HIllary 1 - Competiton 0

Hillary Clinton won that one.
No question.
No wonder - no one else on that stage carries the baggage that always accompanies a Clinton, but no one has, either, her length of experience at the peak of public life.
And it showed tonight.
She even got a bit of help from Bernie when the inevitable question of the Clinton emails hit the floor:

“Let me say something that may not be great politics, but I think the secretary is right — and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!"

He may get a thank you note in the morning.....

Sanders had some trouble fully explaining his varying votes on guns, and came back too often to his the "1% have all the money" theme, but he didn't hurt himself - it's just that the Clinton strength shone stronger in this first debate.

You had to like her spin on a political season where outsiders are winning the game to date:

"I can't think of anything more outsider than electing the first woman president."

Of the other three candidates, O'Malley likely gained a few points - not enough to save him - for the next poll, but I don't understand why Chafee and Webb are even on the stage - they're blips now, and will be tomorrow.

Bernanke - no longer a Republican.....

In a bright ballroom of Seattle University, Ben Bernanke and Gary Locke took us back to a darker time, 8 years back when one-half of all mortgages were underwater, unemployment was north of 10 percent, and panic ran amok inside the American financial system. 

It’s a familiar history now – the subprime mortgage scam, the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, the near death of AIG - the world’s biggest insurer of financial deals - the still-debated $700 billion TARP bailout, and a regulatory system that couldn’t keep up with derivatives and other at the edge investment inventions.
Bernanke, director of the Federal Reserve System through all of it, came to the ballroom – interviewed by Locke – to tout his book about America at the edge of ruin (his spin), “The Courage to Act.”

Some moments:

- the subprime mortgage collapse and other events may have set off the financial run, but it was panic – a collapse of belief – that really caused the damage. An economic system depends on confidence; when that’s gone, the lights go out. 

- Lehmann Bros. went down because there was no buyer to save it, and no TARP yet to bail it out – Congress wouldn’t act, telling Bernanke “there’s been no real damage yet.” 

- Bernanke throws a lot of blame on that same Congress for its unwillingness to act on the fiscal side – pushing more $$$ into the economy – while leaving the burden to the Fed’s monetary moves re liquidity. They, he claims, just didn’t do their job. 

- he’s no longer a Republican, describing the party as in the hands now of know-nothings who know nothing about governing.

- asked about dangers to come, he warned that the current recovery still isn’t working for everyone, not with increasing inequality, and fails the basic purpose of an economic system – to produce broad-based benefit.

- asked if he’d seen the film about the near collapse of 2008-2009 - ”Too Big Too Fail” – he said “No, but I like to say that I saw the original………”

"Bridge of Spies"

Elegant.
That's the word I want to describe Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies."
Film as craft.

As in the way every scene - in its organization, extras, storefronts, clothing, whatever, absolutely recreates a time and place. Yes, it is 1957 again, at least on screen.

And though perhaps a touch stylized from setting to setting, it brings back - in a gripping way - the Cold War, the disastrous flight of Francis Gary Powers' U-2, and the dark mood of a time when nuclear war seemed possible, a time when we still drilled in school against that possibility. We live again in a divided Berlin, see the despair and death at the Wall, watch the potentially deadly (and never-ending) chess game of global power.

But what stays with me tonight is something one hero of the time asks without really using these words, "Who are we?" - meaning what are our true values as Americans?
James Donovan asks because those who chose him to defend the Russian spy Rudolf Abel seem to suggest that the verdict is certain, that the usual rules of American justice need not apply. Yet Donavan defends Abel the spy as he would any defendant, and nearly wins an evidentiary appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, thus upholding enduring values worth far more than the fate of a single spy.

The impulse to fairness, to the right values, comes again when Donavan negotiates the exchange of Abel for Powers, insisting - against the CIA and others in government - that the spy swap also include a young American student imprisoned on the east side of the Wall.

"Who are we?" It's always the important question. Asked another way in a time of every-increasing surveilliance and fear of terror by John le Carré:
“How long can we defend ourselves – you and we - by methods of this kind, and still remain the kind of society that is worth defending?” 

(And a cheer for Tom Hanks as Donovan, and Mark Rylance as Abel. 
Acting as craft....)

Our Time.....

When we were
Young
And dreamers
We imagined
No end
Only beginnings.

And when they
Came we
Lived them
Day by day
Believing that
Our time would
Never end.

And now I
Wonder what
Was the dream?
To live in health
And for so long?

To have worked
And thought, to
Find the narrative
In fragments
Of truth?

