Teachable moments on Facebook

A high school teacher is under fire in New Jersey for taking to her Facebook page to argue that “homosexuality is a perverted spirit” and complaining about recognition of October as LGBT History Month in school.

A Bronx High School principal posted a Facebook profile picture of herself slathered in chocolate syrup dancing with a half-naked man. (She’s also under fire for allegedly improper crediting of students).

A couple of years ago, a teacher in Georgia was fired because of European vacation pictures that showed her holding beer or wine glasses (she said she was drinking but not intoxicated). Her page also included an unspecified expletive.

A first-grade teacher faces losing her job after posting on Facebook a comment about being “a warden for future criminals.”

Raises some interesting questions. Are educators more constrained than the rest of us when it comes to freedom of expression in their off-work lives? Sisters Schools Superintendent Jim Golden says yes.

“Like it or not, like a judge or a policeman, you’re held to a higher standard,” he told The Nugget.

But what standard, exactly? I can see disciplining or firing a teacher whose comments indicate a serious bias against a group of students he or she is supposed to serve.

“If I say something racist, I’m probably going to get fired,” Golden says. “And I probably deserve to be fired.”

OK, I get that.

But what if you’ve just had a crappy day and pop off about your students being “future criminals”? Is letting off steam something to kill a career over? If the teacher said that to a friend over a stiff drink in a bar (and I’m sure every teacher has said something like it at least once) it wouldn’t have been any kind of big deal. Because it’s on Facebook, it became a big deal.

And raising a pint of Guinness in Dublin and letting your friends see the pix on Facebook? Come on! What’s wrong with that?

Sisters School District does not have a specific policy about teachers’ use of social media. Golden said such uses fall under state standards and practices guidelines — but the standards of an “ethical educator” don’t address this area specifically either.

You could argue a couple of different sides to this question. On one hand, teachers should be able to have lives outside the classroom and away from their students. Those lives might even be R-rated. They should be able to express their opinions and let their hair down.

But Superintendent Golden is right — you’re never NOT a teacher, even when you’re off duty. Comes with the job. And you’re still a teacher on your Facebook page.

Social media is a useful tool, perhaps, though it also seems like a gigantic time-suck and an arena custom-made for preening narcissists. It certainly is not a secure venue in which to vent your spleen or show off your chocolate-covered dance moves. You can’t help wondering with these and some Twitter scandals, “What were they thinking?” Maybe there’s some weird dissociative aspect to the Internet that encourages people to post and say things that they would think twice about showing or saying in mixed company.

Sisters School District may not have a social media policy, but maybe a good one would be: Don’t post anything you wouldn’t show or say at a school board meeting.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Wartime blues

A friend of mine who is actively involved in veterans' affairs sent me a link to the Web site of folk singer/songwriter Jason Moon. He's an Iraq War veteran who has struggled with PTSD and is using his music to heal himself and for outreach to others with similar problems.

Well worth a listen: www.jasonmoon.org.
Jim Cornelius, Editor

Whatever happened to the American Left?

Just listened to an NPR “Talk of the Nation” piece entitled “Whatever Happened to the American Left?”

The premise was that the right has, over a period of decades, come to dominate the political discourse through greater message discipline, building better “movement” infrastructure and the development of bully pulpits including talk radio, the Internet and niche magazines. It was all interesting and the analysis was fine — as far as it went.

But it missed what I consider to be the biggest reason that the left is on its heels, despite putting Barack Obama in the White House in a landslide in 2008. That reason is cultural: the left has allowed itself to be perceived as effete, elitist and anti-patriotic. That’s a caricature, of course, but many on the left seem unable to stop sharpening the pencil that draws it.

Two local cases in point:

Back in 2004, I was having a conversation with a local Democratic Party activist who must have assumed we were of like mind because we both disliked George W. Bush and opposed the Iraq war. This woman fulminated against all the “flag wavers,” essentially depicting patriotic Americans as dupes and rubes. I said, “I hate to tell you this, but I have a flag pole in my front yard and I fly the American flag every day.”

“But… but…” she spluttered, “You read books!”

No kidding. She really said that.

