Wednesday, May 30, 2001
Paul Wellstone the conscientious Liberal could be your next President
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Here's good news for the purist New York heirs of FDR and Harry Truman who worry that the principles of their party have been compromised and are getting lost in the the Neo- or Post-Liberal or moderate-Republicanphase of the Democratic party. The lost battalions of McCarthy (Eugene, that is) and the wandering tribes of McGovern will be glad to know that the senior Senator of Minnesota, Paul David Wellstone, has written a compelling book; "Conscience of A Liberal" (Random House, $24), that reaffirms the faith. If the title evokes the late Barry Goldwater's" Conscience of a Conservative," it is deliberate. When Senator Goldwater died, Wellstone, much to his Republican colleagues' surprise, came to the services. He claims that, although the principles of Goldwater were anathema to him, the evocation of a political conscience had influenced him, as a youth, and, in a way, charted his path.
"Never separate the lives you live from the words you say," he used to tell his students at Carlerton College, a prestigious small school in Minnesota, where he taught political science for 21 years, after earning his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1969.
In 1989 he decided to put his liberal priciples into action and mounted a grassroots campaign for the US Senate, against the well heeled and regarded Republican Senator Rudy Boshwitz, an expert in fund raising and TV campaigning. Most surprisingly, this modest campaign, the candidate crisscrossing Minnesota in a green bus to make stump speeches, generated the only upset of a sitting Senator that year.. A burning liberal with an agenda, Wellstone was the Jimmy Stewart character, come live from the 1930s, eliciting an admiring book, "Professor Wellstone Goes to Washington:The Inside Story of a Grassroots Campaign," by two veteran Minneapolis Trribune reporters, Denis J. McGrath and Dane Smith. Environment as well as child care,health and welfare were his main campaign themes. Two books, "How the Rural Poor Got Power " (1978) and "Powerline" (1981, co-authored with Barry M. Casper) were his political credentials, reflecting a populist credo.
Notwithstanding the impression that Minnesotans are easily impressed by colorful underdog populist candidates with moxy (think of their current wrestler/ XFL commentator/Governor Jesse Ventura - Wellstone too was a champion collegiate wrestler) the senator is a down-to-earth legislator with a record that earned him re-election in 1996 against a really well financed Boshwitz, who accused him of being a bad Jew and soft on jailed criminals.
As to his stature as a legislator, Wellstone, with Republican Pete Dominici, has successfully sponsored mental health bills (both senators have near relatives with disabilities). His co-sponsorship of the campaign reform bill and health and welfare proposals (he was the only Senator of either p[arty to vote against Clinton’s Welfare Reform bill) have earned him the "last Liberal" nickname from his colleagues. Much liked, despite his constant battles with Speaker Trent Lott on the Senate floor, and his opposition to the Welfare Reform bill that irked the Democrats, he is an often mentioned potential Presidential candidate. In fact, the Amazon.com reviewer of his new book characterizes it as a typical Presidential candidate's book.
Wellstone had the top office in mind in 2000, but deferred to Vice President. Al Gore. Thw 2004 contest will be another story. Although he claims that his current political goal is to be re-elected in 2002, the book is aimed at a national audience.The subtitle alone, compassionxxxx . Interestingly it is not attracting the attentionxxxx> I became aware of it through an interview on Brian Lehrer’s WNYC
program. Only one of the three normally well-informed information desk associates at the flagship Barnes and Noble 17th Street store knew the Senator’s name, and the books were buried on some bottom shelf. It may well be that the National Democratic leadership is not putting any money on the Wellstone candidacy at this early date. Meanwhile, the opportunist Rev. Al Sharpton is picking up free publicity and some voter approval by his early declaration to be the only real Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 2004.
Wellstone’s 2002 campaign will be difficult, his seat is considered vulnerable, and Vice President Cheney is using his influence to avoid a Republican primary that would expose and wound his candidates before the main bout. He wants a one-on-one.
In this era of compassionate conservatism turning sour Wellstone’s subtitle - - points to his direction. ld
So, what do we know about the man? Well, the people of Minnesota like him. As a Crofessor at Crlton he split his time between rearing a family of three kids (he has six grandchildren), and going to rallies in support of family farmers and low-income people. In his proposals in the US Senate he has followed the principle that government should be the tool to provide an opportunity for all people, not just defense contractors and Wall Street. Recovering alcoholics and druggees should have access to treatment. China’s civil rights record should be condemned - this in concert with Senator Tim Hutchinson of AR, on the 10th anniversary of Tienamen Square (defeated by China in the UN).That’s some quick gleanings from the Internet.
Do the people like him? Opensecrets, Minnesota, an Internet site gathering political contribution data shows that in 1993-98 he received and mostly spent $6.8 million, $4.8 million in contributions of $200 or less (71 percent), and only $570,000 (8.3 percent) in PAC money. That’s a pretty good indication. Why do they like him? I mean, this is Garrison Keeler country of tacit Scandinavians, homesteaded farms with shrinking incomes, and here comes this Jewish kid from the South offering them the future? The impresison is that he has succeeded because he is a teacher, not a profesisonal politician and therefore squeeky clean, a people person who cares and a man who goes all out to help. And smart.That’s why.
Can this type of politician succeed in bringing us a national government that will take care of the people? George W. Bush was supposed to do that, after the Clinton disappointment. Now we see environment policies that, instead of providing research for energy substitutes, favor Texas oil drillers who want to suck out the last drop of petroleum substance out of the ground before worrying about the future. They know the Planet Earth will run out of oil in 38 years or so, hence the vague hints about atomic energy, but, meanwhile, let’s take care of the boys.
Will America like him? Think about it. Meanwhile, Paul should think about getting rid of the beard.
Senator Paul Wellsone, the brightest hope of the liberal Democrats, died in a plane crash at 58, with his wife and daughter, in Dec. 2002 while campaigning for for reelection.
Here's good news for the purist New York heirs of FDR and Harry Truman who worry that the principles of their party have been compromised and are getting lost in the the Neo- or Post-Liberal or moderate-Republicanphase of the Democratic party. The lost battalions of McCarthy (Eugene, that is) and the wandering tribes of McGovern will be glad to know that the senior Senator of Minnesota, Paul David Wellstone, has written a compelling book; "Conscience of A Liberal" (Random House, $24), that reaffirms the faith. If the title evokes the late Barry Goldwater's" Conscience of a Conservative," it is deliberate. When Senator Goldwater died, Wellstone, much to his Republican colleagues' surprise, came to the services. He claims that, although the principles of Goldwater were anathema to him, the evocation of a political conscience had influenced him, as a youth, and, in a way, charted his path.
"Never separate the lives you live from the words you say," he used to tell his students at Carlerton College, a prestigious small school in Minnesota, where he taught political science for 21 years, after earning his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1969.
In 1989 he decided to put his liberal priciples into action and mounted a grassroots campaign for the US Senate, against the well heeled and regarded Republican Senator Rudy Boshwitz, an expert in fund raising and TV campaigning. Most surprisingly, this modest campaign, the candidate crisscrossing Minnesota in a green bus to make stump speeches, generated the only upset of a sitting Senator that year.. A burning liberal with an agenda, Wellstone was the Jimmy Stewart character, come live from the 1930s, eliciting an admiring book, "Professor Wellstone Goes to Washington:The Inside Story of a Grassroots Campaign," by two veteran Minneapolis Trribune reporters, Denis J. McGrath and Dane Smith. Environment as well as child care,health and welfare were his main campaign themes. Two books, "How the Rural Poor Got Power " (1978) and "Powerline" (1981, co-authored with Barry M. Casper) were his political credentials, reflecting a populist credo.
Notwithstanding the impression that Minnesotans are easily impressed by colorful underdog populist candidates with moxy (think of their current wrestler/ XFL commentator/Governor Jesse Ventura - Wellstone too was a champion collegiate wrestler) the senator is a down-to-earth legislator with a record that earned him re-election in 1996 against a really well financed Boshwitz, who accused him of being a bad Jew and soft on jailed criminals.
As to his stature as a legislator, Wellstone, with Republican Pete Dominici, has successfully sponsored mental health bills (both senators have near relatives with disabilities). His co-sponsorship of the campaign reform bill and health and welfare proposals (he was the only Senator of either p[arty to vote against Clinton’s Welfare Reform bill) have earned him the "last Liberal" nickname from his colleagues. Much liked, despite his constant battles with Speaker Trent Lott on the Senate floor, and his opposition to the Welfare Reform bill that irked the Democrats, he is an often mentioned potential Presidential candidate. In fact, the Amazon.com reviewer of his new book characterizes it as a typical Presidential candidate's book.
Wellstone had the top office in mind in 2000, but deferred to Vice President. Al Gore. Thw 2004 contest will be another story. Although he claims that his current political goal is to be re-elected in 2002, the book is aimed at a national audience.The subtitle alone, compassionxxxx . Interestingly it is not attracting the attentionxxxx> I became aware of it through an interview on Brian Lehrer’s WNYC
program. Only one of the three normally well-informed information desk associates at the flagship Barnes and Noble 17th Street store knew the Senator’s name, and the books were buried on some bottom shelf. It may well be that the National Democratic leadership is not putting any money on the Wellstone candidacy at this early date. Meanwhile, the opportunist Rev. Al Sharpton is picking up free publicity and some voter approval by his early declaration to be the only real Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 2004.
Wellstone’s 2002 campaign will be difficult, his seat is considered vulnerable, and Vice President Cheney is using his influence to avoid a Republican primary that would expose and wound his candidates before the main bout. He wants a one-on-one.
In this era of compassionate conservatism turning sour Wellstone’s subtitle - - points to his direction. ld
So, what do we know about the man? Well, the people of Minnesota like him. As a Crofessor at Crlton he split his time between rearing a family of three kids (he has six grandchildren), and going to rallies in support of family farmers and low-income people. In his proposals in the US Senate he has followed the principle that government should be the tool to provide an opportunity for all people, not just defense contractors and Wall Street. Recovering alcoholics and druggees should have access to treatment. China’s civil rights record should be condemned - this in concert with Senator Tim Hutchinson of AR, on the 10th anniversary of Tienamen Square (defeated by China in the UN).That’s some quick gleanings from the Internet.
