most of the fare we’ve been subjected to over the past summer. A nice date movie, perhaps... Love and a TEC-9 anyone?

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Don’t be stupid about economic development

It’s the political season in Sisters. Six candidates are vying for three seats on the Sisters City Council, which means they will have to distinguish themselves one from the other and sell voters on why they would do a better job as a councilor.

That’s all good. Except that if economic development becomes a political football — or, worse, a chew toy in a culture wars dogfight — Sisters will lose.

Actually, I’d like to jettison the term “economic development” and replace it with “economic vitality.” I think it’s more descriptive of a goal. We don’t just want to develop our economy — we want to make sure all sectors become and remain vital. At least, I assume we do.

We can’t afford to divide into camps, where one group favors one type of economic activity and another favors something else; where “the developers” are painted as somewhat sinister exploiters or proponents of focusing on the downtown core are dismissed as anti-growth obstructionists.

I’ve heard people talking about “economic development” using the term “the other side.” Big mistake. The distinctions are stupid. We’re too small to be stupid.

Whatever economic activity we can generate in Sisters is going to have a symbiotic relationship with all other economic activity. A vital, thriving, prosperous downtown core is vital to attracting the holy grail of “family wage” businesses, which in turn will provide patrons for shops and services.

There’s a legitimate debate to be had over where and how we should expend our energy and resources, but that debate has to be in good faith, not a way to score cheap political points or to poke your finger in the eye of somebody on “the other side.”

My own two cents are these: Any economic vitality plan or program that doesn’t focus first on retention is bogus. Attracting any business is speculative. Not that we shouldn’t try, but we must recognize that our best shot at economic vitality lies in enhancing the climate for the businesses that are here now.

If we can’t keep existing businesses vital, why would others come here? Vitality breeds greater vitality — and the opposite is true as well.

We have to define what we mean by retention. I don’t mean we prop up businesses that simply aren’t viable. The market is supposed to flush out businesses that don’t work; creative destruction is a healthy thing.

But sometimes — and especially in hard times — a business that could make it fails because there’s just not enough margin for error; a mistake or wrong turn is fatal. That’s where educational, financial and “enterprise facilitation” resources could really shine. Make sure that people with dreams have enough resources and savvy to avoid or quickly recover from the inevitable mistakes every entrepreneur makes; help them maximize their chances for success.

Then, of course, business owners themselves need to know what they don’t know and avail themselves of the resources available to them.

I always think of Jean Wells Keenan learning to be a business person through classes at COCC, building a thriving (and now international) business, a keystone of the community, because she knew she needed education, sought it out and found it when she needed it.

There’s a lot of pieces that have to work together to promote economic vitality, but helping the businesses we have to thrive has to be the first piece in the puzzle.

Jim Cornelius, Editor