More recently, my friend Jack McGowan gave a beautiful, heartfelt invocation during the Sisters Folk Festival’s community show on Sunday, September 11, remembering the attacks of 10 years before and his experience as a member of Oregon’s Flight for Freedom, which went to New York City to show solidarity with that wounded metropolis. He closed with the third stanza of “America the Beautiful”: Thine alabaster cities gleam/Undimmed by human tears.

Later, someone expressed to me some mild discomfort at the patriotic tenor of Jack’s words. Huh?

The American Left has alienated itself from its natural work-for-a-living constituency because it has allowed itself to be portrayed as anti-American. And that, I’m afraid, is because some on the left are anti-American. Too bad, because America needs a genuine progressive voice to continue to ensure that the blessings of liberty are extended to all its citizens, to promote the access to opportunity and the principle of the common weal that are essential to making the pursuit of happiness more than a chimera for the vast bulk of our population.

Back in ’04, Howard Dean said his party needed to be talking to the guy with the Confederate flag on his pickup truck bumper. He was right. Of course he got so much crap for it that he climbed down. By 2008, candidate Obama was talking to a San Francisco fundraising crowd about folks bitterly clinging to guns and religion.

Well, if you’re trying to come across as an elitist snob, that’s a pretty good job of it. That’s how the left has ceded the field to the likes of W — a blueblood born-on-third-base aristocrat posing as some kind of regular guy. It’s pathetic and ridiculous.

I’ve seen this before. I went to college in Santa Cruz and my girlfriend at the time went to Berkeley, so I was exposed to plenty of idiots who claimed to speak for “the people” yet obviously despised them. Until those kinds of voices are marginalized, until the American Left embraces the “American” part of that moniker, there will never again be a successful progressive movement in this country. Who wants to work with people who look down on them?

And until there are real countervailing sources of power, the looters will continue to pillage a once-great nation.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Fat, broke and ignorant. Is this the best we can do?

I laid a bum trip on my brother yesterday, as the stock market plunged 630 points. I called him up and opined that the S&P credit downgrade was just a milepost on the road to the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Cheerfully, of course.

Not sure it was appreciated. He’s a small business owner trying to navigate the shoals and buffeting winds of our nasty economic condition. A dose of “we are well-and-truly screwed” isn’t especially helpful.

I do that a lot. Can’t help it; I’m a cultural pessimist. Being a student of history will do that to you. After all, it’s all about picking through the ash heap of nations and civilizations that flourished, flowered and fell. Unfortunately, the U.S. keeps throwing up mileposts on the highway to oblivion.

More than 60 percent of Americans are overweight and more than 20 percent qualify as obese. Before anyone accuses me of “fatism,” let me state right here that I’m not advocating government intervention in people’s lifestyle choices. But criminy, folks! How can you create a vigorous culture when you can’t do a pushup? The burdens of obesity-related health problems on our health care system are, well, huge. We all pay for this, one way or another.

America is merely average in international education rankings, which doesn’t bode well for our potential leadership in an information-based economy. A shocking number of people lack basic communication and mathematical skills. This ain’t good, people.

Then there’s the national debt. Sovereign debt is a huge problem across the developed world; we’re not alone here. But it’s grating (if unsurprising) to see a problem that requires wise policy decisions and concerted effort degenerate into a farcical American partisan political circus. I don’t believe for a minute that the folks we send to congress — most of them at least — don’t recognize that getting out of this debt hole will require genuine entitlement reform (that’s where the big money is) and higher taxes. But both left and right are so wedded to zero-sum ideological positions that a comprehensive tackling of the nation’s finances is impossible.

S&P may have been out of line in basing their downgrade on a political judgment (and what's with a $2 trillion math error in the analysis? See above.) Still, they aren’t wrong. We’re dysfunctional and there is little prospect of that changing. And President Obama has got to stop blaming Bush for everything. Seriously. It doesn’t help.