Do the people like him? Opensecrets, Minnesota, an Internet site gathering political contribution data shows that in 1993-98 he received and mostly spent $6.8 million, $4.8 million in contributions of $200 or less (71 percent), and only $570,000 (8.3 percent) in PAC money. That’s a pretty good indication. Why do they like him? I mean, this is Garrison Keeler country of tacit Scandinavians, homesteaded farms with shrinking incomes, and here comes this Jewish kid from the South offering them the future? The impresison is that he has succeeded because he is a teacher, not a profesisonal politician and therefore squeeky clean, a people person who cares and a man who goes all out to help. And smart.That’s why.
Can this type of politician succeed in bringing us a national government that will take care of the people? George W. Bush was supposed to do that, after the Clinton disappointment. Now we see environment policies that, instead of providing research for energy substitutes, favor Texas oil drillers who want to suck out the last drop of petroleum substance out of the ground before worrying about the future. They know the Planet Earth will run out of oil in 38 years or so, hence the vague hints about atomic energy, but, meanwhile, let’s take care of the boys.
Will America like him? Think about it. Meanwhile, Paul should think about getting rid of the beard.
Senator Paul Wellsone, the brightest hope of the liberal Democrats, died in a plane crash at 58, with his wife and daughter, in Dec. 2002 while campaigning for for reelection.
Thursday, May 24, 2001
Rare Pete Seeger interview on WAMC gives insights on conservation, politics and folk music
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
(Columbia County, N.Y.) During an early May Saturday afternoon we were off on a Spring errands trip - the library, plant store and supermarket - when the car radio came live with a Pete Seeger song. WAMC, the Albany Public Radio, was doing a two-hour blockbuster interview with the 81-year old veteran folksinger.. We were spellbound, and sat in the library driveway until the 2PM station break, too late to grab but a quick book before closing. Progressing to the market, we noted that the interviewer, the usually uninhibited Dr.,Alan Chartok, Chairman of the Board of Northeast Public Radio Network and its man of all seasons, was uncommonly self-effacing, limiting himself to throwing one-word song title cues to Seeger, which evoked 10-minute polished reminiscences, interspersed with songs. Did you know that Guantanamera, a poem by Jose Marti, refers to the bar girls of Guantanamo, the American naval base of Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.? Locals, asked where they have been all night, simply answer "Guantanamera." Or that while Where Have All the Flowers Gone started as a camp song, Seeger plucked it out from Michael Sholokhow’s Stalinist book And Quiet Flows the Don, and is voluntarily paying royalties to Russia’s folklore archivists? Or that hootnanny is not what the French couples do on the night before marriage? At the ALDI market, we once more sat in the hot parking lot, mesmerized until the program was over at 3PM. Our day's schedule was shot, but it was worth it.
Story has it that Pete Seeger lives on a hill top in Beacon, the only house visible in the wooded slope above the Taconic Parkway a mile or two south of the only remaining gas station on the Governor's Road. Rightly or wrongly, I never fail to point it out to visiting friends, who are usually more concerned with my staying straight on this winding stretch that we call the Terrible Twenty (miles, that is). We have been Seeger people ever since he started the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater project, to clean the waters of the mighty Hudson, polluted with PCBs by General Electric's upriver plants over the decades. {PCBs don’t mainly cause cancer, they make for deformed babies. Upstate Hudson Valley has a lot of people who need home care.} GE admits its sinful past but declares that stirring the river's bottom sediments will cause an increase of PCBs in the water. Seeger agrees that ordinary dredging will be harmful but a modern method of sucking up the mud will cleanse the river We're with Seeger, but the real trick is where to put the polluted mud.
The singer has been a man of causes all his life - union, civil rights, peace, anti-war movement, Socialism, environment, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party (1948). Blacklisted by the major media during the McCarthy years, he has achieved belated official recognition in the '90s, with a the nation’s greatest musical award at Kennedy Center in 1994, the Harvard Arts Medal and a strange Rock & Roll Hall of Fame designation in 1996, followed by a Grammy a year later.
Son of Juillard’s ethnomusicist Charles Seeger, the 19-year old guitar and banjo picker and second-year Harvard dropout joined the music folklorist Alan Lomax in collecting folk songs in the South. Seeger's singing career was started by a schoolteacher aunt, who offered him five dollars if he would perform before her class, and he's never looked back In 1941, with another musician, Oklahoma’s favorite son Woodie Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers, and the idealistic kids traveled all over the country, singing their songs in rent parties, lumberjack camps and union halls.. WWII broke up the team.
After service in the Army, in 1948 Seeger formed the Weavers, with Fred Hellerman, Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert. Their six-month gig at the Village Vanguard brought them to the attention of band leader Gordon Jenkins, a producer for Decca records. When the head of the firm refused to hear the group, Jenkins put them on within his own recording program, and the two sides, Tzena, Tzena Tzena and Goodnight Irene (borrowed from Hudie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, who died in 1949, a few months before fame struck) were the top songs on the Hit Parade for many weeks. The Weavers, whose 19 LP records, produced form 1952 through 1997, are part of the canon of American folk music repertory, brought to our attention such favorites as So Long (It's Been Good to Know You),On Top of Old Smokey, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Kumbaya, Wimoweh, Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer (words by Lee Hays) and Marching to Pretoria. Their protest songs and left-wing politics brought Seeger to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Weavers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs on the major TV and radio stations. But America wanted them, they gave a historic Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Hall in 1955, repeated in 1963 and 1980. Eventually the Smothers Brothers forced CBS to let them have Seeger as a guest on their popular TV program (sans protest songs such as Garbage). Seeger sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a concealed anti-Vietnam war song. It may have lost the Smothers their show, but the folk singers were on a comeback trail. Good music wins. Although politically at odds with the Socialism of the Weavers and Seeger, I grooved to their songs on Washington Square Sunday afternoon hootnannies. Seeger’s prison sentence for dissing HUAC was reversed by Appeals Court Judge Irving R. Kaufman, the Rosenbergs’ trial judge of 1951, on 1st Amendment grounds.
Seeger left the Weavers in 1958, and was replaced by Frank Hamilton, Bernie Krause and Eric Darling, in sequence. He has continued to sing, and to write some two dozen books (The Incompleat Folksinger, 1972) and scads of songs. In concerts with Arlo Guthrie their repertory ranged from Alice's Restaurant to Amazing Grace. He has been campaigning for the rights of the folk musicians of 3rd World, to have publishers recognize the origins of such music, seemingly in "public domain," with some royalties. While it is too late for the South African Xosa (pronounced khosa) day laborer and Wimoweh singer Landa to earn any comforts, his family and the Zulu cultural and music preservation groups will benefit from the Tokens’ and their songwriter George Weiss’ earnings from their adaptation of his song. Seeger's record of children's music, Abiyoyu, likewise pays royalties to Africa. Turn, Turn, Turn, is from the Ecclesiastes, else our indomitable folklorist with a stern sense of justice would pay royalties on it too.
Seeger at 81 continues to play and sing, mostly for children in schools, and to defend the causes of justice and environment. People learning music use his text, Henscratches, and his guitar and banjo study tapes., and anyone joining in a rousing We Shall Overcome is singing with Pete Seeger (only some of the words are his, he would hasten to correct).
WNYC cannot re-broadcast the interview for copyright reasons, but you can hear it on WAMC upstate, Memorial Day, 9-11 AM, and Alan is giving away CDs of the interview in his upcoming WAMC fund-raiser.
(Columbia County, N.Y.) During an early May Saturday afternoon we were off on a Spring errands trip - the library, plant store and supermarket - when the car radio came live with a Pete Seeger song. WAMC, the Albany Public Radio, was doing a two-hour blockbuster interview with the 81-year old veteran folksinger.. We were spellbound, and sat in the library driveway until the 2PM station break, too late to grab but a quick book before closing. Progressing to the market, we noted that the interviewer, the usually uninhibited Dr.,Alan Chartok, Chairman of the Board of Northeast Public Radio Network and its man of all seasons, was uncommonly self-effacing, limiting himself to throwing one-word song title cues to Seeger, which evoked 10-minute polished reminiscences, interspersed with songs. Did you know that Guantanamera, a poem by Jose Marti, refers to the bar girls of Guantanamo, the American naval base of Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.? Locals, asked where they have been all night, simply answer "Guantanamera." Or that while Where Have All the Flowers Gone started as a camp song, Seeger plucked it out from Michael Sholokhow’s Stalinist book And Quiet Flows the Don, and is voluntarily paying royalties to Russia’s folklore archivists? Or that hootnanny is not what the French couples do on the night before marriage? At the ALDI market, we once more sat in the hot parking lot, mesmerized until the program was over at 3PM. Our day's schedule was shot, but it was worth it.
Story has it that Pete Seeger lives on a hill top in Beacon, the only house visible in the wooded slope above the Taconic Parkway a mile or two south of the only remaining gas station on the Governor's Road. Rightly or wrongly, I never fail to point it out to visiting friends, who are usually more concerned with my staying straight on this winding stretch that we call the Terrible Twenty (miles, that is). We have been Seeger people ever since he started the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater project, to clean the waters of the mighty Hudson, polluted with PCBs by General Electric's upriver plants over the decades. {PCBs don’t mainly cause cancer, they make for deformed babies. Upstate Hudson Valley has a lot of people who need home care.} GE admits its sinful past but declares that stirring the river's bottom sediments will cause an increase of PCBs in the water. Seeger agrees that ordinary dredging will be harmful but a modern method of sucking up the mud will cleanse the river We're with Seeger, but the real trick is where to put the polluted mud.
The singer has been a man of causes all his life - union, civil rights, peace, anti-war movement, Socialism, environment, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party (1948). Blacklisted by the major media during the McCarthy years, he has achieved belated official recognition in the '90s, with a the nation’s greatest musical award at Kennedy Center in 1994, the Harvard Arts Medal and a strange Rock & Roll Hall of Fame designation in 1996, followed by a Grammy a year later.
Son of Juillard’s ethnomusicist Charles Seeger, the 19-year old guitar and banjo picker and second-year Harvard dropout joined the music folklorist Alan Lomax in collecting folk songs in the South. Seeger's singing career was started by a schoolteacher aunt, who offered him five dollars if he would perform before her class, and he's never looked back In 1941, with another musician, Oklahoma’s favorite son Woodie Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers, and the idealistic kids traveled all over the country, singing their songs in rent parties, lumberjack camps and union halls.. WWII broke up the team.
