Yes, But … Crony, Phony, Fake, or Real?

                  Yes, But … Crony, Phony, Fake, or Real?

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 25, 2017

            Yes, the Atlanta Braves SunTrust Park is a sight to behold.  Sports lovers or not, citizens can experience an enjoyable afternoon or evening at the park.

For children, the stadium is an absolute delight, and kids do need more open air fun these days.  They’re inside too much. 

            Most churches have abandoned the organ.  Baseball hasn’t, and that’s good.   At a baseball game, thoughts of politics and socio-economics are as far from fans’ minds as is New Zealand.  That’s good as well.

            The yelling is fun too.  Not my yelling.  I don’t yell.  I’ve tried to, but can’t.  Listening to the yelling (clean yelling) of nearby fans is all the release I need.  I did turn around once to compliment loud teenage boys for their hilarious and playful put-down comments about the opposing team.

            Back to the stadium itself.  One doesn’t have to be an architect or engineer to appreciate architecture.  In fact, one reason I didn’t yell recently is that I was pondering the steel, the labor, and the engineering that produced the structure.  When I think of “advanced nations,” I think of good roads, safe bridges, and beautiful, functioning buildings.  When Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us,” he indicated that what meets the eye influences the soul.

            Even though there are seats at SunTrust where it’s hard to see the batter, the oft repeated comment, “There are no bad seats in the house,” still holds true.  The sweep of the seating as opposed to the stacked effect of so many other stadiums is a striking feature.

            BUT … I’m conflicted.  I’ve taken my wife, and will soon take my two sons to the park, but I’m still conflicted.  Why? Because I and several hundred thousand other citizens were forced to pay, not a petty portion of the park’s cost, but a hefty $300 million plus.  We had no choice and no vote.

            Ok, the park is built and is in use, so am I rattling old bones?  No, because as long as regular citizens say nothing, crony capitalism (phony, fake capitalism?) will continue.

            There has always been contention over the interplay of the public and private sector, always debate about what government should or should not give money to.  The debate should drive us back to a foundational question: What is the proper role of government?

            Further, is the marriage of state and private special interests a good idea?  Is it proper for government to aid and assist billionaires in building their sports stadiums?  I say no.      

Will hotel and restaurant earnings and the taxes therefrom justify our multimillion dollar “investment”?  Jobs at the stadium will not.   Stadium jobs are held by teenagers and seemingly retired citizens, seasonal jobs at best.

SunTrust Park is the third home built for the Braves team in the last four decades.  Like other sports cities, mostly Southern ones, Atlanta will demolish a building at the drop of a hat.  And when elected officials make deals in secret with the billionaires seeking “public funds” (weasel words for the people’s money), the situation becomes even more onerous.

            Current annual average pay for Major League baseball players is just over $4 million.    And what do players do for these millions?  Outfielders and basemen spend most of their time standing.  Just standing.   Their work is momentary.  Not so for pitchers and catchers, but overall, baseball players, good hitters or not, are paid to stand.  What an easy life!  Brought to them in part (in the case of SunTrust Park) by the taxpayers of the county.

            If a free market allows it, I’m for it, but the injection of tax money, voted on or not, sullies the very concept and function of a free market.  Columnist George Will once wrote that government has as much business funding the arts as it does rodeo.  I say let’s add professional sports to the No, No list for goverment.

            Even though the Braves fan base lies northwest of Atlanta, what percentage of Cobb County taxpayers attend the games or even care about baseball?  A 35-year-old working stiff with two or three small children probably can’t afford more than one trip per year to the park.  But we gotta pay our hardworking celebrity athletes, so tickets, parking, and food prices aren’t likely to drop.

            My word “conflicted” above is too mild.  I’ve already moved to “Against it” in spite of the deep pleasure of watching the Braves shut out the San Francisco Giants.

            Let’s just keep capitalism pure and keep government in its place.

                       

Roger Hines

6/22/17

What Happens When a Giant Awakens?