The pessimist in me teeters on the brink of cynicism — a belief that what’s broken can’t be fixed. We're fat, broke and ignorant and we're gonna stay that way. The patriot in me wants to shout: “Is this the best we can do? No! C’mon, get it together America!” The pragmatist says, just do what you can where you are. That’s my brother’s approach and I think he’s got it right. I’ll try not to throw any more buckets of doom his way.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Don’t know much about history…

Just read that California is going to require the teaching of gay history. Swell.

Not that I have any problem acknowledging that there were gay people doing significant things throughout history, just as there are today (although the concept of “gayness” is a recent development). My problem is with the breaking of history into smaller and smaller subsets, to the point where it’s just a bunch of pieces of tile, not a mosaic.

David McCullough, one of the finest popular historians ever to put pen to paper, had this to say on the subject:

"History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history — so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

In the sixth grade, my daughter spent a lot of time learning about Africa and did a project on Tanzania. She enjoyed it, learned a lot, did well on her project. But she hasn’t learned boo about how her own country works. What she knows, she’s learned from her parents.

I’m all for a broad perspective on the wide and wonderful world, but dammit, it is not xenophobic to expect your child to learn her own history first. Sorry, but it is much more important for her to understand the U.S. Constitution than it is for her to know about Tanzania.

The Department of Education’s 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 12 percent of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. That's pathetic.

Most Americans don’t know in which century the Civil War occurred, much less anything about its causes and effects. Even fewer have any grasp of how the American economy developed or how the rights they take for granted were won.

Breaking history free of a fixation on the mainstream triumphalist narrative that dominated for many decades is a good thing. A great thing. But you can’t appreciate “A Renegade History of the United States” (which is wonderful, BTW) if you have no clue about what happened in the first place. If you don’t understand the narrative, a counter narrative or alternative narrative doesn’t have any resonance.

Unless there’s a grasp of the bigger picture, all the pieces of women’s history, African-American history, gay history or whatever, don’t have any context. They are rendered essentially meaningless.

When only 12 percent have a firm grasp of the subject, I’d say that we should stop worrying about teaching gay history and try just teaching history.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

‘Back to basics’ is a false choice

School board member-elect Andrew Gorayeb’s concerns about Sisters students’ preparation for the SAT exams has sparked an interesting dialogue in Letters to the Editor, with more coming in the June 15 issue.

In a letter last week, Eugene Trahern asked,

“How can students who are near the top of their class in GPA be, to put it bluntly, mediocre at best on the SAT? The answer is that there is such a high emphasis on the arts program in Sisters, that the school district is missing the basics.”

In arguing that “math, science, and good writing skills need to be emphasized at Sisters, not art projects,” I think Mr. Trahern poses a false choice.

Note here that I have a dog in the fight. The Sisters Folk Festival, which I have been involved with for many years, has invested significantly in the creation of a music education outreach program, the Americana Project, and a guitar building program at Sisters High School.

Obviously, I believe in the importance of the arts in education.

I would argue that “math, science, and good writing skills” need to be emphasized at Sisters along with “art projects.” And, properly conducted, those art projects can enhance the learning of those basics.

For centuries the, the ideal of an educated person has been the “Renaissance man,” the scholar-athlete-artist-scientist. What a rich ideal to strive toward. David Crabtree, President of Gutenberg College, told a large assemblage at the proposed Sisters site of the college that he believes that higher education in the U.S. has become synonymous with vocational training and advocated passionately for the value of a liberal arts education. The students I met there impressed me as being very well educated indeed.

The answer to grade-inflation and weak performance on standardized tests is to go after those problems directly, not to tear down aspects of the program that are working well. What is wanted is more rigor in all areas, not a narrowing of focus.

In any case, it is gratifying to see so many people engaging with the question of what education in Sisters schools should be. I encourage them all to turn out to school board meetings, contact their school board members and share their concerns, their passions and their ideas. This district is small enough that, with a high level of engagement, we can make positive changes, despite dwindling resources.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

The Imperial Presidency

Looks like President Obama intends to violate the War Powers Act vis a vis U.S. involvement in the NATO action in Libya.

One more brick in the edifice of the Imperial Presidency. I considered President Bush’s war in Iraq to be reckless, misconceived and ultimately dishonest — but Bush did get congressional authorization for his act.

Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway wrote this week in the Washington Post: "If nothing happens, history will say that the War Powers Act was condemned a quiet death by a president who had solemnly pledged, on the campaign trail, to put an end to indiscriminate war making."

There you have it. From a Nobel Peace Prize honoree, no less.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

The king of sports?

Let me first acknowledge for the record that I am insanely jealous.

I mean, despite the handicaps of growing up in the SoCal suburbs, I had a great childhood. I got to be a ridge runner in Wrightwood instead of a suburban mall rat. I was a pretty good baseball player and mostly enjoyed it. I played tennis and had a ball collecting bruises in rollerblade hockey. All good. But I really missed out on something in my athletic endeavors.

WHERE WAS LACROSSE?

I would have loved to play lacrosse — loved it. But from the vantage point of ’70s and ’80s Southern California, lacrosse was an old American Indian game or the obscure sport of elite northeastern colleges. Actually, nobody paid any attention to lacrosse at all.

Now it’s all the rage across the West. I hope the Outlaws know how lucky they are. It seems like they do — the sport sure has caught on.

Lacrosse may be the king of sports — along with hockey, which it resembles. It’s fast, it’s rough, it’s got a true American pedigree. Heck, it even played a tactically significant role in a major battle in Pontiac’s Uprising in 1763. How cool is that? (Actually, not so cool for the British garrison of Fort Michilimackinac, but c’est la guerre, you know...).

Now lacrosse is a big deal in Sisters. A really big deal. As in bringing more than 1,000 people to town for a tournament, where they eat, sleep and shop, infusing tens of thousands of dollars into a local economy that can really use the shot in the arm.

Hats off to Bill Rexford and Andrew Gorayeb, to Ryan Moffat of the Sisters Parks and Recreation District and all the others who put together last weekend’s Sisters Annual Lacrosse Invitational (SALI).

This is how Sisters’ signature events — from the quilt show to the folk festival to the rodeo — happen. Individuals with a passion for a sport, an art, a way of life, come together manifest something that benefits the broader community.

And for all of us pining away on the sidelines, maybe we can get some novice play for creaky middle-aged guys...

Jim Cornelius, Editor

You can run on for a long time...

Justice was a long time coming for Osama bin Laden, but when it came, it came swift and hard, at the hands of elite special operations forces.

It appears that the U.S. put together a nearly perfect operation, following a fragment of intel for years until it paid off with the killing of a mass murderer who sent the world reeling with the most spectacular terrorist attacks in history. (Somehow, it matters a lot that this was done in a toe-to-toe fight, not by an impersonal Hellfire missile strike from a drone. It matters that he knew he was going down.).

As President Obama stated, justice has been served.

It’s probably true that the death of Osama bin Laden is not terribly strategically significant. The strategic picture has shifted over the past decade and most experts doubt that he had much more than a symbolic role to play for most of that decade. Nonetheless, symbols are tremendously important in the psychology of war, especially of the asymmetric kind — and this is a significant symbolic victory, if nothing else.

It’s also true that the execution of a murderer cannot fill the hole left by the deaths he caused. Yet it it is no cold comfort. A thirst for a balancing of the scales, however incomplete, is part of what makes us human. We have an innate, intuitive sense of justice and retribution and there is, for most at any rate, a deep sense of satisfaction in closing the circle, in seeing the man who sowed the wind reap the whirlwind.

The U.S. has taken many a misstep in the war Osama bin Laden declared in 1996, missteps that compromised very real successes in dismantling al Qaeda’s capabilities. We will continue to struggle to extract ourselves from the mire of Iraq and Afghanistan and it is axiomatic that terrorism will always remain a threat.

But in the action of May 1, 2011, the United States — and the civilized world — won a victory worth celebrating. As a friend put it: There’s so many things that we do wrong, so many things that we can do better, but this — this was perfect.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

No Lawrence of Arabia in this Arab Revolt

Had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day, a fellow student of the life of T.E. Lawrence.

We speculated on what Lawrence, a British agent who won lasting fame for his role in the World War I Arab Revolt, would think of the current Arab Revolt. We concluded that Lawrence would be gratified that this Arab Revolt really does belong to the Arabs.

