On The Wing

Editor’s Note: This piece first appeared at Like The Dew, Journal of Southern Culture & Politics

Pope Benedict XVI last week delivered his most definitive statement and apology for the sex scandal that has been plaguing the Roman Catholic Church for the better part of  the last decade. Standing before thousands of priests in St. Peter’s Square on Friday, the Pope begged forgiveness and was quoted  by the New York Times as saying he would do “everything possible” to prevent priests from abusing children.

Bishopaccountability.org, a U.S. based organization that documents the abuse crisis in the Church called the Pope’s  remarks a squandered opportunity and asked for the Holy Father to “endorse and facilitate certain external measures that would increase transparency and advance justice,” including posting all abuse cases handled by the Vatican on the Vatican Web site and ordering “his bishops to cooperate fully with secular investigations, not oppose them.”

In revealing a new detailed explanation of the forces at work behind the scandal, the Pope said the Devil was behind the scandal, saying it had emerged now, in the middle of the Vatican’s Year of the Priest, because “the enemy,” or the Devil, wants to see “God driven out of the world.”

The Pope,  rumored to be a  huge fan of the late comedian, Flip Wilson, was reported to have been watching the “Best of” the comic’s 70s variety series just before making his “Devil made them do it” statements. One report also indicates Wilson’s Grammy award winning comedy album, The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress is a favorite in the Pope-mobile CD player.

This reporter’s repeated attempts at reaching the Devil for comment have as yet gone unanswered.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally ran in Like the Dew, Journal of Southern Culture and Politics.

New Normal: Heartland is Not in Kansas Anymore

by Michael J. Solender

The Brookings Institution has just published The State of Metropolitan America report which evaluates census and other data for the nation’s top one hundred metropolitan areas. Their conclusions? As a nation we are reaching critical milestones that if continued to be ignored will dramatically impact our collective standards of living in negative ways.

The report outlines  five “new realities” to be mindful of. They are: Growth and Outward Expansion, Population Diversification, Aging of the Population, Uneven Higher Educational Attainment, and Income Polarization. These realities, according to the report, are redefining who we are, where and with whom we live, and how we provide for our own welfare, as well as that of our families and communities.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the report is a new categorization typology they have developed to better describe the significant demographic differences in an increasingly diverse American Landscape. According to the report: “Large metropolitan areas as a group are ‘ahead of the curve’ on the five new demographic and social realities that America confronts. However, in some ways, large metropolitan areas actually became more different from one another in the 2000s, mak­ing it even more important to understand American society from the individualized perspectives of these places.”

One such typology is the “New Heartland,” defined as metro areas with fast growing, highly educated locales, but lower shares of Hispanic and Asian populations than the national average. These 19 metro areas include many in the “New South” where blacks are the dominant minor­ity group, such as Atlanta and Charlotte, as well as largely white metro areas throughout the Midwest and West, such as Indianapolis and Portland (OR).

The report states that over 100 million of America’s 300 million are seniors and or baby boomers who will require different housing, transportation and service needs than the suburban landscape many have grown up in.

The implications are clear and while the consequences for inaction may be dire, Americans have shown intestinal fortitude throughout history on similar economic and demographic changes and there is no reason why we can’t embrace and leverage these shifts rather than pine for the “good old days.”

My take is we need to get serious in  four key areas under the new normal:

• Education: While municipalities across the U.S. are facing some of the most significant budgetary crises in history, we need to be spending more, not less on teachers and programs that deliver the education our children will need to remain competitive. The costs on the back end of welfare, unemployment, crime, etc. far outweigh front-end expenditures on education. Schools need to be run like businesses, complete with P&L’s and performance metrics that go beyond test scores to measure effectiveness of the jobs they do in educating our kids. We need to embrace radical changes in our education process in this country; too much of it is flat out broken.
• Zoning: Decades of giving the developers the upper hand and virtually the only seat at the table in the growth of our cities has created urban sprawl, gridlock, water shortages and a host of unproductive land use that is unsustainable and replete with empty big boxes. Citizens unite! Take back our communities.
• Municipal government: Does every city or town in this country need its own police department? Fire department? Public works, etc? Town councils? Redundant services are in such oversupply providing excess payroll and considerable duplication. I love the great individuality that this land offers, but perhaps it is time to rethink the cost of having a million of everything.
• The Deficit: It isn’t going away, people. Take a look across the pond at Greece. Americans are sick and tired of partisan politics. When we have our Secretary of Defense standing up and publicly stating he doesn’t want or need the money that congress is giving him, and having that message fall on deaf ears, something is clearly wrong. Defense programs where planes are built in 47 states are going to have support of 47 states’ worth of congressional approval, regardless of what Robert Gates wants.

My wife and I have exactly one parent left. My mom-in-law is ninety-one and lives with us in our home in Charlotte.

My friends constantly ask me how we do it and try and convene saint-hood upon us because we care for my wife’s mother.

Mumma has lived with us for six years, leaving the small rural Wisconsin dairy farming community she grew up in and raised her kids in. Mumma is deaf and has been ever since she was a child. Outside of that minor inconvenience she is healthy, of strong mind and while occasionally troublesome – who isn’t?- does not pose a great burden for us to care and provide for.