Or just to
Wake, to fill
The hours with
Query, with wonder,
Then to sleep again
'Til morn?

We lived that
Dream - perhaps
Not that one of
Youth, but
One of time and
Chance.

And no, we are
Not done
Not yet,
Only in search
Of the dream
To come.

What Rough Beast.....

Something is stirring, brooding, out there.
Sometimes, as Robert Reich said at Town Hall last night, we don't know what it is until after it happens.
But see - a Trump and a Carson getting half the votes in early polls of Republican primary voters.  One is all bombast and noise, the other quietly, as one GOP writer claims this morning, "imbecilic."  Yet they lead, for now, one of our two major political tribes.

When in any other time would a national political candidate - see Carson - be rewarded for comparing the United States to the Nazi Third Reich?  Or say of a medical coverage plan - Obamacare - that it is "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery."  Or claim that the sitting President of the United States is modeling his policies after those of Cuba and Russia?  See Carson, again.
Yes, there is always over the cliff rhetoric, but rewarded, cheered on, by so many?

As Peter Wehner, a GOP consultant who served in the last three GOP administrations, writes:"....the usual ways voters judge a candidate - experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues - have been devalued.........Reason has given way to demagogy."

Reich offers a sunnier view - that yes, there's a rumbling out there, but in his Berkely economics classes he sees an idealism, a commitment to public service, and in American history he sees a pattern - that when the political/ecnomic system goes off track, leaving too many out of its benefits, there's adjustment (see TR's progressivism, FDR's New Deal, Johnson's New Society).
That's his sense of this moment, of the anti-establishment fever - a moment for sweeping change, but with a warning that there are two kinds of populism.

- reform populism - see the Roosevelts and LBJ
- authoritarian populism - the rise of scapegoating, of government is evil rhetoric, of obstructionism as policy. See the GOP House, see Trump, Carson, Cruz, et al

Which way history goes depends on a citizenry, its information and drive to seek fact over noise, and its engagement.
Politics, says Reich as so many have before, is not a spectator sport.

Theater of War

It was a different setting - actors David Strathairn on the left, Lili Taylor on the right and Bryan Doerries in the middle, with Doerries narrating a kind of life story - his - and how it led him to discover the ways scenes from Greek tragedy could help PTSD veterans (and their families) cope.

It sounds improbable, but imagine a soldier coming home from war, returning after months away, at the edge, surrounded by death.  As one soldier's wife told Doerries at a performance, "A returning soldier brings invisible bodies into a home, making it a slaughter house - of the mind if not body."
Doerries has found a healing in the trauma of these Greek plays; they resonate because the families, the soldiers, know tragedy and death - witnessing it together, facing the darkness in these tragedies, creates a kind of bonding, a shared discomfort and a sense that they are not alone.

Strathairn - one of our great actors - and Taylor (from Six Feet Under, The X-Files, Mystic Pizza) were terrific in telling these stories, Strathairn almost visceral in his portrayal of a soldier gone mad (in Sophocles' "Ajax") who wants to kill his comrades, but instead takes his own life.

It's an unexpected therapy called "Theater of War" - taken to settings, many military, all over the country (and at Town Hall Seattle Tuesday evening).

Strathairn:
“These plays are part of a 2,500-year history of mental and emotional pain for soldiers that run up to the present day.”

Doerries:
"Sophocles was himself a general, and Athens during his time was at war for decades. By performing these scenes, we’re hoping that our modern-day soldiers will see their difficulties in a larger historical context, and perhaps feel less alone.”

Does it work?
In the sense that the trauma of war is timeless, yes, and in the sharing of that pain, perhaps yes, too.

As one soldier said, at one setting - “I’ve been Ajax. I’ve spoken to Ajax.”

(I thought Doerries made perhaps the sharpest point of the night, re why so many soldiers do have a sense of isolation on returning home.  I don't recall the exact words but close to this:
"When a small subset of a population fights all of its wars, there's something wrong, something that in time undermines a democracy."
Hard to argue.)

Beyond the Urban Crunch - how?

The buzz at the hair salon on Pike hasn't changed in months - it's about traffic snarls, density, growth, vows to never come into the city again, etc. etc. - but this time, walking out, it seemed to echo more than ever one end of a civic conversation re managing what's happening to us.

A NYTimes article tracks the mood this week (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/technology/seattle-in-midst-of-tech-boom-tries-to-keep-its-soul.html?ribbon-ad-idx=4&rref=technology&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Technology&pgtype=article):

- do we want to be San Francisco with crunching traffic and housing costs out of sight?
- are we rushing to that outcome with every crane that rises on the skyline?
- how do we get the growth we want - the jobs, the spinoff of restaurants, art, a 21st century boom - while keeping what some folks want to call the city's soul?