The original Arab Revolt was stoked by the British for their own ends — primarily to defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. The British made many promises to support an Arab nation — promises they never intended to keep. And, in the end, they betrayed the revolt, with consequences that echo to this day.

Till the end of his days, Lawrence carried a profound sense of guilt and self-loathing for his collusion in the deception and betrayal of his Arab allies.

The current wave of revolt and revolution sweeping much of the Arab world has tremendous potential to reshape the region. It could all go horribly wrong, too. History doesn’t give much cause for optimism.

But whatever happens, this Arab Revolt must continue to be their own; the peoples of North Africa and the Arabian peninsula must be left to shape their own destiny. Our meddling, even with the best of intentions, will ultimately blow back.

The rebels made that point when Lawrence’s heirs — an MI6 operative under diplomatic cover and several SAS men who arrived in Libya to offer some covert help — were arrested and told “thanks but no thanks.”

No Lawrence of Arabia in this Arab Revolt.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Why is it so hard to get things done?

Watching the Sisters City Council at work is painful. You leave a meeting feeling like you’ve walked a mile through wet concrete. And that’s just watching. I can only imagine how frustrated and tired the councilors themselves must feel.

The council has been high-centered on enacting a water rate increase and new water rate structure for nine months. Around and around and around, no resolution (well, maybe a glimmer of the beginning of a resolution after Thursday’s workshop). This is only the latest in a litany of issues that have bogged the city down over the past couple of years.

Why is it like this? Why is it so hard to get things done?

There are obvious disagreements and personality conflicts on the council, but that kind of thing doesn’t have to create dysfunction — it could make a board more dynamic. There’s something deeper and more fundamental at play here, something that is bigger than Sisters and our particular issues.

I think it’s about trust.

David Asson argued Thursday morning for a five year business plan based on worst-case scenarios — usage (and therefore revenue) declines or stays flat, expenses go up, etc. This approach makes sense — if you trust that if the worst-case scenario doesn’t develop, you won’t spend the money and won’t enact the associated rate increases. That’s where things start falling apart.

Most folks assume that if a government entity has the opportunity to gain revenue through fees or taxes, it will take it, no matter what. Expecting government to refrain from enacting a tax increase or a rate hike is like expecting a lion to refrain from eating a zebra ’cause it had zebra last week and there’s still leftovers in the fridge. And we expect that that government entity will fight tooth and nail to avoid cutting costs, especially personnel costs.

Those assumptions exist regardless of how responsible local government has or has not been in managing its taxpayers’ money. What looks like prudent management to some looks suspicious to many others — because we have become accustomed to thinking that government is an alien, voracious entity that wants to eat our wallet and our groceries.

And we know we’re right to be suspicious, because we’ve seen it happen.

It’s cognitively difficult to separate generalities from specifics when it comes to problems like this. Whenever some reporter gets caught making up a story or a national icon of journalism like Dan Rather lets his agenda make a sucker of him, I cringe. Anything that erodes faith in “the media” affects our work here. None of us are judged solely on our own merits and failings; people’s perceptions are shaped by what they see on the state, national and international level.
Virtually every institution in our society has somewhere at some time given us reason to distrust it — from Wall Street to the White House, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the doors of the church, from the school house to city hall.

But without some level of trust, it’s impossible to get anything done. And we’re seeing the results of that everywhere. I honestly don’t know how we get out of this morass, locally or across the nation.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Pouring money down a rat hole

In this week’s syndicated column on page 2 of The Nugget, Joel Brinkley talks about the fortune in American treasure being poured down an aid rat hole in Afghanistan. Specifically, a...

...$760 million program, to strengthen government agencies, was America’s single largest non-military expense in Afghanistan over the last year. All of it was money thrown away.
The mind dulls when confronted with large numbers like that. But $760 million spent another way would allow Washington to give every single public school in the nation’s 25 largest cities almost $200,000 extra this year.

I like Brinkley’s work. He’s got a clear eye and a real passion for exposing corruption. A “crusading journalist” in the best sense of the term. He’s also got a Sisters connection. He earned a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Cambodian refugee crisis in 1979, an honor he shares with Sisters photographer Jay Mather.