After service in the Army, in 1948 Seeger formed the Weavers, with Fred Hellerman, Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert. Their six-month gig at the Village Vanguard brought them to the attention of band leader Gordon Jenkins, a producer for Decca records. When the head of the firm refused to hear the group, Jenkins put them on within his own recording program, and the two sides, Tzena, Tzena Tzena and Goodnight Irene (borrowed from Hudie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, who died in 1949, a few months before fame struck) were the top songs on the Hit Parade for many weeks. The Weavers, whose 19 LP records, produced form 1952 through 1997, are part of the canon of American folk music repertory, brought to our attention such favorites as So Long (It's Been Good to Know You),On Top of Old Smokey, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Kumbaya, Wimoweh, Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer (words by Lee Hays) and Marching to Pretoria. Their protest songs and left-wing politics brought Seeger to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Weavers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs on the major TV and radio stations. But America wanted them, they gave a historic Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Hall in 1955, repeated in 1963 and 1980. Eventually the Smothers Brothers forced CBS to let them have Seeger as a guest on their popular TV program (sans protest songs such as Garbage). Seeger sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a concealed anti-Vietnam war song. It may have lost the Smothers their show, but the folk singers were on a comeback trail. Good music wins. Although politically at odds with the Socialism of the Weavers and Seeger, I grooved to their songs on Washington Square Sunday afternoon hootnannies. Seeger’s prison sentence for dissing HUAC was reversed by Appeals Court Judge Irving R. Kaufman, the Rosenbergs’ trial judge of 1951, on 1st Amendment grounds.
Seeger left the Weavers in 1958, and was replaced by Frank Hamilton, Bernie Krause and Eric Darling, in sequence. He has continued to sing, and to write some two dozen books (The Incompleat Folksinger, 1972) and scads of songs. In concerts with Arlo Guthrie their repertory ranged from Alice's Restaurant to Amazing Grace. He has been campaigning for the rights of the folk musicians of 3rd World, to have publishers recognize the origins of such music, seemingly in "public domain," with some royalties. While it is too late for the South African Xosa (pronounced khosa) day laborer and Wimoweh singer Landa to earn any comforts, his family and the Zulu cultural and music preservation groups will benefit from the Tokens’ and their songwriter George Weiss’ earnings from their adaptation of his song. Seeger's record of children's music, Abiyoyu, likewise pays royalties to Africa. Turn, Turn, Turn, is from the Ecclesiastes, else our indomitable folklorist with a stern sense of justice would pay royalties on it too.
Seeger at 81 continues to play and sing, mostly for children in schools, and to defend the causes of justice and environment. People learning music use his text, Henscratches, and his guitar and banjo study tapes., and anyone joining in a rousing We Shall Overcome is singing with Pete Seeger (only some of the words are his, he would hasten to correct).
WNYC cannot re-broadcast the interview for copyright reasons, but you can hear it on WAMC upstate, Memorial Day, 9-11 AM, and Alan is giving away CDs of the interview in his upcoming WAMC fund-raiser.
Wednesday, May 23, 2001
Paul Wellstone the conscientious liberal could be your next President
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Here's good news for the purist New York heirs of FDR and Harry Truman who worry that the principles of their party have been compromised and are getting lost in the the Neo- or Post-Liberal or moderate-Republicanphase of the Democratic party. The lost battalions of McCarthy (Eugene, that is) and the wandering tribes of McGovern will be glad to know that the senior Senator of Minnesota, Paul David Wellstone, has written a compelling book; "Conscience of A Liberal" (Random House, $24), that reaffirms the faith. If the title evokes the late Barry Goldwater's" Conscience of a Conservative," it is deliberate. When Senator Goldwater died, Wellstone, much to his Republican colleagues' surprise, came to the services. He claims that, although the principles of Goldwater were anathema to him, the evocation of a political conscience had influenced him, as a youth, and, in a way, charted his path.
"Never separate the lives you live from the words you say," he used to tell his students at Carlerton College, a prestigious small school in Minnesota, where he taught political science for 21 years, after earning his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1969.
In 1989 he decided to put his liberal priciples into action and mounted a grassroots campaign for the US Senate, against the well heeled and regarded Republican Senator Rudy Boshwitz, an expert in fund raising and TV campaigning. Most surprisingly, this modest campaign, the candidate crisscrossing Minnesota in a green bus to make stump speeches, generated the only upset of a sitting Senator that year.. A burning liberal with an agenda, Wellstone was the Jimmy Stewart character, come live from the 1930s, eliciting an admiring book, "Professor Wellstone Goes to Washington:The Inside Story of a Grassroots Campaign," by two veteran Minneapolis Trribune reporters, Denis J. McGrath and Dane Smith. Environment as well as child care,health and welfare were his main campaign themes. Two books, "How the Rural Poor Got Power " (1978) and "Powerline" (1981, co-authored with Barry M. Casper) were his political credentials, reflecting a populist credo.
Notwithstanding the impression that Minnesotans are easily impressed by colorful underdog populist candidates with moxy (think of their current wrestler/ XFL commentator/Governor Jesse Ventura - Wellstone too was a champion collegiate wrestler) the senator is a down-to-earth legislator with a record that earned him re-election in 1996 against a really well financed Boshwitz, who accused him of being a bad Jew and soft on jailed criminals.
As to his stature as a legislator, Wellstone, with Republican Pete Dominici, has successfully sponsored mental health bills (both senators have near relatives with disabilities). His co-sponsorship of the campaign reform bill and health and welfare proposals (he was the only Senator of either p[arty to vote against Clinton’s Welfare Reform bill) have earned him the "last Liberal" nickname from his colleagues. Much liked, despite his constant battles with Speaker Trent Lott on the Senate floor, and his opposition to the Welfare Reform bill that irked the Democrats, he is an often mentioned potential Presidential candidate. In fact, the Amazon.com reviewer of his new book characterizes it as a typical Presidential candidate's book.
Wellstone had the top office in mind in 2000, but deferred to Vice President. Al Gore. Thw 2004 contest will be another story. Although he claims that his current political goal is to be re-elected in 2002, the book is aimed at a national audience.The subtitle alone, compassionxxxx . Interestingly it is not attracting the attentionxxxx> I became aware of it through an interview on Brian Lehrer’s WNYC
program. Only one of the three normally well-informed information desk associates at the flagship Barnes and Noble 17th Street store knew the Senator’s name, and the books were buried on some bottom shelf. It may well be that the National Democratic leadership is not putting any money on the Wellstone candidacy at this early date. Meanwhile, the opportunist Rev. Al Sharpton is picking up free publicity and some voter approval by his early declaration to be the only real Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 2004.
Wellstone’s 2002 campaign will be difficult, his seat is considered vulnerable, and Vice President Cheney is using his influence to avoid a Republican primary that would expose and wound his candidates before the main bout. He wants a one-on-one.
In this era of compassionate conservatism turning sour Wellstone’s subtitle - - points to his direction. ld
So, what do we know about the man? Well, the people of Minnesota like him. As a Crofessor at Crlton he split his time between rearing a family of three kids (he has six grandchildren), and going to rallies in support of family farmers and low-income people. In his proposals in the US Senate he has followed the principle that government should be the tool to provide an opportunity for all people, not just defense contractors and Wall Street. Recovering alcoholics and druggees should have access to treatment. China’s civil rights record should be condemned - this in concert with Senator Tim Hutchinson of AR, on the 10th anniversary of Tienamen Square (defeated by China in the UN).That’s some quick gleanings from the Internet.
Do the people like him? Opensecrets, Minnesota, an Internet site gathering political contribution data shows that in 1993-98 he received and mostly spent $6.8 million, $4.8 million in contributions of $200 or less (71 percent), and only $570,000 (8.3 percent) in PAC money. That’s a pretty good indication. Why do they like him? I mean, this is Garrison Keeler country of tacit Scandinavians, homesteaded farms with shrinking incomes, and here comes this Jewish kid from the South offering them the future? The impresison is that he has succeeded because he is a teacher, not a profesisonal politician and therefore squeeky clean, a people person who cares and a man who goes all out to help. And smart.That’s why.
Can this type of politician succeed in bringing us a national government that will take care of the people? George W. Bush was supposed to do that, after the Clinton disappointment. Now we see environment policies that, instead of providing research for energy substitutes, favor Texas oil drillers who want to suck out the last drop of petroleum substance out of the ground before worrying about the future. They know the Planet Earth will run out of oil in 38 years or so, hence the vague hints about atomic energy, but, meanwhile, let’s take care of the boys.
Will America like him? Think about it. Meanwhile, Paul should think about getting rid of the beard.
Here's good news for the purist New York heirs of FDR and Harry Truman who worry that the principles of their party have been compromised and are getting lost in the the Neo- or Post-Liberal or moderate-Republicanphase of the Democratic party. The lost battalions of McCarthy (Eugene, that is) and the wandering tribes of McGovern will be glad to know that the senior Senator of Minnesota, Paul David Wellstone, has written a compelling book; "Conscience of A Liberal" (Random House, $24), that reaffirms the faith. If the title evokes the late Barry Goldwater's" Conscience of a Conservative," it is deliberate. When Senator Goldwater died, Wellstone, much to his Republican colleagues' surprise, came to the services. He claims that, although the principles of Goldwater were anathema to him, the evocation of a political conscience had influenced him, as a youth, and, in a way, charted his path.
"Never separate the lives you live from the words you say," he used to tell his students at Carlerton College, a prestigious small school in Minnesota, where he taught political science for 21 years, after earning his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1969.
In 1989 he decided to put his liberal priciples into action and mounted a grassroots campaign for the US Senate, against the well heeled and regarded Republican Senator Rudy Boshwitz, an expert in fund raising and TV campaigning. Most surprisingly, this modest campaign, the candidate crisscrossing Minnesota in a green bus to make stump speeches, generated the only upset of a sitting Senator that year.. A burning liberal with an agenda, Wellstone was the Jimmy Stewart character, come live from the 1930s, eliciting an admiring book, "Professor Wellstone Goes to Washington:The Inside Story of a Grassroots Campaign," by two veteran Minneapolis Trribune reporters, Denis J. McGrath and Dane Smith. Environment as well as child care,health and welfare were his main campaign themes. Two books, "How the Rural Poor Got Power " (1978) and "Powerline" (1981, co-authored with Barry M. Casper) were his political credentials, reflecting a populist credo.