Walking across the street after the haircut, I thought how our own family's life has shifted urban.  We walk more than drive, I bus and rail whenever possible, love the fact that so much that we like about urban life is just minutes away on foot.  (I drove on Mercer the other afternoon - that's the street that cost millions and years of disruption ending with worse traffic than ever - and vowed "never again!")

And that's the question for the table.  In a city growing this fast, the acreage for cars in motion or in need of parking does not expand - we're not going to tear down buildings so we can widen streets, or rip up more homes to make I-5 eight lanes or wider, or dig more ditches to hold cars sitting for 10 hours, i.e. as one urban planner writes, "...it is impossible from both a practical and financial standpoint to build out of the problem by expanding the physical infrastructure adding lanes, decks, tunnels, etc.

We ARE giving travelers/commuters who recognize this and don't want to drive or hunt a parking space alternatives (bike lanes, transit, Uber/Lyft, etc.), but it's not enough, the technology/data/management systems aren't there yet - we're hunting a 21st century look at how to move bodies and vehicles.  Not there yet.

I often look while walking and driving - to see how many vehicles are carrying one person.  It's an overwhelming number, and understandable - control, flexibility, on demand, etc. - but it doesn't/can't work as a city (especially one virtually surrounded by water) rises.  One person one car multiplied thousands of times, with every vehicle needing a space to idle for 8-10 hours doesn't make sense - and yet the alternatives of transit, bicycles, vehicles for hire are not sufficient to displace the cars now crowded at rush hour into every lane and intersection.   We may need one day something like London's congestion charge - around $16 and up.

My responses are walking/transit/Uber/etc., but I live in a downtown and don't have a ready answer (beyond more investment in alternatives and better management of traffic flows) for folks outside the center who don't like transit, or don't have it nearby, or who need a vehicle to carry goods or equipment.

I do know it's got to be a top 5 civic focus (along with jobs, affordable housing, climate, race); we don't want to lose the plus side of urban life by failing to manage its explosive growth........

The Way We Were

The way we were; the way it was - is not coming back.

What was, back then - from the birth of television and into this new century -  kept running through my head at a labor meeting tonight, called to fight  against a new owner's insistence that all labor unions at KING Broadcasting agree to new jurisdictional language, the short of which is that unions will be much weaker, perhaps out of business, and that the age we knew - of professional photographers, experienced journalists, and a staff of tested engineers - will swiftly vanish.

The impulse - immediate - is to fight for the way it was - unions representing employees meeting with management (the KING management back in the way it was believed in organized labor; a management that, while tough at the table, knew that better products come out of a workplace treated with respect and fairness) to hash out working conditions, pensions, health care, pay, etc.  But the nagging thought is that we're in a different time.

 KINGTV then was family, the Bullitt family.  We could bargain across that table knowing the goal of better journalism and a workplace that could produce it was shared - with respect.  Now, a national corporation owning 23 TV stations is in charge and - as City Council Member Sawant (not always my favorite, but she was right tonight) said, consolidation and corporate power over local television and much else is on the rise.  She and Council Member Licata argued for organizing, pressuring legislators, using media - good on paper and yes, even a suggested city council resolution could help -  but I wonder if we can go back.

When I began in local journalism, the sources for news were countable on a single hand; now we have one less newspaper but also a smartphone full of news sources, and new breeds of journalist/writers who fill a Crosscut, a Politico, a Stranger and much more.  Information is a constant throb, a digital river, pulsing on your device of choice.  As a long-time news junkie, there's no way I can keep track of it all.

As a former shop steward and long time union member, as an employee who negotiated contracts and once threatened a strike, I know that the technological changes of this century will shift the makeup of local TV news, pushing it more on-line, changing its formats - more streaming and less of the actual news hour on a set time and channel - as they are changing the delivery of film, television, music, books, groceries, etc.  We're not at the same bargaining table.

This is long enough, and I hope will spark some conversation.  The problem discussed by broadcast jouranlists at Kane Hall tonight is real - unions are under threat, jobs as we've known them are in jeopardy, professionals may become low pay interns if they survive at all - but I doubt the old strategies can turn that around.  The way it was, the way we were, won't come back.

We didn't discuss a model for our time, this time and century - but workers everywhere, not just inside newsrooms, will need one.

And soon.

2nd GOP Presidential debate

I gave up.
At my age, two hours of three with 11 Republican presidential candidates is enough.