                   What Happens When a Giant Awakens?

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 18, 2017

            There’s only one word for what’s stirring in and around our national capital.  That word is hysteria.  Scorned elites from the media and the political class, who cannot accept political defeat, have never been as effectively challenged as they are now.

            The job market is improving, stocks are doing well, and but for acting up college students, there is relative peace in the land.  Peace outside of Washington, that is.  Inside that eternal bubble, truth deniers struggle with reality.  That reality is Donald Trump.

            Trump is not legitimate, the deniers are claiming.  He’s neither from them nor of them and doesn’t belong in the palace.  He doesn’t know what he’s doing. 

Actually, the new sheriff in town knows exactly what he’s doing.  Those who have taken to the streets to oppose him, affording the elites a measure of joy, call themselves the Resistance.  But the Resistance is actually President Trump and his regime who are resisting the status quo of regulatory strangulation, debt, and declining influence among other nations.  There are good reasons for the President’s enemies to quake.

            This past week when the president held his first full cabinet meeting and asked his secretaries for comments, they took turns heaping praise upon their new boss.  Admittedly, the praise got mighty thick.

            Was this unusual cabinet meeting scripted as Trump critics claimed?  Scripted or not, there is no reason to believe cabinet members weren’t sincere.  Ben Carson, not sincere?  General “Mad Dog” Mattis, fawning?  Sonny Perdue, not happy to be there?  Dr. Tom Price, not excited to help the president with medical care policy?  And who believes Mike Pence could ever be a poser?  The man oozes character and sincerity.

            Around the table sat men and women of practical experience: a surgeon, a farmer, an “oil man,” generals, and business people.  The nervous network and cable TV chattering class mocked the meeting, their hysteria evident.  Practical types such as the cabinet members frighten the media.  Media elites wallow in commentary, speculation, and of course, drama.  They have built nothing, have run nothing, and have never met a payroll. 

Probably three-quarters of them have never held a wrench, never climbed upon a tractor, never operated on a patient, never changed a tire, managed a store, worked in a warehouse, gathered crops, wired a house, fought in war, driven a big truck, or gotten dirty. 

Hysteria reigns because Donald Trump tapped a sleeping giant on the shoulder and gave him hope.  The victory which the giant gave Trump in return was more than an election; it was a rebellion.  It was populism rearing its oppressed head.  It was a revolt against know-it-all commentators, big government Democrats, timid Republicans (not all Republicans), and practically everything Hillary Clinton stood for.

The giant had been told by all of the above that he must accept global this, global that, and global the other.  This time the giant rejected “We are the world” for “America First.”

The giant-awakener whom the elites detest has heralded a new political order.  This new order is apparently what voters desired when they elected Mr. Trump.  As surely as Andrew Jackson, the first president from west of Appalachia, aroused voters who were far down the socio-economic ladder,  Trump successfully wooed white working class voters, many of whom had been alienated by the Democratic party.  Consider his typically Democratic midwestern states victories.

One chief characteristic of the new political order is that its architect owes nothing to the  establishment.  Talk about “of the people”!  His victory was a rebuke of experts, commentators, and pollsters.  If pollsters were so wrong about the architect’s chances for election, argues the giant, why trust their reports about his approval rating?

Like Jackson’s 1828 victory, Trump’s victory gave voice to the little guy.  The little guy in America is not alone.  His counterpart in Britain has spoken also, rejecting the British establishment’s argument that Brits should be ruled from Brussels.  Even with a recent loss in France, the little guy made a respectable showing.  In Italy he is making noise as well. 

What sweet irony that our billionaire president was buoyed to power by rural, small town, and urban voters who were less educated (formally) than in the past.  Television commentators consider themselves intellectuals.  Historian Paul Johnson said of intellectuals, “They are dangerous.  They forget that people are more important than concepts.  The worst of all tyrannies is the tyranny of ideas.” 