Notwithstanding the impression that Minnesotans are easily impressed by colorful underdog populist candidates with moxy (think of their current wrestler/ XFL commentator/Governor Jesse Ventura - Wellstone too was a champion collegiate wrestler) the senator is a down-to-earth legislator with a record that earned him re-election in 1996 against a really well financed Boshwitz, who accused him of being a bad Jew and soft on jailed criminals.
As to his stature as a legislator, Wellstone, with Republican Pete Dominici, has successfully sponsored mental health bills (both senators have near relatives with disabilities). His co-sponsorship of the campaign reform bill and health and welfare proposals (he was the only Senator of either p[arty to vote against Clinton’s Welfare Reform bill) have earned him the "last Liberal" nickname from his colleagues. Much liked, despite his constant battles with Speaker Trent Lott on the Senate floor, and his opposition to the Welfare Reform bill that irked the Democrats, he is an often mentioned potential Presidential candidate. In fact, the Amazon.com reviewer of his new book characterizes it as a typical Presidential candidate's book.
Wellstone had the top office in mind in 2000, but deferred to Vice President. Al Gore. Thw 2004 contest will be another story. Although he claims that his current political goal is to be re-elected in 2002, the book is aimed at a national audience.The subtitle alone, compassionxxxx . Interestingly it is not attracting the attentionxxxx> I became aware of it through an interview on Brian Lehrer’s WNYC
program. Only one of the three normally well-informed information desk associates at the flagship Barnes and Noble 17th Street store knew the Senator’s name, and the books were buried on some bottom shelf. It may well be that the National Democratic leadership is not putting any money on the Wellstone candidacy at this early date. Meanwhile, the opportunist Rev. Al Sharpton is picking up free publicity and some voter approval by his early declaration to be the only real Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 2004.
Wellstone’s 2002 campaign will be difficult, his seat is considered vulnerable, and Vice President Cheney is using his influence to avoid a Republican primary that would expose and wound his candidates before the main bout. He wants a one-on-one.
In this era of compassionate conservatism turning sour Wellstone’s subtitle - - points to his direction. ld
So, what do we know about the man? Well, the people of Minnesota like him. As a Crofessor at Crlton he split his time between rearing a family of three kids (he has six grandchildren), and going to rallies in support of family farmers and low-income people. In his proposals in the US Senate he has followed the principle that government should be the tool to provide an opportunity for all people, not just defense contractors and Wall Street. Recovering alcoholics and druggees should have access to treatment. China’s civil rights record should be condemned - this in concert with Senator Tim Hutchinson of AR, on the 10th anniversary of Tienamen Square (defeated by China in the UN).That’s some quick gleanings from the Internet.
Do the people like him? Opensecrets, Minnesota, an Internet site gathering political contribution data shows that in 1993-98 he received and mostly spent $6.8 million, $4.8 million in contributions of $200 or less (71 percent), and only $570,000 (8.3 percent) in PAC money. That’s a pretty good indication. Why do they like him? I mean, this is Garrison Keeler country of tacit Scandinavians, homesteaded farms with shrinking incomes, and here comes this Jewish kid from the South offering them the future? The impresison is that he has succeeded because he is a teacher, not a profesisonal politician and therefore squeeky clean, a people person who cares and a man who goes all out to help. And smart.That’s why.
Can this type of politician succeed in bringing us a national government that will take care of the people? George W. Bush was supposed to do that, after the Clinton disappointment. Now we see environment policies that, instead of providing research for energy substitutes, favor Texas oil drillers who want to suck out the last drop of petroleum substance out of the ground before worrying about the future. They know the Planet Earth will run out of oil in 38 years or so, hence the vague hints about atomic energy, but, meanwhile, let’s take care of the boys.
Will America like him? Think about it. Meanwhile, Paul should think about getting rid of the beard.
Saturday, May 19, 2001
Rare Pete Seeger interview on WAMC
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Rare Pete Seeger interview on WAMC gives insights on conservation, politics and folk music
(Columbia County, N.Y.) During an early May Saturday afternoon we were off on a Spring errands trip - the library, plant store and supermarket - when the car radio came live with a Pete Seeger song. WAMC, the Albany Public Radio, was doing a two-hour blockbuster interview with the 81-year old veteran folksinger.. We were spellbound, and sat in the library driveway until the 2PM station break, too late to grab but a quick book before closing. Progressing to the market, we noted that the interviewer, the usually uninhibited Dr.,Alan Chartok, Chairman of the Board of Northeast Public Radio Network and its man of all seasons, was uncommonly self-effacing, limiting himself to throwing one-word song title cues to Seeger, which evoked 10-minute polished reminiscences, interspersed with songs. Did you know that Guantanamera, a poem by Jose Marti, refers to the bar girls of Guantanamo, the American naval base of Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.? Locals, asked where they have been all night, simply answer "Guantanamera." Or that while Where Have All the Flowers Gone started as a camp song, Seeger plucked it out from Michael Sholokhow’s Stalinist book And Quiet Flows the Don, and is voluntarily paying royalties to Russia’s folklore archivists? Or that hootnanny is not what the French couples do on the night before marriage? At the ALDI market, we once more sat in the hot parking lot, mesmerized until the program was over at 3PM. Our day's schedule was shot, but it was worth it.
Story has it that Pete Seeger lives on a hill top in Beacon, the only house visible in the wooded slope above the Taconic Parkway a mile or two south of the only remaining gas station on the Governor's Road. Rightly or wrongly, I never fail to point it out to visiting friends, who are usually more concerned with my staying straight on this winding stretch that we call the Terrible Twenty (miles, that is). We have been Seeger people ever since he started the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater project, to clean the waters of the mighty Hudson, polluted with PCBs by General Electric's upriver plants over the decades. {PCBs don’t mainly cause cancer, they make for deformed babies. Upstate Hudson Valley has a lot of people who need home care.} GE admits its sinful past but declares that stirring the river's bottom sediments will cause an increase of PCBs in the water. Seeger agrees that ordinary dredging will be harmful but a modern method of sucking up the mud will cleanse the river We're with Seeger, but the real trick is where to put the polluted mud.
The singer has been a man of causes all his life - union, civil rights, peace, anti-war movement, Socialism, environment, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party (1948). Blacklisted by the major media during the McCarthy years, he has achieved belated official recognition in the '90s, with a the nation’s greatest musical award at Kennedy Center in 1994, the Harvard Arts Medal and a strange Rock & Roll Hall of Fame designation in 1996, followed by a Grammy a year later.
Son of Juillard’s ethnomusicist Charles Seeger, the 19-year old guitar and banjo picker and second-year Harvard dropout joined the music folklorist Alan Lomax in collecting folk songs in the South. Seeger's singing career was started by a schoolteacher aunt, who offered him five dollars if he would perform before her class, and he's never looked back In 1941, with another musician, Oklahoma’s favorite son Woodie Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers, and the idealistic kids traveled all over the country, singing their songs in rent parties, lumberjack camps and union halls.. WWII broke up the team.
After service in the Army, in 1948 Seeger formed the Weavers, with Fred Hellerman, Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert. Their six-month gig at the Village Vanguard brought them to the attention of band leader Gordon Jenkins, a producer for Decca records. When the head of the firm refused to hear the group, Jenkins put them on within his own recording program, and the two sides, Tzena, Tzena Tzena and Goodnight Irene (borrowed from Hudie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, who died in 1949, a few months before fame struck) were the top songs on the Hit Parade for many weeks. The Weavers, whose 19 LP records, produced form 1952 through 1997, are part of the canon of American folk music repertory, brought to our attention such favorites as So Long (It's Been Good to Know You),On Top of Old Smokey, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Kumbaya, Wimoweh, Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer (words by Lee Hays) and Marching to Pretoria. Their protest songs and left-wing politics brought Seeger to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Weavers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs on the major TV and radio stations. But America wanted them, they gave a historic Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Hall in 1955, repeated in 1963 and 1980. Eventually the Smothers Brothers forced CBS to let them have Seeger as a guest on their popular TV program (sans protest songs such as Garbage). Seeger sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a concealed anti-Vietnam war song. It may have lost the Smothers their show, but the folk singers were on a comeback trail. Good music wins. Although politically at odds with the Socialism of the Weavers and Seeger, I grooved to their songs on Washington Square Sunday afternoon hootnannies. Seeger’s prison sentence for dissing HUAC was reversed by Appeals Court Judge Irving R. Kaufman, the Rosenbergs’ trial judge of 1951, on 1st Amendment grounds.
Seeger left the Weavers in 1958, and was replaced by Frank Hamilton, Bernie Krause and Eric Darling, in sequence. He has continued to sing, and to write some two dozen books (The Incompleat Folksinger, 1972) and scads of songs. In concerts with Arlo Guthrie their repertory ranged from Alice's Restaurant to Amazing Grace. He has been campaigning for the rights of the folk musicians of 3rd World, to have publishers recognize the origins of such music, seemingly in "public domain," with some royalties. While it is too late for the South African Xosa (pronounced khosa) day laborer and Wimoweh singer Landa to earn any comforts, his family and the Zulu cultural and music preservation groups will benefit from the Tokens’ and their songwriter George Weiss’ earnings from their adaptation of his song. Seeger's record of children's music, Abiyoyu, likewise pays royalties to Africa. Turn, Turn, Turn, is from the Ecclesiastes, else our indomitable folklorist with a stern sense of justice would pay royalties on it too.
Seeger at 81 continues to play and sing, mostly for children in schools, and to defend the causes of justice and environment. People learning music use his text, Henscratches, and his guitar and banjo study tapes., and anyone joining in a rousing We Shall Overcome is singing with Pete Seeger (only some of the words are his, he would hasten to correct).
WNYC cannot re-broadcast the interview for copyright reasons, but you can hear it on WAMC upstate, Memorial Day, 9-11 AM, and Alan is giving away CDs of the interview in his upcoming WAMC fund-raiser.