Fair disclosure – given the attacks on Planned Parenthood, the emerging belligerence on foreign policy, the same-old rhetoric on immigration, I don’t see any of them winning my vote.

But on the night:

Huckabee gets the over the cliff prize, ranting that simply requiring the director of a Kentucky government office to do her job amounts to “criminalization of Christianity.”
Hello?

Cruz has apparently decided that the general election is not important, as his entire campaign is now a red meat appeal to the extreme corners of his party – shred the Iran deal first day in office, Planned Parenthood “killing children for their body parts,” etc. 
If the country truly wants his angry, negative, doomsday rhetoric as the White House standard, it might be time to take that long vacation somewhere safe.

Trump seemed weaker, his usual bombast muted and absent any real policy detail, but the moderators and other candidates – at least in my two hours – spent far too much time going over and over again what Trump said about whom and when.
Bluster without content – my two cents. But did he ever get air time.

Fiorina helped her candidacy last night – sharp and on point, excepting a tiresome back and forth with Trump re: their alleged business successes and failures. Christie finally called them out, asking – can we talk about real issues?

Carson – not much to say. If Trump thought Jeb Bush was low energy, Carson’s low, low key barely wandered into pulse territory. Nice, polite, respectful. A President? Not likely.

Rubio apparently scored points in the last hour of the debate but they’d all lost me by then. He's smart on analyzing the main points in the immigration debate but has abandoned the only policy that makes sense.

Bush is still, with Kasich, the only one on stage who wouldn’t throw me into trauma should he win. His takes on issues from the Iran deal to immigration are more nuanced, even though – at crunch time – he also went off against Planned parenthood.

Kasich – still my adult in the room, focusing on issues instead of personalities and offering the quote of the night:
“If I’m watching this at home I’d be inclined to turn it off.” (Three hours is TOO long.....)

I see I'm not mentioning Rand Paul, Scott Walker, or Chris Christie (though he did get off some good lines).
Nothing to say......

---- Adding to this some lines from a NYT editorial re: the debate - on point:

".....Peel back the boasting and insults, the lies and exaggerations common to any presidential campaign. What remains is a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre, that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates’ lecterns. 

It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world where actions have consequences, programs take money and money has to come from somewhere. Where basic laws — like physics and the Constitution — constrain wishes. Where Congress and the public, allies and enemies, markets and militaries don’t just do what you want them to, just because you say they will."

Charter Schools

Guess I'm not losing much sleep over the State Supreme Court's ruling that charter schools are unconstitutional.

Yes, a lot of parents, students, and staff are in limbo, not knowing whether the schools, now illegal, can stay open - but at least they are open, for now.

Seattle public schools are not, and a far greater number of students and families are scrambling, looking for alternatives should the teacher strike go on much longer.

The teachers want more pay, which would seem reasonable if - as the Court demands in another case - the state were to fully fund education.

Which brings me to the punch line - if public schools are underfunded, as the State Supreme Court argues, why did we vote to funnel millions of education dollars into the now illegal charter school alternative?

If we're concerned about our public school system, let's fix it, not ship precious dollars into an alternative system that helps - if it does - a tiny fraction of all students.

You have to wonder - at least I do - what might happen if all the energy and money and talent now sustaining charter schools would focus instead on positive changes in public education - the place where the overwhelming number of our children go to learn.

Fair disclosure - I voted against charter schools twice, for all these reasons.........

Teacher Evaluation

There's something worrying - at least my two cents - in the otherwise welcome news that the teachers' strike is over, that the folks who teach our children will deservedly be earning more.
In the proposed contract the district agrees to review, with the teachers union, all tests and test schedules. That may be a positive in the endless quarrel over testing, but it may provide only a place for the arguments - and likely stalemates - to continue. Wish it well, though.

But what's really concerning is the reported agreement on teacher evaluations - that is, test scores will no longer play ANY role. No role at all? How will we then fully measure teacher effectiveness? 

Of course test scores are not the only sum of a teacher's impact on students, but to say they mean nothing, that they "play no role" in evaluations, seems ridiculous.
If a class repeatedly fails basic tests that measure student progress, has this nothing to do with the skill of the teacher? Are we to totally ignore the progress - or lack of it - of students in evaluating their teachers?
If so, how will we evaluate? 

At times I wonder if teachers, or at least their union representatives, want any kind of measurement. And yet, because effective teaching is crucial in this or any other society, we must be able to give measure to the skills of those who lead our classrooms.

To say that test scores are irrelevant in that measurement is, to repeat, ridiculous.