But common folks have awakened to their would-be tyrants, and that explains the hysteria of the moment.  Expect it for a while longer, though I’ve no doubt the giant will prevail.

Roger Hines

6/14/17 

Fact or Fiction? The State of the Nation’s News

         Fact or Fiction? The State of the Nation’s News

       Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 11, 2017

            Television news has almost reached the point of fabrication.  Daily it gives the lie to race relations, religion, and national unity.  Unlike print journalism which allows slow thought and consideration, television news centers on fast moving images that do little more than stir emotions.  Television news is sheer snapshot.

            Every week of my life I see good race relations at the gas pump, at church, at work, in the grocery store checkout line, and in the neighborhood where I live.   Nowhere have I seen better race relations than in a state prison where I have taught for the last five years.  There the warden is black, guards and office employees are of different races, and inmates are of every extraction that exists.  Friendliness prevails, even among inmates.  Makes you wonder if Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson ever leave the cameras and get out among real people.

            Television news portrays us as a nation aflame.  It delights in showing us at our worst.  I’m talking about the USA, not the globe.  We all know there is war and carnage around the world, but racial strife in the United States is not widespread.  There are occasional brushfires but it’s not as though the woods are on fire.

Goodwill just doesn’t make good television.  Spoiled college kids do, as do filthy-mouth comedians, all of whom need a good spanking.  I’m thinking one problem nowadays is that too many people under 40 never got a good spanking.

            The internet has not been good for dictators, liars, the formerly mainstream media, or Al Gore who says he invented it.  Social media may be sillier than it is serious, but it has given voice to the voiceless. Most television news is as much about the news givers as it is the newsmakers.  The news givers are celebrities and view themselves as such.

            It hasn’t always been this way.  ABC’s Howard K. Smith was steady at the helm.  Like Walter Cronkite, Smith was trusted.  Their coverage of the civil rights revolution and of race generally was balanced.

            As for religion, television news likes to portray Westboro Baptist Church and the KKK as the standard bearers of Christianity.  Claiming that faith is faltering in America, the network anchors apparently have never flown over the parking lots of megachurches on any given Sunday.  Do they even know of the heavy sprinkling of start-up churches that thickly dot the nation and are drawing in millennials?  These 20, 30, and 40-something-filled churches may have weird – sometimes even disrespectful – names (Not Your Grandmother’s Church? The Together Church?  Church in the Now?  Good grief!), but most of them espouse orthodox Christianity.

            This figure is at least four years old, but each weekend, 41% of Americans attend worship.  Not a majority, but perhaps a surprisingly high minority.  In England, a former cradle of the Christian Gospel, the figure is 6%.  We can be sure that the 41% don’t subscribe to the moral slime the networks slop out at prime time, programming that does not portray the values of close to half of the nation.

            As for national unity, television news tells us we’re more divided than ever.  Not so, but you would think so from all the televised hollering, college kid window-bashing and protesting that only non-working Americans have time to engage in.

            When Mississippi native Turner Catledge became executive editor of the New York Times, the Times was not at all the fake news spout it is today.  In Catledge’s obituary, The NYT wrote, “He believed New York sophisticates could learn a thing or two about life in the rest of America.”

            Ah, “the rest of America,” those whose axis is not New York / D.C. / L.A.  Those regular working people ignored by television news, considered deplorable by some, even though they are the backbone of the nation.  People who don’t live in a media bubble.

            Recently in New Republic magazine, Michael Tomasky claimed that elitism is liberalism’s biggest problem.  Advising Democrats to “tone down the looking-down,” Tomasky urged them to understand that middle Americans “go to church,” and that “they don’t feel self-conscious about saluting the flag.”  Lord, Lord.  One hopes CNN and MSNBC got that message.

            Maybe it’s because print journalists don’t have to be “made up” for television.  Maybe it’s because they can rely completely on their printed words and not on being pretty guys or gals for the camera. 