His juxtaposition of giving money away to corrupt warlords and cleptocrats versus investment in schools is a rhetorical device — but the point is still valid.

We have frittered away billions in aid to corrupt regimes — from Afghanistan to Egypt. We continue to provide aid to Israel as though Israel is the underdog in the Middle East and often get a finger in the eye for thanks.

Meanwhile, we are disinvested in our own country — infrastructure, education, the things that we need to invest in to hold our own in an increasingly competitive global economy.
I do not argue that simply throwing money into education will produce better results. That’s been proven false. But investment that includes the implementation of best practices, financial incentives for improved teaching and outcomes is critical to shore up America’s crumbling education capacity.

Then there’s the sorry state of our transportation infrastructure, and we’re falling behind in our communications infrastructure, too.

This doesn’t have to generate into a left-right, big government vs. private sector brawl. There are a lot of different ways to make the kinds of investments we need. But as long as we’re talking taxpayers’ dollars, I’d rather fix a few potholes than give another cent to the Mubaraks and Karzais of the world...

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Time to retire the ‘N’ word

It’s past time to stop using the “N” word.

No, not that one. That one has been pretty thoroughly scrubbed out of our public discourse — and even from the youth version of Huckleberry Finn.

I’m talking about the other insidious “N” word, the one that gets thrown around in politics all the time, by left and right. You know the one: Bush is a Nazi; Obama is a Nazi, blah, blah, blah. It’s become nothing more than a playground insult, unconnected to any real understanding of who the Nazis really were, what National Socialism actually was.

That’s an insult to the memory of the millions of victims of National Socialism. It also obscures any serious inquiry into the nature of its evil. Like the boy who cried wolf, the constant playing of the Nazi card ultimately dulls our sensibilities when actual totalitarian impulses might be identified.

Early in the Iraq war, I listened to an interview the the great World War II historian John Lukacs (“Five Days in London, May 1940;” “The Last European War, September 1939-December 1941”). A caller made a comparison between Saddam Hussein and Hitler and between George Bush and Winston Churchill. In his very gentlemanly way, Lukacs pointed out that Saddam, while an evil tyrant, was no Hitler, and the threat of his fourth-rate military could not be compared to that of the Wehrmacht, c. 1940. Nor could the position of the United States — as the most powerful military force in the history of the world — be compared to that of a beleaguered Britain.

This was clearly lost on the caller, who just wanted his simplistic morality play.

Even serious analysis is tainted by the desire to score contemporary political points.

Lew Rockwell, Jr.’s 2004 essay “Red State Fascism” was widely touted during the Bush years, often by the left, even though Rockwell is a libertarian. (The “F” word should be held suspect, too). Rockwell’s essay pointed out all the signs of creeping fascism on the right, turning from the libertarian principles of the antigovernment electoral uprising of 1994 toward an authoritarian statism in the Bush era. He wasn’t wrong; there was that kind of shift. But the Tea Party is evidence of a swing of the pendulum back toward cranky libertarianism — so how does that fit the model?

Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” (self-explanatory, right?) is beloved on the right and excoriated on the left. It’s actually a pretty interesting book, despite its polarizing title, cover and hype. But Goldberg has to hedge on his own thesis. See the following from a Salon.com interview:

What I thought was interesting about your definition of fascism was that nationalism seemed to be missing ... Stanley Payne, whom you quote and say is "considered by many to be the leading living scholar of fascism," in his definition of fascism, the first thing he says is that it's "a form of revolutionary ultra-nationalism." How does that fit with contemporary liberalism, which is often derided as being unpatriotic, anti-American?

That's a perfectly legitimate question. I think classical fascism, the fascism that we all think of when we hear the word "fascism" -- Italy, Germany and to a certain extent Spain, they were ultra-nationalistic, I don't dispute that, I think that is absolutely the case. I just would want to emphasize that that ultra-nationalism comes with an economic program of socialism. There's no such thing as a society undergoing a bout of ultra-nationalism that remains a liberal free-market economy. The two things go together.