Seattle Arts - At The Crossroads

I don't go to early morning breakfast meetings now, but I broke that rule Friday for a probing and vivid hour of talk about the arts in our city.
It's a story with triumph and risk.

Take that first part - Seattle is the #1 American city for the number of cultural choices per capita; it beats New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. See the photo here - just one page of a Times insert listing hundreds of artistic events between now and the end of the year. I sit on the board of Town Hall, one iconic space that will offer this season alone more than 400 talks, musical performances, and cultural forums.

The risk - evident in the best question of the morning, from Seattle Symphony Executive Director Simon Wood, asking "Where is the next generation of Seattle philanthropists?"
It's the dead-on-point question because no matter how popular an art institution may be, it needs big money to survive; it needs people who can write six-figure checks. Wood, for example, must raise $11 million a year just to keep the symphony on the stage. That's not coming from crowd funding, nor from $25-$100 contributions.

And that question is aimed directly at the generation now crowding into the rising buildings of South Lake Union - the tech millennials. Are they drawn to the arts? Do they value a vibrant art culture? Will they write the big checks of tomorrow?
If not, who will?

The other big question of the morning dovetails with something we all know - the rising cost of any kind of space, from homes to business offices to art studios.
Where, the question asks, will the artists of now and tomorrow find practice rooms, studio space, even housing, that is affordable. One artist who spoke has given up her paintbrush to work full time on finding buildings and spaces - once abundant in Belltown, Pioneer Square, Fremont, Ballard - for working artists.
It asks another question - do we want working artists as residents of our urban center (and if yes, what will it take to make artistic space affordable?)?

There was much more, worth every minute even with the usual ghastly food - with one larger question looming over the hour:

If we are, and it seems so, in a golden age of culture in our town, can we sustain it?

"Strange Fruit"

I hadn’t thought about the song in a while, not even over these last months of shootings and the marches of Black Lives Matter, but here it suddenly came again – out of a jazz mix:

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit

 Blood on the leaves and blood at the root"

It’s a touchstone of American history, to hear again as we might read again Elie Wiesel’s “Night” – to remember, to never forget.

"Black body swinging in the Southern breeze.

Strange Fruit hanging from the poplar trees."

I remember – perhaps ten years ago now – talking to Larry Gossett, King County Councilman (for a weekly broadcast) - about the first day he actually saw the words to “Strange Fruit” - - he was a UW student, active in the Black Student Union:

["WHEN I HEAR THAT SONG NOW, OR REFERENCES TO IT, IT ALWAYS REMINDS ME OF THE SAME THING – THE HORRIFIC HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  AND PARTICULARLY IN THIS POST 9/11 ERA WHEN I’VE BEEN IN COUNCIL MEETINGS LISTENING TO MY COLLEAGUES TALK ABOUT HOW INCENSED THEY WERE ABOUT THIS FIRST ACT OF TERROR ON THE SHORES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  AND HERE I AM COMING FROM A PEOPLE WHOSE  WHOLE HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WAS AN EXPERIENCE OF UTTER TERROR.”]

"Pastoral scene of the gallant south.

  The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth."

A New York writer, Abe Meeropol, wrote the song, but Billie Holliday made it her signature, her show stopper, her message wherever she sang:

"Scent of Magnolia sweet and fresh.

 And the sudden smell of burning flesh."

And it became for Larry Gossett, and others dedicated to change but also to remembering a bitter history, a dark anthem that told a story of fear, and of a debased reality that took more than two centuries of American life to overcome:

[“…BETWEEN 1890 AND 1920 THERE WAS ABOUT 28-HUNDRED LYNCHINGS IN THE THIRTEEN CONTIGUOUS STATES OF THE SOUTH, ALL OF THEM AFRICAN AMERICANS, OFTEN BECAUSE OF SOME SLIGHT TO A WHITE PERSON AND IT WAS DONE, YOU KNOW – TAKEN TO A TREE AND HUNG -  ALL TO REMIND THEM, AND ALL OF THE OTHER PEOPLE THAT HEARD ABOUT THE LYNCHING – THAT YOU ARE INFERIOR PEOPLE AND YOU ARE NEVER TO CHALLENGE THE SUPERIOR PEOPLE, WHITE FOLKS IN THIS COMMUNITY.  SO THAT SONG REFLECTS THAT  EXPERIENCE REALLY WELL.”]

When I hear "Strange Fruit" now - it's not as often - I’ll sit.  To listen again.
Dark as it is, it reminds as well of the long road we travel to make reality of our promises.

"Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop."

 -- Abe Meeropol, 1937

Yes, Amanda Knox is innocent, without doubt.....