Rare Pete Seeger interview on WAMC gives insights on conservation, politics and folk music
(Columbia County, N.Y.) During an early May Saturday afternoon we were off on a Spring errands trip - the library, plant store and supermarket - when the car radio came live with a Pete Seeger song. WAMC, the Albany Public Radio, was doing a two-hour blockbuster interview with the 81-year old veteran folksinger.. We were spellbound, and sat in the library driveway until the 2PM station break, too late to grab but a quick book before closing. Progressing to the market, we noted that the interviewer, the usually uninhibited Dr.,Alan Chartok, Chairman of the Board of Northeast Public Radio Network and its man of all seasons, was uncommonly self-effacing, limiting himself to throwing one-word song title cues to Seeger, which evoked 10-minute polished reminiscences, interspersed with songs. Did you know that Guantanamera, a poem by Jose Marti, refers to the bar girls of Guantanamo, the American naval base of Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.? Locals, asked where they have been all night, simply answer "Guantanamera." Or that while Where Have All the Flowers Gone started as a camp song, Seeger plucked it out from Michael Sholokhow’s Stalinist book And Quiet Flows the Don, and is voluntarily paying royalties to Russia’s folklore archivists? Or that hootnanny is not what the French couples do on the night before marriage? At the ALDI market, we once more sat in the hot parking lot, mesmerized until the program was over at 3PM. Our day's schedule was shot, but it was worth it.
Story has it that Pete Seeger lives on a hill top in Beacon, the only house visible in the wooded slope above the Taconic Parkway a mile or two south of the only remaining gas station on the Governor's Road. Rightly or wrongly, I never fail to point it out to visiting friends, who are usually more concerned with my staying straight on this winding stretch that we call the Terrible Twenty (miles, that is). We have been Seeger people ever since he started the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater project, to clean the waters of the mighty Hudson, polluted with PCBs by General Electric's upriver plants over the decades. {PCBs don’t mainly cause cancer, they make for deformed babies. Upstate Hudson Valley has a lot of people who need home care.} GE admits its sinful past but declares that stirring the river's bottom sediments will cause an increase of PCBs in the water. Seeger agrees that ordinary dredging will be harmful but a modern method of sucking up the mud will cleanse the river We're with Seeger, but the real trick is where to put the polluted mud.
The singer has been a man of causes all his life - union, civil rights, peace, anti-war movement, Socialism, environment, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party (1948). Blacklisted by the major media during the McCarthy years, he has achieved belated official recognition in the '90s, with a the nation’s greatest musical award at Kennedy Center in 1994, the Harvard Arts Medal and a strange Rock & Roll Hall of Fame designation in 1996, followed by a Grammy a year later.
Son of Juillard’s ethnomusicist Charles Seeger, the 19-year old guitar and banjo picker and second-year Harvard dropout joined the music folklorist Alan Lomax in collecting folk songs in the South. Seeger's singing career was started by a schoolteacher aunt, who offered him five dollars if he would perform before her class, and he's never looked back In 1941, with another musician, Oklahoma’s favorite son Woodie Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers, and the idealistic kids traveled all over the country, singing their songs in rent parties, lumberjack camps and union halls.. WWII broke up the team.
After service in the Army, in 1948 Seeger formed the Weavers, with Fred Hellerman, Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert. Their six-month gig at the Village Vanguard brought them to the attention of band leader Gordon Jenkins, a producer for Decca records. When the head of the firm refused to hear the group, Jenkins put them on within his own recording program, and the two sides, Tzena, Tzena Tzena and Goodnight Irene (borrowed from Hudie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, who died in 1949, a few months before fame struck) were the top songs on the Hit Parade for many weeks. The Weavers, whose 19 LP records, produced form 1952 through 1997, are part of the canon of American folk music repertory, brought to our attention such favorites as So Long (It's Been Good to Know You),On Top of Old Smokey, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Kumbaya, Wimoweh, Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer (words by Lee Hays) and Marching to Pretoria. Their protest songs and left-wing politics brought Seeger to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Weavers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs on the major TV and radio stations. But America wanted them, they gave a historic Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Hall in 1955, repeated in 1963 and 1980. Eventually the Smothers Brothers forced CBS to let them have Seeger as a guest on their popular TV program (sans protest songs such as Garbage). Seeger sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a concealed anti-Vietnam war song. It may have lost the Smothers their show, but the folk singers were on a comeback trail. Good music wins. Although politically at odds with the Socialism of the Weavers and Seeger, I grooved to their songs on Washington Square Sunday afternoon hootnannies. Seeger’s prison sentence for dissing HUAC was reversed by Appeals Court Judge Irving R. Kaufman, the Rosenbergs’ trial judge of 1951, on 1st Amendment grounds.
Seeger left the Weavers in 1958, and was replaced by Frank Hamilton, Bernie Krause and Eric Darling, in sequence. He has continued to sing, and to write some two dozen books (The Incompleat Folksinger, 1972) and scads of songs. In concerts with Arlo Guthrie their repertory ranged from Alice's Restaurant to Amazing Grace. He has been campaigning for the rights of the folk musicians of 3rd World, to have publishers recognize the origins of such music, seemingly in "public domain," with some royalties. While it is too late for the South African Xosa (pronounced khosa) day laborer and Wimoweh singer Landa to earn any comforts, his family and the Zulu cultural and music preservation groups will benefit from the Tokens’ and their songwriter George Weiss’ earnings from their adaptation of his song. Seeger's record of children's music, Abiyoyu, likewise pays royalties to Africa. Turn, Turn, Turn, is from the Ecclesiastes, else our indomitable folklorist with a stern sense of justice would pay royalties on it too.
Seeger at 81 continues to play and sing, mostly for children in schools, and to defend the causes of justice and environment. People learning music use his text, Henscratches, and his guitar and banjo study tapes., and anyone joining in a rousing We Shall Overcome is singing with Pete Seeger (only some of the words are his, he would hasten to correct).
WNYC cannot re-broadcast the interview for copyright reasons, but you can hear it on WAMC upstate, Memorial Day, 9-11 AM, and Alan is giving away CDs of the interview in his upcoming WAMC fund-raiser.
Thursday, May 17, 2001
Preservationists worry about the beauties of Stuyvesant Park Historic District
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Preservationists worry about the beauties of Stuyvesant Park Historic District
Stuyvesant Square Park in the Spring is a poem, a work of art, a painting by Maurice Prendergast. The trees are in bloom, the perfumes are heady, the purple tulips in the fountain have a special glow, as darkness sets.
The Park has been discovered by artists. Of a Friday morning there were three painters, by name of Charlie, Lyle and Georgina, sitting on the shady benches facing Peter Stuyvesant's statue and capturing the sun-dappled aspects of the structures on historic Rutherford Place. Lyle's was the more ambitious canvas, he covered the length of the park, onward from Friends, past St. George's Church and Chapel, with the former Parish House peeking from behind, all outlined in a grey underpainting. Someone will have a truly nice panoramic vista of the glories of our Historic District, worthy of a place of honor over any mantelpiece..
The St. George's Memorial House, formerly Parish House, at No. 203-207 East 16th Street was the reason for my trip to the park. The owner, a real estate operator, has filed an application for a renovation that has the local preservationists worried. On one hand, he wants to remove an eyesore, the metal ramp that disfigures the East end street level entrance to the 1888 Romanesque Revival style gabled and turreted building, and compensate for it by adding an adroitly concealed ADA-compliant lift at the West end entrance,. That part everyone applauds - the Historic Districts Council, the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and Community Board No. Six (although the latter would like to hear of alternatives to the lift).
Other aspects of the renovation have the same parties protesting - aproposed architecturally inappropriate light fixture and a canopy over the door that would conceal historic elements of the entrance , and particularly, a rooftop addition that might not be visible from 16th Street but would certainly become apparent when viewed from the Beth Israel side of 2nd Avenue. Such a flat stucture would interfere with the romantic skyline of spires and gables. The charmed unity of rhythm that emerged in Lyle's vision of the parkside would be broken.
The landlord's proposal is currently under review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (its chair, Jennifer Raab, is leaving May 15, to become the President of Hunter College, replaced by a temporary appointee, Sherida Paulsen, an experienced member of the LPC).
The Memorial House has important history. In 1886 J.Pierrepont Morgan, vestryman and senior warden of St. George's Church, accquired the land for it from Rutherford Stuyvesant, grand nephew of the great civic benefactor Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, second-wealthiest New Yorker of the time (after J.J.Astor), who gave the land for 10th through 22nd Streets to NYC in 1828, eight years later adding the acreage for the Stuyvesant Square park to the donation. He also gave the land for St. George's Church in 1846. All this bounty stemmed from the family inheritance of Peter Stuyvesant's "bouwerie." Old Silvernails, the greeat-great-grandfather of PGS, in 1651 bought the farmland from his employer, the Dutch West Indies Company, and kept adding more pasturage to it until he owned most of Manhattan’s East Side from 6th to 21st Streets
Although Morgan is best remembered for his palatial Murray Hill residence, now the Morgan Library at 219 Madison Avenue, he had deep ties to our area. The great romance of his life, Amelia Sturges, who lived with her artistic family on East 14th Street, died of tuberculosis in 1861, four months after their marriage. Although the Memorial House was named in remebrance of Charles and Louisa Kirkland Tracy, parents of his second wife, Frances or Fanny, mother of their four children, poor Mimi Sturges must have been much in his thsoughts. The Morgam memorials in the neighborhood, in addition to the Parish or Memorial house, which he built in 1888, include St George's Chapel (1911-12) and the Lying -In Hospital for poor immigrant women, a 22-story structure on the block between 17th and 18th Streets on 2nd Avenue. It is now the Rutherford House, a duplex rental apartment building.
Note that the Historic Districts Council, a party to the Landmarks Certificate of Appropriateness hearings affecting the Memorial House, is now located nearby, as one of the partners in the newly created Neighborhood Preservation Center. It is at 232 East 11th Street, in the St. Mark's Rectory (designed by Ernest Flagg, 1900). The Center is a project of the St. Mark's Historic Landmark Fund, steward of the restoration and maintenance of the St. Mark's Church in the Bowery complex (the remains of Peter Stuyvesant, Vice President of the US Daniel Tompkins and Nicholas Fish of Revolutionary War fame lie in its vaults). Another partner in the Center is the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, a leader in protecting the structural heritage of the Village.