I don't say that contemporary liberalism is the direct heir of Nazism or Italian fascism. I say it's informed by it. It's like its grandniece. It's related, they're in the same family, they share a lot of genetic traits, but they're not the same thing.

OK. It’s got four legs, a tail and a nose. Is it an elephant or a Chihuahua?

An arm’s length list of “yeah, but...” qualifications doesn’t make for good sound bytes. So by the time interesting but limited ideas like Rockwell’s and Goldberg’s hit the mainstream, we end up with labels and fatuous comparisons that create heat but no light.

Maybe by dropping the easy buzzwords, we'll have to come up with more accurate and useful ways of making our arguments. Voluntarily of course. Forcing people to stop using words would be fascist.

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Monkey man don’t do 'civil discourse'

Sisters Mayor Lon Kellstrom read a proclamation Thursday night reaffirming the city council’s commitment to civil discourse. The proclamation was in response to the Tucson shootings and the (tenuous) connection with the overheated rhetorical climate in America.

It’s always a good idea to remind ourselves that, as our president is fond of saying, “we can disagree without being disagreeable.” But how realistic is that? In a free society, with a lot of convenient megaphones that amplify our sometimes strident voices, people’s feelings are going to get hurt. And they’re going to get mad. And at a certain point, they’re going to get so mad they can’t think straight.

When our political ideologies are tangled up with our identity, civil discourse is really difficult, maybe impossible.

One of my favorite bloggers is a corrections officer/writer/martial artist/philosopher named Sgt. Rory Miller. One of his recent blog entries hits on a phenomenon that I believe explains the tenor of a lot of our national — and even local — political and social discourse.

...Two conversations today, talks where intelligent people lied and math (not fake philosophical math but simple "2x4 is less than 2x8, you realize that, right?" ) was dismissed, and historical documents didn't count. But the most important thing is realizing, whether in criminals or martial artists or debate, that there is an identifier. When the other side gets labeled. When the person says "You are a _________" or "You sound just like___________" Right there the tribal mind is engaged. You are no longer reasoning with a human but trying to reason with a monkey...
With patience and by pretending to not notice dominance games or accepting a label as 'other' I have sometimes given people the space and time to let the monkey brain die down and get back to tangible problems. But rarely, if ever, when the problem was tied directly to their identity.

We’re in a phase where, for many people, politics is tied directly to their identity. People choose sides, and lash their identity to their party, their movement, their tribe. They label those who disagree and perceive them as “other.”

This is by no means a new phenomenon in our history. In fact, I’d argue that it’s more common than periods of broad consensus and “civility.”

No proclamation, no matter how heartfelt, is going to change the climate. Unless... it causes us in that critical moment to pause, to question whether our identity is really under threat, to ask ourselves, “am I a monkey or a man?”

Jim Cornelius, Editor

Sisters should elect its mayor

This is no way to start a new year and a new city council.

The first act that brand-new city councilor David Asson will take Thursday night will be divisive. It’s not his fault; he’s the presumptive swing vote in a choice between Lon Kellstrom and Sharlene Weed for the mayor’s seat on the council. Asson has already indicated that he will not support Weed in for position, but any way he votes puts him crosswise with somebody right off the bat, despite best intentions to be a unifying force.

By charter, the city council selects the mayor after each election. The idea is that the mayor is merely “first among equals” rather than a separately elected chief. That’s fine for a small city with little politics. But that’s not what Sisters is anymore.

Like it or not, Sisters has politics — strongly held diverging positions on issues ranging from economic development to the manner in which the city should conduct its business. That means the old way of selecting the mayor is outmoded.

Council selection of the mayor sets the body up for infighting and gamesmanship which erodes the body’s ability to work together. Direct election eliminates one divisive element.

The citizens should decide who they want to be the face of the city and a four-year term will give the position built-in continuity. Direct election makes the will of the citizenry clear and gives the mayor a mandate. It also makes the mayor more accountable for the manner and style of his or her conduct of the city’s affairs.

It would take a charter amendment to change the method of the mayor’s election — something that many in the City of Bend are also advocating for the same reasons. It’s an idea whose time has come.

Jim Cornelius, Editor