Let this be a short memo to anyone reading who still doubts the innocence of Amanda Knox.

Italy's highest court - after its declaration last March that Knox and her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito had nothing to do with the murder of Meredith Kercher, today released a scathing 52-page summary re its reasoning.

In sum:
- the investigation was full of "stunning flaws, or amnesia..."
- there was an "abolute lack of biological traces" of either defendant in the murder room or on the victim's body
- the international spotlight on the case caused a "frantic search" for more suspects, with or without evidence
-  the lower courts ignored all testimony of contaminated evidence

And, most vividly, re: the victim's bra clasp that supposedly contained Sollecito DNA - that clasp was on the floor of the murder scene "for 46 days, passed from hand to hand by the workers who, furthermore, were wearing dirty latex gloves."

And on and on.....

It can be said of the Italian judicial system, with its series of automatic appeals, openness to new evidence, and multiple reviews of the known facts in a case, that it finally reached the only possible conclusion, but the incompetence and disregard of basic facts by the original prosecutor cost Amanda Knox precious years of her life, damaged her family financially, and unfairly slandered the reputation of a lovely Italian town - our sister city, Perugia.

Time to set this down, to believe in the innocence of these defendants, to ponder the imperfections of judicial systems everywhere - here as well - and move on.......

A Skeptic In Time

At dinner the other night we paused before eating - held hands around the table in silence as the host offered a prayer giving thanks and asking for guidance, not only for our own lives, but for our nation.

I'm not a religious (spiritual in a way, yes) person, so the moment was rare for me in adult life - I had spent a childhood not missing an Anglican Sunday, even serving as altar boy for a time. In the days since, I've been more the skeptic, and in many cases - gay marriage, the reproductive rights of a woman, racial barriers - I've found religious practice more about dogma than kindness.

But what strikes me again, as it always does, is the sense of comfort, confidence - even a serenity - belief can give to a person, to a family, a congregation. I remember from youth that sense of community every Sunday in the social time following services. And the music - often extraordinary.

All of this is in mind reacting to the use of religion by a Virginia clerk to deny marriage licenses to same gender couples or, put another way, using religion as an excuse not to carry out duties she had sworn to perform, as a reason to ignore court orders, as a justification to defy the Supreme Court of the United States.

Absurd. 

Religion cannot be used to pick and choose which portions of a publicly funded job an elected official will carry out. It cannot be used to unlawfully discriminate. In short, it cannot be used as a fig leaf to cover up bigotry. The clerk in this case could as easily refuse a wedding license to a mixed-race couple, saying her religion forbade such a union.

Absurd.

And this is my own issue with religion - its dark side, what it can justify in the name of faith, in the distorted twisting of words written down centuries ago.
The denial of a wedding license is one thing, but see as well - in the name of faith - human slaughter, beheadings, sexual enslavement, war.

I'm still drawn now and then to the comfort and community I remember, to the help of a symbolic oar of faith on our turbulent life journey. I greatly respect the faith, and resulting generosity, of those who led that prayer the other evening.

But I remember the rest as well - and so these days I'm much more with that great skeptic, Michael Shermer:

“There are many sources of spirituality; religion may be the most common, but it is by no means the only. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades.”
― Michael Shermer

Religion, then, as I believe, is not the only path to a kind and charitable and informed human life. 

Not at all.

Artifacts on the journey

In Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From,” a great read re California and the West, she writes of the 19^th century journey into the promised land, its myths and realities, and notes the precious artifacts, the family relics carried West, then abruptly abandoned along the way, thrown to the side in the rush to climb the Sierra mountains before snowfall, and possible death.

“Women who believed they could keep some token of their mother’s house (the rosewood chest, the flat silver) learned to jettison memory and keep moving.

Sentiment, like grief and dissent, cost time.  A hesitation, a moment spent looking back, and the grail was forfeited.”

Our family made, postwar, a very different journey from our native England – by ocean liner and train rather than oxen and wagon – but we also carried with us artifacts of the life before, relics that, too, are mostly vanished, abandoned or lost somewhere – now just memories kept inside.

That running cup my grandfather won at Wadham College, Oxford; the wood and glass bookshelf he took there; the stuffed alligator he kept above the stair landing in Rottingdean; my “Just William” books, early reading adventures -  all gone, lost, or forgotten gathering dust in a storeroom seldom seen.

In the arc of life, in the long journey, what do we keep?  What is important?  What precious objects remind us of the road traveled?  Who will care about them when our own time is done?

Reading provokes memories, questions……

Trust

Trust.
That's the bedrock of civilization.