Every day at our house is Mother’s Day. We make sure Mumma has what she needs when we are at work or away from the home. She can fix her own meals and is fairly self-sufficient, though she doesn’t drive and after a few falls we are reluctant to leave her alone for extended periods of time. We keep her favorite food on hand though our culinary tastes and interests couldn’t be further apart. She has her own sitting room, TV, bedroom and bath. We wash her clothes, run her errands and see to her physical needs the best we can. We expend no more effort than most of you do with your kids and I bet no one is trying to Saint you for being a parent.

Is it challenging at times? Of course. Does it get between my wife and I and place strain on us? Yes you bet. But it also brings us closer together and provides a sense of well being knowing that we are making someone, someone who cared for my wife for many years, happy and comfortable late in her life when the only other option would have likely been a nursing home in a community where no one knew her anymore.

Mother’s Day seems so contrived and commercially American. Virtually every other nation in the world, especially third world nations, have extended families that live together and treat their elders with reverence, deference and genuine care. Why isn’t that the norm here?

My wife and I don’t have kids. Who the hell is going to look out for us??

Editor’s note: This piece ran last week at Like The Dew, Journal of Southern Culture & Politics. It bears repeating.

Sky Falling. Now What? Caveat Emptor in Consuming New Media

By Michael J. Solender

U.S Newspaper circulation suffered its biggest drop in over fifteen years as reported last week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The annual report indicates an average weekday drop in circulation of 8.7% in the six months ending March 31^st.  Sunday circulation saw a fall of 6.5%.

The Chicago Sun-Times said that national journals showed large weekday losses, with the San Diego Union-Tribune falling 22.7 percent, the Washington Post declining 13.1 percent, and USA Today losing 13.6 percent. The Chicago Tribune was down 9.8 percent to 452,145 weekdays and down 7.5 percent to 858,256 Sundays. The Wall Street Journal was the only one of the top 25 papers to gain in circulation — 0.5 percent.

My adopted home town paper and sometimes employer, the Charlotte Observer, trumpeted their own decline today stating, in Charlotte, the Observer shed 21,000 daily readers and lost 18,400 on Sundays, a decline of 11 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Additionally they noted double-digit percentage declines at some other major Carolina dailies, led by a 17 percent daily plunge at the News & Record in Greensboro.

As evidenced by your very reading this piece online, more and more people are getting their news, opinion and entertainment content from non-print sources online and otherwise. Much has been written about this trend over the last decade and the newspaper as we once knew it has been declared dead more times than any nine-lived cat ever.

The evolution and convergence of media is certainly nothing new and is being embraced in many circles, particularly with younger readers and technology adapters who use digital forms of media to inform and entertain themselves.

Credibility and journalistic integrity in particular I think bear mindfulness and warning as we turn increasingly online for our daily “news”  fix.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the overwhelming majority of print journals establish and maintain journalistic standards and integrity in their reporting. Fact checking, source verification and access for rebuttal and response are cornerstone elements and sacred for any journal worth the stock it’s printed on.

Editorial and News functions remain separated by mostly effective Chinese Walls that are established to prevent inherent conflicts that exist between the business — and make no mistake about it, a newspaper is a business — of running the paper and the editorial position of the institution. While most if not all of the mainstream print media has  online beachheads that carry on these standards, many online publishers and bloggers do not.

The barrier for entry to online information dissemination is access to a P.C. (any library can provide this) and a modicum of spare time.

Consumers of political perspective and news who turn to the internet, more specifically the blogosphere, for their sustenance have no assurance that anything they read is factually accurate, verifiable or even from an identifiable or credible source.

David Wallace, author of One Nation Under Blog (Brown Books Publishing Group), was the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council member and 3 term former mayor of Sugar Land, Texas, builds a solid argument for injecting a code of conduct and ethical responsibility into the exploding forum of information exchange and influence found online in the blog-o-sphere.

Recognizing that unfettered conversational speech provides the very element that makes blogging unique and a dynamic forum for political dialogue, Wallace acknowledges that this can be the underlying Achilles heel of the political blog if not held to more universal standards.  Personal responsibility, fact verification, blog monitoring for unacceptable content, refusing to allow for harassing, stalking or threatening of others, copyright infringement, and privacy violation all make it into Wallace’s common sense code.

As newspaper circulation continues to plummet, the question we should be asking ourselves is not how will we replace our beloved papers, but how should we be more informed consumers of what replaces them.

Will someone please put Dick Cheney in a Toyota and send him back to the bunker? The former Veep and puppet-master was sounding off yesterday with the talking heads taking aim at his successor and Barry-O regarding their stand on fighting the war on terror.

The pot shots come from the man whose “Mission Accomplished” proved to be a premature ejaculation as was his famous quote, telling all who would listen that Iraq bound U.S troops would be greeted as “liberators” in the streets of Baghdad.

Sensing the plunge in value of his speaker’s fees  to less than a quarter of the  right’s new darling, Sarah Palin, the big Dick is trying his best at revisionist history. Scolding Joey-B via the airwaves he said the progress in Iraq and Afghanistan made during the past year is deserving of a big “thank you” to Bush Jr. and the previous administration.

Credit to jumping Joe for getting his digs back, as most pundits scored the W for the plagiarist from Delaware. In a particularly juicy jibe, Joe chided the Dick-meister, noting he’d been sidelined by his own boss for the last year of Bush’s tenure.  He said Cheney had been “misinformed or was misinforming” in an attempt to rewrite history.

To think that this dude was once a heart-beat away from the football is pretty scary. Maybe he wants his job back at Halliburton?