Whatever, I’ll take the cooler pages of a newspaper over the frantic, pow-pow-pow pace of television any day of the week.

Roger Hines

6/7/17   

             

            

Let Not Many Be Teachers, Or Coaches

                            Let Not Many Be Teachers, Or Coaches

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 4, 2017

            My mind is on our teachers.  Most of them wound up their year’s work in the last week or two.  Believe me, their minds and bodies are still numb.  They don’t have and never did have three months off, no matter what their school system calendar may have said.

            Teaching is draining work.  Teachers are constantly giving.  Not just knowledge, but energy, emotions, and every ounce of creativity they possess.  The emotional part gets more intense by the year.  Weakened homes have made sure of that.

            I have the deepest respect for the teachers I’ve worked with for the past half-century.  I can’t recall over four or five high school teachers that I would classify as bad teachers or bad people.  From the five colleges I have taught in, I’m thinking the numbers are about the same.

            Teachers of small children particularly need our support.  We all know how demanding children can be; however, teachers of younger children tell me that the number of demanding children is decreasing because so many children come to school sad, unresponsive, and disengaged.

            Here’s something taxpaying citizens need to know, especially my conservative friends.  We can complain about failing schools all we want, but failing schools are often the result of failing homes.  There are many children, and teenagers as well, who don’t like to leave school when the day is over, all because of the help, support, and love they get from their teachers.  First-year teachers learn fast why students (even seventeen-year-olds) cling to them.  There’s little help and little clinging at home.

            I’ve no doubt that many teachers occasionally leave school deeply troubled because of student needs that are not academic or intellectual.  The school’s chief task is (or should be) to provide knowledge by teaching academic content, and to build character by teaching right and wrong, particularly regarding stealing, cheating, and respecting others.  Nowadays students come with other needs as well.

            Today schools are feeding students, clothing them, and providing therapy of all stripes.  “Grief counseling” is particularly widespread, an offering which is often simply over-done.  It teaches students to wallow in grief instead of how to interpret and appropriate it.

            Those who claim schools have moved from a knowledge-based institution to a feelings-based one are largely correct.  We are indeed one nation under therapy; however, schools are not an entity that is disconnected from the larger culture.  Schools are a reflection of the culture.  What many critics don’t understand is that teachers must teach whoever enters the building.  And a very large percentage of those who enter the building come from brokenness, fighting parents, and absentee fathers.  Not all of these are from poverty-stricken homes.

            .  Failing homes are not the fault of children or teens, but of parents.  If teachers must spend time training students on matters that parents didn’t attend to (discipline, social skills, need of encouragement), how can we blame teachers or schools for having to do what should have already been done?   How can education’s critics not understand that attending to what has not been attended to takes time from academic content?

            There is a Biblical injunction that reads, “Let not many be teachers.”  It refers to teachers of scripture, but it reminds me that schools need teachers who truly desire to teach.  Our coaches are teachers, too, and some of the best.  Few realize the positive impact that coaches have on students, even students whom they don’t teach or coach.  Male coaches are still symbols of masculinity, strength, discipline, and cheer.  The best influence on high school girls is often male coaches; however, both male and female coaches too often go unheralded.  I say may their tribe increase.

            Education critics should back up and become social (hearth and home) critics.  And then become activists, working with poor families, or taking a next door teen to church or synagogue. Such a step back would help produce a better child or teen before he or she enters the school building.

 Schools are no doubt doing some things wrong.  I wish schools would cut some of the therapy and teach students to “cowboy up.”  Education’s therapeutic self-absorption, however, didn’t start in the schools.  A nation’s schools are downstream from its culture.

The “man for all seasons,” renaissance figure Sir Thomas More, said to young Richard Rich, “Why not be a teacher?  You’d be a fine one, perhaps a great one.”  Rich answered, “And if I were, who would know it?”

“You, your pupils, friends, God.  Not a bad public, that.”

Wish every teacher you know a good summer.  We need them back.

Roger Hines

5/31/17