And it's a shakier foundation in our own time, with the rise of gun possession and violence, with the pressures of an increasingly global and urbanized economic system, and with the presence everywhere of a growing religious extremism that manifests itself in slaughter.

That's just a morning's two cents worth, but "trust" is what I remember from many years as a television journalist, trust in a community of behavior, trust that during an interview - often outside, exposed, vulnerable, focused on the work and not on the surroundings - we would be safe.
I know the thought must be in the air in newsrooms across the country.

Trust in a level of community behavior is what allows us to walk down a street, attend a ball game, shop in a grocery store, see a film, ride an elevator.

If it erodes, so does a part of the civilization we've known.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/wdbj7-virginia-journalists-shot-during-live-broadcast.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Amanda Knox

I hardly know Amanda Knox - we'd chatted briefly once, in Italian, at a cooking class - but as president of the Seattle-Perugia Sister City Association I'd lived a long time with the drama of her incarceration and under the long arc of her journey from guilt to final innocence.

Seven years and more, time that cast a shadow over a friendship between two cities, time that tested Amanda, her family and friends, in unimaginable ways, time that moved, for those who believed in her innocence, glacially, painfully.

She had written a deeply self-probing book, "Waiting To Be Heard," after her return home to Seattle, after an appeals court had found her innocent, but of course that book could not end the story - the highest court in Italy re-instated her guilt, another appeals court confirmed it, leaving her - all of us really - in a lingering state of limbo, waiting for a final ending, this last spring, in that same high court.

We know the outcome - innocent - but I waited for Amanda's word, an epilogue, a new afterword to her narrative of freedom, prison, and freedom again.

Reading it, just moments ago, three things resound and close this long and traumatic journey:

- how perhaps only the person falsely accused can sum so clearly the reasons for innocence

""None of my DNA was found in my friend Meredith Kercher's bedroom, where she was killed.  The only DNA found, other than Meredith's, belonged to the man convicted of her murder, Rudy Guede.  And his DNA was everywhere in the bedroom.

It is, of course, impossible to selectively clean DNA, which is invisible to the naked eye.  We simply could not have cleaned our DNA and left Guede's and Meredith's behind.  Nor was any other trace of me found at the murder scene, not a single fingerprint, footprint, piece of hair, or drop of blood or saliva.  My innocence and Raffaele's was irrefutable."

- the cruel carelessness of those who judge, and never review their reasons

"A couple of students in one of my large lecture classes at UW posted pictures of me online saying they were in class with a murderer."

- Knox's discovery of The Innocence Project at a 2014 conference, the birth of a commitment to help those who are falsely accused, to pay back the countless world of people who believed in her, and made her own freedom possible

".....I have found my purpose:  to help other innocent people be able to shout, as I did, 'I'm free!' "

Remembering the power of a union - -

I read a few lines from John Talton's Sunday column re the decline of organized labor in the workplace:

"Unions once provided a powerful antidote to [worker] abuse. But after decades of union-busting policies and self-destructive behavior, organized labor represented only 6.6 percent of private-sector workers in 2014."

The column - and the grim recent view of Amazon's workplace - sparked memory of a time, years back, when a news director wrote abusive and demeaning notes to a reporter - tearing him down, insulting and mocking him in writing - an apparent attempt to drive him from the newsroom.  It was over the top unbearable.

As the shop steward of the time, I was able to convene a meeting with the news director and upper management to get that unacceptable behavior on the table for a direct discussion.The young man found work a few months later in a less pressured environment, but those abusive notes stopped - the director and station president agreed they were out of line and damaging to the work environment.

It was a small thing in a way - not comparable perhaps to a contract negotiation - but I've always remembered it when I hear the usual negative talking points re organized labor.
Unions, at their best, are about the rights of workers.  At their best, they work with management to create a more productive and humane workplace.  They are only, though, as effective as the belief in them, the faith in them, given by a workforce.

That faith is at its lowest stage now since the beginnings of the labor movement over a century ago.  But if the picture of the Amazon workplace emerging this week is anywhere close to accurate; if it's a plausible window into the workplace of tomorrow, organized labor may soon have its day - again.

Believe it.

A Hillary Moment

My world is inhabited by a number of Hillary skeptics - I'm one of them - but something she said in that encounter with a Black Lives Matter activist made enormous sense, and it goes to the heart of why politics, the best politics, is so important.

Yes, we need protest.
Yes, we need movements.
We need, yes, a shift of hearts and minds.
But at the end - as MLK, Jr, knew so well - politicians must vote, laws must change, systems must adapt.
Or we just talk, again and again.