The Neighborhood Preservation Center has a free landmarks-oriented library,as well as reference and computer services. Although funded by some foundation, city and state monies, it must charge for meeting space and printer and fax services that it makes available for qualified organizations. To visit, call Felicia Mayro, Project Director, 212/228-2781.
This column thanks Jack Taylor and Jon Schachter , and wishes happy landings to Bob Durkin, who has resigned as the principal of Washington Irving High School.
Preservationists worry about the beauties of Stuyvesant Park Historic District
Stuyvesant Square Park in the Spring is a poem, a work of art, a painting by Maurice Prendergast. The trees are in bloom, the perfumes are heady, the purple tulips in the fountain have a special glow, as darkness sets.
The Park has been discovered by artists. Of a Friday morning there were three painters, by name of Charlie, Lyle and Georgina, sitting on the shady benches facing Peter Stuyvesant's statue and capturing the sun-dappled aspects of the structures on historic Rutherford Place. Lyle's was the more ambitious canvas, he covered the length of the park, onward from Friends, past St. George's Church and Chapel, with the former Parish House peeking from behind, all outlined in a grey underpainting. Someone will have a truly nice panoramic vista of the glories of our Historic District, worthy of a place of honor over any mantelpiece..
The St. George's Memorial House, formerly Parish House, at No. 203-207 East 16th Street was the reason for my trip to the park. The owner, a real estate operator, has filed an application for a renovation that has the local preservationists worried. On one hand, he wants to remove an eyesore, the metal ramp that disfigures the East end street level entrance to the 1888 Romanesque Revival style gabled and turreted building, and compensate for it by adding an adroitly concealed ADA-compliant lift at the West end entrance,. That part everyone applauds - the Historic Districts Council, the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and Community Board No. Six (although the latter would like to hear of alternatives to the lift).
Other aspects of the renovation have the same parties protesting - aproposed architecturally inappropriate light fixture and a canopy over the door that would conceal historic elements of the entrance , and particularly, a rooftop addition that might not be visible from 16th Street but would certainly become apparent when viewed from the Beth Israel side of 2nd Avenue. Such a flat stucture would interfere with the romantic skyline of spires and gables. The charmed unity of rhythm that emerged in Lyle's vision of the parkside would be broken.
The landlord's proposal is currently under review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (its chair, Jennifer Raab, is leaving May 15, to become the President of Hunter College, replaced by a temporary appointee, Sherida Paulsen, an experienced member of the LPC).
The Memorial House has important history. In 1886 J.Pierrepont Morgan, vestryman and senior warden of St. George's Church, accquired the land for it from Rutherford Stuyvesant, grand nephew of the great civic benefactor Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, second-wealthiest New Yorker of the time (after J.J.Astor), who gave the land for 10th through 22nd Streets to NYC in 1828, eight years later adding the acreage for the Stuyvesant Square park to the donation. He also gave the land for St. George's Church in 1846. All this bounty stemmed from the family inheritance of Peter Stuyvesant's "bouwerie." Old Silvernails, the greeat-great-grandfather of PGS, in 1651 bought the farmland from his employer, the Dutch West Indies Company, and kept adding more pasturage to it until he owned most of Manhattan’s East Side from 6th to 21st Streets
Although Morgan is best remembered for his palatial Murray Hill residence, now the Morgan Library at 219 Madison Avenue, he had deep ties to our area. The great romance of his life, Amelia Sturges, who lived with her artistic family on East 14th Street, died of tuberculosis in 1861, four months after their marriage. Although the Memorial House was named in remebrance of Charles and Louisa Kirkland Tracy, parents of his second wife, Frances or Fanny, mother of their four children, poor Mimi Sturges must have been much in his thsoughts. The Morgam memorials in the neighborhood, in addition to the Parish or Memorial house, which he built in 1888, include St George's Chapel (1911-12) and the Lying -In Hospital for poor immigrant women, a 22-story structure on the block between 17th and 18th Streets on 2nd Avenue. It is now the Rutherford House, a duplex rental apartment building.
Note that the Historic Districts Council, a party to the Landmarks Certificate of Appropriateness hearings affecting the Memorial House, is now located nearby, as one of the partners in the newly created Neighborhood Preservation Center. It is at 232 East 11th Street, in the St. Mark's Rectory (designed by Ernest Flagg, 1900). The Center is a project of the St. Mark's Historic Landmark Fund, steward of the restoration and maintenance of the St. Mark's Church in the Bowery complex (the remains of Peter Stuyvesant, Vice President of the US Daniel Tompkins and Nicholas Fish of Revolutionary War fame lie in its vaults). Another partner in the Center is the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, a leader in protecting the structural heritage of the Village.
The Neighborhood Preservation Center has a free landmarks-oriented library,as well as reference and computer services. Although funded by some foundation, city and state monies, it must charge for meeting space and printer and fax services that it makes available for qualified organizations. To visit, call Felicia Mayro, Project Director, 212/228-2781.
This column thanks Jack Taylor and Jon Schachter , and wishes happy landings to Bob Durkin, who has resigned as the principal of Washington Irving High School.
Monday, May 07, 2001
Preservationists worry about the beauties of Stuyvesant Square park Historic District
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Stuyvesant Square Park in the Spring is a poem, a work of art, a painting by Maurice Prendergast. The trees are in bloom, the perfumes are heady, the purple tulips in the fountain have a special glow, as darkness sets.
The Park has been discovered by artists. Of a Friday morning there were three painters, by name of Charlie, Lyle and Beverly, sitting on the shady benches facing Peter Stuyvesant’s statue and capturing the sun-dappled aspects of the structures on historic Rutherford Place. Lyle’s was the more ambitious canvas, he covered the length of the park, from Friends, past St. George’s Chirch and Chapel, with the Parish House peeking from behind, all outlined in a grey underpainting. Someone will have a truly nice panoramic vista of the glories of our Historic District, worthy of a place of honor over any mantelpiece..
The St. George’s Memorial House, or Parish House at No. 203-207 East 16th Street, was the reason for my trip to the park. The owner, a real estate operator, has filed an application for a renovation that has the local preservationists worried. On one hand, he wants to remove an eyesore, the metal ramp that disfigures the East end street level entrance to the 1888 Romanesque Revival style gabled and turreted building, and compensate for it by adding an adroitly concealed ADA-compliant lift at the West end entrance,. That part everyone applauds - the Historic Districts Council, the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and Community Board No. Six (although the latter would like to hear of alternatives to the lift).
Other aspects of the renovation have the same parties protesting - an archtecturally inappropriate light fixture and a canopy over the door that would conceal historic elements of the entrance , and particularly, a rooftop addition that might not be visible from 16th Street but would certainly become apparent when viewed from the Beth Israel side of 2nd Avenue. Such a flat stucture would interfere with the romantic skyline of spires and gables. The charmed unity or rhythm that emerged in Lyle’s vision of the parkside would be broken.
The landlord’s proposal is currently under review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (its chair, Jennifer Raab, is leaving May 15, to become the President of Hunter College, replaced by a temporary appointee, Sherida Paulsen, an experienced member of the LPC)
The Memorial House has important history. 1886 J.Pierrepont Morgan, vestryman and senior warden of St. George’s Church, accquired the land for it from Rutherford Stuyvesant, grand nephew of the great civic benefactor Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, second-wealthiest New Yorker of the time (after J.J.Astor), who gave the land for 10th through 22nd Streets to NYC in 1828, eight years later adding the acreage for the Stuyvesant Square park to the donation. He also gave the land for St. George’s Church in 1846. All this bounty stemmed from the family inheritance of Peter Stuyvesant’s "bouwerie." Old Silvernails, the greeat-great-grandfather of PGS, in 1651 bought the farmland from his employer, the Dutch West Indies Company, and kept adding more pasturage to it until he owned the entire East Side from 6th to 21st Streets.
Although Morgan is best remembered for his palatial Murray Hill residence, now the Morgan Library, at 219 Madison Avenue, he had deep ties to our area. The great romance of his life, Amelia Sturges, who lived with her artistic family on East 14th Street, died of tuberculosis in 1861, four months after their marriage. Although the Memorial House was named in remebrance of Charles and Louisa Kirkland Tracy, parents of his second wife, Frances or Fanny, mother of their four children, poor Mimi Sturges must have been part of the thought process. The Morgam memorials in the neighborhood, in addition to the Parish or Memorial house, which he built in 1888, include St George’s Chapel (1911-12) and the Lying -In Hospital for poor immigrant women, a 22-story structure on the lock between 17th and 18th Streets on 2nd Avenue, now the Rutherford House, a duplex rental apartment building.
The Historic Districts Council, a party to the Landmarks Certificate of Appropriateness hearings affecting the Memorial House, is now located nearby, as one of the partners in the newly created Neighborhood Preservation Center. It is at 232 East 11th Street, in the St. Mark’s Rectory (designed by Ernest Flagg, 1900). The Center is a project of the St. Mark’s Historic Landmark Fund, steward of the restoration and maintenance of the St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery complex (the remains of many famous New Yorkers lie in its vaults). Another partner is the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, a leader in protecting the structural heritage of the Village.
The Neighborhood Preservation Center has a free landmarks-oriented library, reference and computer services.Although funded by some foundation, city and state monies, it must charge for meeting space and printer and fax services available for qualified organizations. To visit, call Felicia Mayro, Project Director, 212/228-2781.
This column thanks Jack Taylor and Jon Schachter , and wishes happy landings to Bob Durkin, who has resigned as the principal of Washington Irving High School.
Stuyvesant Square Park in the Spring is a poem, a work of art, a painting by Maurice Prendergast. The trees are in bloom, the perfumes are heady, the purple tulips in the fountain have a special glow, as darkness sets.
The Park has been discovered by artists. Of a Friday morning there were three painters, by name of Charlie, Lyle and Beverly, sitting on the shady benches facing Peter Stuyvesant’s statue and capturing the sun-dappled aspects of the structures on historic Rutherford Place. Lyle’s was the more ambitious canvas, he covered the length of the park, from Friends, past St. George’s Chirch and Chapel, with the Parish House peeking from behind, all outlined in a grey underpainting. Someone will have a truly nice panoramic vista of the glories of our Historic District, worthy of a place of honor over any mantelpiece..
The St. George’s Memorial House, or Parish House at No. 203-207 East 16th Street, was the reason for my trip to the park. The owner, a real estate operator, has filed an application for a renovation that has the local preservationists worried. On one hand, he wants to remove an eyesore, the metal ramp that disfigures the East end street level entrance to the 1888 Romanesque Revival style gabled and turreted building, and compensate for it by adding an adroitly concealed ADA-compliant lift at the West end entrance,. That part everyone applauds - the Historic Districts Council, the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and Community Board No. Six (although the latter would like to hear of alternatives to the lift).
Other aspects of the renovation have the same parties protesting - an archtecturally inappropriate light fixture and a canopy over the door that would conceal historic elements of the entrance , and particularly, a rooftop addition that might not be visible from 16th Street but would certainly become apparent when viewed from the Beth Israel side of 2nd Avenue. Such a flat stucture would interfere with the romantic skyline of spires and gables. The charmed unity or rhythm that emerged in Lyle’s vision of the parkside would be broken.
The landlord’s proposal is currently under review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (its chair, Jennifer Raab, is leaving May 15, to become the President of Hunter College, replaced by a temporary appointee, Sherida Paulsen, an experienced member of the LPC)
The Memorial House has important history. 1886 J.Pierrepont Morgan, vestryman and senior warden of St. George’s Church, accquired the land for it from Rutherford Stuyvesant, grand nephew of the great civic benefactor Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, second-wealthiest New Yorker of the time (after J.J.Astor), who gave the land for 10th through 22nd Streets to NYC in 1828, eight years later adding the acreage for the Stuyvesant Square park to the donation. He also gave the land for St. George’s Church in 1846. All this bounty stemmed from the family inheritance of Peter Stuyvesant’s "bouwerie." Old Silvernails, the greeat-great-grandfather of PGS, in 1651 bought the farmland from his employer, the Dutch West Indies Company, and kept adding more pasturage to it until he owned the entire East Side from 6th to 21st Streets.
Although Morgan is best remembered for his palatial Murray Hill residence, now the Morgan Library, at 219 Madison Avenue, he had deep ties to our area. The great romance of his life, Amelia Sturges, who lived with her artistic family on East 14th Street, died of tuberculosis in 1861, four months after their marriage. Although the Memorial House was named in remebrance of Charles and Louisa Kirkland Tracy, parents of his second wife, Frances or Fanny, mother of their four children, poor Mimi Sturges must have been part of the thought process. The Morgam memorials in the neighborhood, in addition to the Parish or Memorial house, which he built in 1888, include St George’s Chapel (1911-12) and the Lying -In Hospital for poor immigrant women, a 22-story structure on the lock between 17th and 18th Streets on 2nd Avenue, now the Rutherford House, a duplex rental apartment building.
The Historic Districts Council, a party to the Landmarks Certificate of Appropriateness hearings affecting the Memorial House, is now located nearby, as one of the partners in the newly created Neighborhood Preservation Center. It is at 232 East 11th Street, in the St. Mark’s Rectory (designed by Ernest Flagg, 1900). The Center is a project of the St. Mark’s Historic Landmark Fund, steward of the restoration and maintenance of the St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery complex (the remains of many famous New Yorkers lie in its vaults). Another partner is the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, a leader in protecting the structural heritage of the Village.
The Neighborhood Preservation Center has a free landmarks-oriented library, reference and computer services.Although funded by some foundation, city and state monies, it must charge for meeting space and printer and fax services available for qualified organizations. To visit, call Felicia Mayro, Project Director, 212/228-2781.
This column thanks Jack Taylor and Jon Schachter , and wishes happy landings to Bob Durkin, who has resigned as the principal of Washington Irving High School.
Thursday, May 03, 2001
A proposed solution for the drug problem
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The war on drugs has reached another crisis, with the downing of a plane and the killing of a missionary and her baby daughter by Peruvian airforce, the latest of 25 planes shot down in the interdiction effort. The interdiction effort costs US taxpayers $1.1 billion in Peru area alone, and has "helped in reducing the count of drug users in the US from 27 million in 1979 to 13 million as of the past few years, not counting the recent upsurge" (I’m sure the ‘90s prosperity and upsurge in jobs for the unskilled did the bulk of the job).
Hearing these claims on CNN makes me sick. The war on drugs is an industry, costing $37 bilion in 1995, and adding numbers to the GNP and GDP, as part of the economic growth of this country. If it were really successful in lessening drug use and saving lives, it might be worthwhile, but it is only fractionally effective. It adds to the growth of the prison industy, with its two million clients and hundreds of thousands of service enployees, another fine GNP item. We should be ashamed of ourselves for not finding effective ways to salvage the 400,000 drug users and criminals now in jail.
This is a sick country, with epaulette-decorated minds like William Bennett and Gen McCaffrey proudly announcing how drug use has been reduced through military efforts, interdiction and taking the dealers off the streets. They preen about reducing the supply.
What about reducing demand, and letting the supply fall off? That solution has not been too successful either. Even demand side advocates like Rep. Maxine Waters speak vaguely of "education," suasion, support groups and talks in schools.There is no real thought given to effective curbs to demand, in the country that put men on the moon. Is education going to work with Darryl Strawberry, the sickeningly sad wreck of a national hero, or with Robert Downey Jr.? Many of us read the recent article in the NYT Magazine section, about the Straw's efforts to rehabilitate, his lies and relapses. You read of his friends saying: "He's junkie, do not listen to him, you cannot believe him." Promises to reform mean nothing to people who live from fix to fix, and stay clean only until the next crisis in living sends them back to dope and deception.
Yet there may be an answer to this problem of curbing demand among drug users, the three million addicts and 10 million "recreational users." The answer is not to legalize drugs, as George Soros and his cost-benefit analysts observe. Legalizing will totally destroy the vulnerable people of this nation who use potent drugs to provide relief from the pressures of the tense everyday environment. A search for a more lasting escape will push their demands up fast, expediting the process of their self-destruction and loss to society. Note that tobacco and alcohol are similar addictive agents, although less destructive on a percentage of use basis, and look at the damage they cause. Hard drugs escalate the addiction/destruction process.
Strawberry is a man who felt for people. He gave away millions to relatives and friends in need. It is that type of person who returns to drugs when emergency or unbearable circumstances confront him (or her, let's not forget). It is that configuration of personality we have to worry about when we try to curb demand for drugs by interdiction, or reduction in supply. It does not work.
So then, you may ask, smartass, how do you curb demand? Let's think it through. Educate, forbid, arrest, put in jail... Let’s consider the latter threat.Why not develop a cocaine (or angel dust, Ecstasy, LSD) substitute, and offer the criminal users of drugs the option to go to jail or have periodic substitute therapy instead? Installing therapy institutes will help rehabilitate the addicts, reduce demand, curb crime, add to the GNP, provide jobs for social service people, and cut the exposure to foreign entanglements. It is a methadone-type therapy.
Let's go even a step further. Why can’t the US, a nation that can clone living creatures, sponsor development of drugs that give bad reactions to users of cocaine (angel dust, Ecstasy, LSD). When injected with this antidote, the relapsing drug user will have an undesirable reaction (say, a bad headache, diarrhea, inability to hold down food, incontinence, change of skin tone to green or purple, development of a distinct body odor, or whatever else is appropriate). Offer this medication to the criminal drug addicts, plus therapy and support groups, as an alternative to jail. Take a year, or five years, even ten, to develop and implement this "cure." Again, implementing such a cure will not only add to the GNP, it will save lives and families. Save lives! That's what interdiction often forgets, in its effort to catch drug distributors and price the drugs out of the market. The latter fails because the true addict, faced with higher costs, will not stop the use of drugs, he will redouble his effort to rob or steal (or sell crooked stocks, or cheat clients, or doctor books), to raise the money. Saving lives is what we have to concentrate on.
The US should pay Pfizer or Squibb to get started in developing the medicines. We the citizens of the US can pay for their time, or get the National Institute of Health to do the work. It is worth it.
Where are the Einsteins of Academy of Sciences, the NIH, the legislature, the legal system and the civil rights community that they have not addressed the question of effectively curbing the demand for illegal drugs? Drug abuse is a national disgrace. And even with the wrenching tragedy of a dead mother and baby, why is there nothing but "we told them, almost in time, but they did not listen" complacency on part of the responsible military, followed by pro forma cries for investigation of the CIA, the Coast Guard and the Immigration Service that we hear from the public representatives and the press? Let's solve the problem, not tread water and generate GNP in wasted taxpayer money. Great leaders of our era, take this set of ideas to the drawing board and work on them. Washington to copy, let's not waste any more lives.
The war on drugs has reached another crisis, with the downing of a plane and the killing of a missionary and her baby daughter by Peruvian airforce, the latest of 25 planes shot down in the interdiction effort. The interdiction effort costs US taxpayers $1.1 billion in Peru area alone, and has "helped in reducing the count of drug users in the US from 27 million in 1979 to 13 million as of the past few years, not counting the recent upsurge" (I’m sure the ‘90s prosperity and upsurge in jobs for the unskilled did the bulk of the job).
Hearing these claims on CNN makes me sick. The war on drugs is an industry, costing $37 bilion in 1995, and adding numbers to the GNP and GDP, as part of the economic growth of this country. If it were really successful in lessening drug use and saving lives, it might be worthwhile, but it is only fractionally effective. It adds to the growth of the prison industy, with its two million clients and hundreds of thousands of service enployees, another fine GNP item. We should be ashamed of ourselves for not finding effective ways to salvage the 400,000 drug users and criminals now in jail.
This is a sick country, with epaulette-decorated minds like William Bennett and Gen McCaffrey proudly announcing how drug use has been reduced through military efforts, interdiction and taking the dealers off the streets. They preen about reducing the supply.
What about reducing demand, and letting the supply fall off? That solution has not been too successful either. Even demand side advocates like Rep. Maxine Waters speak vaguely of "education," suasion, support groups and talks in schools.There is no real thought given to effective curbs to demand, in the country that put men on the moon. Is education going to work with Darryl Strawberry, the sickeningly sad wreck of a national hero, or with Robert Downey Jr.? Many of us read the recent article in the NYT Magazine section, about the Straw's efforts to rehabilitate, his lies and relapses. You read of his friends saying: "He's junkie, do not listen to him, you cannot believe him." Promises to reform mean nothing to people who live from fix to fix, and stay clean only until the next crisis in living sends them back to dope and deception.