“I don’t believe you change hearts,” Mrs. Clinton says. “I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”

And on the road to that moment you need a message that resonates, that sells:

".....in politics, if you can’t explain it and you can’t sell it, it stays on the shelf.”

And if it dies on the shelf, all the talk and all the marches won't change the world.
Politics can.

I’m re-imagining Donald Trump as a deranged Pied Piper casting a malevolent spell, luring Republican candidates and voters down a dubious road.

This may seem a good thing to Democrats measuring the political baggage piling up in the Clinton campaign van, but it ought to worry anyone concerned about the sanity of our political discourse.

To wit, channeling Trumpspeak:

- re the estimated 11 million undocumented residents of our country, the Trump – and now add too many other Presidential candidates – “policy” is simply, “They’ve got to go.”  All of them – families, children brought here as youngsters, etc.
- Mexico must pay for wall construction running from California to Texas and beyond – an impenetrable wall on the order, say, of the old Soviet Union wall in Berlin.  A symbol of fear and exclusion.
- the 14th Amendment, one of the fundamental documents of our democratic freedom, must change – especially those words giving citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

To tamper with an amendment that is bedrock to human rights - to suggest its dismantling or fundamental change - ought to be (my two cents) a disqualifier for anyone wanting to become President of us all.

Just a quick look at our legal history will show that the 14th Amendment guarantees of citizenship, due process, and equal protection of the law gave us – to choose three of many – the right to same-sex marriage, the right to equal rather than segregated schools, and the right of women to choose a medically safe termination of an unwanted pregnancy.

The partisan in me wants Trump to keep talking and casting the spell; the other part – the one wanting a civil discourse about things that matter -  is appalled that Trump Talk not only cowers too many other politicians, but that it is swallowed by so many Americans.

Out of Proportion

There was something troubling - my two cents - in the uproar over that disruption of Bernie Sanders in downtown Seattle.
On one side we had plenty of folks annoyed at missing the chance to hear Sanders because the folks who took over the mike were not intent on simply delivering their message - they wanted it to be the only message.
On another we had folks who essentially cheered the rudeness towards Sanders and those who wanted/and waited to hear his message, insisting that Black Lives Matter is the most important message of our time (yes, it is important) and coming close to suggesting (in fact doing so in some cases) than any criticism of the arrogance at the podium was racist.
It was, really, a window in miniature into our current divisive and corrosive politics - and not incidentally one inflated beyond its worth by a media become increasingly an entertainment troubadour.

In counter, let's go to the reliable sanity of Mr. Egan:

"When a noisy intruder, an African-American, jumped to the podium and refused to let Sanders speak, it was widely interpreted as a big problem for the candidate and race relations.
Wrong. The censor with the mouth was, it turns out, a self-described “extremist Christian,” from a family that once backed Sarah Palin. Some members of Black Lives Matter distanced themselves from her.
How did this stunt become a thing among the national press corps? Junk media. Sadly, [our] sugar high goes two ways."
- Tim Egan, NYTimes

Sparks from the page

I love the sparks a book page can set off, conjuring distant memory, moments that suddenly rise as clear as morning.
I'm reading through Tim Egan's "The Good Rain" - that sum of the Northwest soul - on a page where he talks of Justice William O. Douglas:

"....a thin-haired noodle of a man who favored lonely alpine meadows and young wives, was that rare breed from another time, the Renaissance Man of the American West:  lawyer, author, outdoorsman, lover."

And that passage rolled the screen far back to the summer of 1973.  Bill Dorsey, with camera, and myself drove early - perhaps 4am - over the big mountain past Sunrise and down to Goose Prairie to the mountain home of Justice Douglas who, that August 4th morning, was to rule on President Nixon's decision to bomb Cambodia.
Being young - near rookies of journalism - we imagined we might get an advance, an exclusive interview.  Innocents on the road......

So I knocked on that prairie door, unannounced, but beyond a few words with Mrs. Douglas (nee the young Cathy Heffernan) and a glimpse of Douglas himself (scowling a few feet away), we didn't get much more than a shot of the cabin, set in a great meadow east of Mt. Rainier.

We drove, disappointed, on down to the federal courthouse in Yakima where later that same day Douglas ordered an immediate halt to the bombing, setting in motion a momentary Constitutional crisis.
Before we got home, though, the rest of the Supreme Court - voting 8-0 by phone - reversed Douglas, but Bill and I - years later - still remembered that journey as a piece of history traveled - a moment remembered again today by that passage in Tim's book.

So read on - we never quite know where it will lead, or what it may provoke.  That's the wonder of the written word......