Yet there may be an answer to this problem of curbing demand among drug users, the three million addicts and 10 million "recreational users." The answer is not to legalize drugs, as George Soros and his cost-benefit analysts observe. Legalizing will totally destroy the vulnerable people of this nation who use potent drugs to provide relief from the pressures of the tense everyday environment. A search for a more lasting escape will push their demands up fast, expediting the process of their self-destruction and loss to society. Note that tobacco and alcohol are similar addictive agents, although less destructive on a percentage of use basis, and look at the damage they cause. Hard drugs escalate the addiction/destruction process.
Strawberry is a man who felt for people. He gave away millions to relatives and friends in need. It is that type of person who returns to drugs when emergency or unbearable circumstances confront him (or her, let's not forget). It is that configuration of personality we have to worry about when we try to curb demand for drugs by interdiction, or reduction in supply. It does not work.
So then, you may ask, smartass, how do you curb demand? Let's think it through. Educate, forbid, arrest, put in jail... Let’s consider the latter threat.Why not develop a cocaine (or angel dust, Ecstasy, LSD) substitute, and offer the criminal users of drugs the option to go to jail or have periodic substitute therapy instead? Installing therapy institutes will help rehabilitate the addicts, reduce demand, curb crime, add to the GNP, provide jobs for social service people, and cut the exposure to foreign entanglements. It is a methadone-type therapy.
Let's go even a step further. Why can’t the US, a nation that can clone living creatures, sponsor development of drugs that give bad reactions to users of cocaine (angel dust, Ecstasy, LSD). When injected with this antidote, the relapsing drug user will have an undesirable reaction (say, a bad headache, diarrhea, inability to hold down food, incontinence, change of skin tone to green or purple, development of a distinct body odor, or whatever else is appropriate). Offer this medication to the criminal drug addicts, plus therapy and support groups, as an alternative to jail. Take a year, or five years, even ten, to develop and implement this "cure." Again, implementing such a cure will not only add to the GNP, it will save lives and families. Save lives! That's what interdiction often forgets, in its effort to catch drug distributors and price the drugs out of the market. The latter fails because the true addict, faced with higher costs, will not stop the use of drugs, he will redouble his effort to rob or steal (or sell crooked stocks, or cheat clients, or doctor books), to raise the money. Saving lives is what we have to concentrate on.
The US should pay Pfizer or Squibb to get started in developing the medicines. We the citizens of the US can pay for their time, or get the National Institute of Health to do the work. It is worth it.
Where are the Einsteins of Academy of Sciences, the NIH, the legislature, the legal system and the civil rights community that they have not addressed the question of effectively curbing the demand for illegal drugs? Drug abuse is a national disgrace. And even with the wrenching tragedy of a dead mother and baby, why is there nothing but "we told them, almost in time, but they did not listen" complacency on part of the responsible military, followed by pro forma cries for investigation of the CIA, the Coast Guard and the Immigration Service that we hear from the public representatives and the press? Let's solve the problem, not tread water and generate GNP in wasted taxpayer money. Great leaders of our era, take this set of ideas to the drawing board and work on them. Washington to copy, let's not waste any more lives.
Tuesday, May 01, 2001
Dr. Paranoia spins the answers to national and international crises
In these days of political revelations and accusations, paranoia lurks just barely below one's conscious surface. I mean, come on, why did Newsweek's xx save up the story of Senator Bob Kerrey's nightmare Mai Lai type attack on Vietmamese civilians until now, when the 56-year old ex-hero might be about ready to be drafted as the 2004 Democratic candidate for the Presidency?
Why is the story of graft involving New Jersey's. Democratic Senator Robert G. Torricelli hitting the news now, with the potential of forcing his resignation at the time of the death watch of the centenarian Republican Senator Strom Thurmond? Is it that a Republican replacement Senator from New Jersey would kill any opportunity of turning the balance of the US Senate until the election of 2002? With that in mind, is there an equal opportunity Democratic counteroffensive in New Jersey to discredit the Republicans, via the acting Governor Donald T. DiFrancesco? (If so, it has succeeded, DiFrancesco has left the gubernatorial race amid allegations that he broke the legal ethics rules). Is the attack on the NJ Supreme Court Justice Peter G. Verniero, and the call for his impeachment for misleading testimony regarding racial profiling all a part of the strategies for control of the US Senate?
And what about the stories of how the four Democratic candidates in New York's majoral race are using their jobs, their staffs and the government funds to gently push their candidacies with the voters? Messrs Vallone and Ferrer use their taxpayer-paid mailings tto advance their causes, Mr. Hevesi has hired Senator Clinton's campaign spokeswoman to fill the office of the Controller's communications director, vacant for three years, and Mr. Green's office staff prepares his campaign material. All of this helps for the September primary, since the campaign funds limit, $5.33 million for each candidate, must be earmarked for the expensive TV commercials. Are the stories planted to help the Wealthy Republican candidate? If so, it is all in vain. The City Campaign Board and the City Conflicts of Interest Board will not find anything wrong with the campaign activities of these time-hardened politicians, no matter how much the competition prompts them.
Enough of domestic strife, let's look to international events. How does the Intifada II fit within Dr Paranoia's scenario? Well, it all started with the Camp David peace negotiations in OCTTTTT. The three participants agreed to meet because they needed the event to establish credibility with their constituents, and they succeeded. Prime Minister Ehud Barak could up his offer to return an incredible 92 percent of the West Bank occupied territories because he knew that Yassir Arafat could not come back to his constituents without acquiring a big piece of Jerusalem. A surrender of Jerusalem to Israel would assure his assasination, with Hamas, Hezbollah and any number of other Palestinian Muslem fanatics contending for the honor. By holding out he pumped up his flagging stature with his Palestinians.
Barak, by making the offer, established his standing as an earnest advocate of peace, who would go to the limit, and thereby prove the irrationality of the Palestinians' demands. He too would have been a goner, assassinated or otherwise, if he had surrendered Jerusalem.
President Clinton knew all along that an agreement between the two parties was impossible, but organized the peace talks and pushed and prodded the two antagonists to establish his own bona fides as an earnest broker who tried, both for the benefit of the peace community and for his stature in the history books.
So, why then, after the breakup of the talks, did the two parties not go back to another eight years of a post-Oslo like hibernation? What prompted the new deadly Intifada?
Well, folks, there are also other interests. In Dr. Paranoia's scenario, the Likud leader Ariel Sharon needed a cause to bring forth a political upsurge in the standing of his party. By provoking the Moslems with his jack-booted visit to the sacred Temple Mount, he expected to evoke Palestinian attacks, suicide missions and riots that would prove to the peace Israelis that the Palestinians cannot be trusted. The pro- peace Israelis had begun to envision a final solution of co-existence, and there were those who would have surrendered parts of Jerusalem to be the capital of a new Palestinian state, for the sake of providing a peaceful life for all future generations. Sharon's plan succeeded, the Palestinian extremists used the excuse of his visit to start up a new Intifada and reactivate their demands for reclaiming Jerusalem and restoring the borders of 1947, and Arafat had to move fast and talk tough, so as not to lose his leadership of the troops to some real militant. The poor disenchanted pro-peace Israelis, convinced that there is no way to assure a co-existence with the Palestinians, groaned and formed a national unity coalition behind Sharon. The Labor an Likud parties are now one, for national security purposes, and the Mideast world is back to the permanent low-grade war status. In a sense, that is reassuring, since the Gulf kingdoms, afraid of the Palestinians, will not finance a big war, and the Israelis, afraid of a Kosovo-like reaction on part of the UN or the NATO forces, will keep their retaliations to a minimum. Note that the Israeli tanks came back from the Gaza Strip in a day, after securing their objective of destroying the hiding places used for mortar attacks, and the work permits for Palestinians have been expanded. The Intifada may wind down.
Now, what about the US and China, are we going for a big confrontation? Nah, says Dr. Paranoia. Look, we left a lot of secret stuff on the plane that will reassure the Chinese of our peaceful intents. As for our promise to protect Taipei, we did not sell the Aegis system to the Taiwanese, we gave them the Kidd-class destroyers, built for the Shah of Iran - in the 1970s, for goodness sake - to be delivered in three years, and diesel submarines that we have to build, with parts to be bought from the Germans or the Dutch. In their secret hearts the Chinese leaders should feel quite comfortable. If Dr. Paranoia did not know better, he might think that the US dropped the EP-3 plane on the Chinese in Hainan to give them an opportunity to learn what we are doing, as part of an effort to reassure them of our peceful intents (Dr. Paranoia has misspent his youth reading Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy and studying Winston Churchill, the Spectra case and disinformation). The tough talk that President Bush and the Chinese leaders mouth is strictly for public consumption and preservation of face. President George W. must have some agreement up his sleeve, else the wily Rxx, the stra ight-talking Powell and the plain-thinking Laura Bush would have held him back. He is no Jack Kennedy, and even the K. brothers did not threaten Khruschew into withdrawing the rockets from Havana without a secret quid-pro-quo of withdrawing our Jupiters from Turkey. The Beijing crowd has to maintain the posture of tough independence, and hope that the US Congress will not mistake it for the real thing and decide to respond in kind by screwing up the trade talks.
Dr. Paranoia suggests that we should stay cool, the behind-the-scenes world may be more rational than we think.
Why is the story of graft involving New Jersey's. Democratic Senator Robert G. Torricelli hitting the news now, with the potential of forcing his resignation at the time of the death watch of the centenarian Republican Senator Strom Thurmond? Is it that a Republican replacement Senator from New Jersey would kill any opportunity of turning the balance of the US Senate until the election of 2002? With that in mind, is there an equal opportunity Democratic counteroffensive in New Jersey to discredit the Republicans, via the acting Governor Donald T. DiFrancesco? (If so, it has succeeded, DiFrancesco has left the gubernatorial race amid allegations that he broke the legal ethics rules). Is the attack on the NJ Supreme Court Justice Peter G. Verniero, and the call for his impeachment for misleading testimony regarding racial profiling all a part of the strategies for control of the US Senate?
And what about the stories of how the four Democratic candidates in New York's majoral race are using their jobs, their staffs and the government funds to gently push their candidacies with the voters? Messrs Vallone and Ferrer use their taxpayer-paid mailings tto advance their causes, Mr. Hevesi has hired Senator Clinton's campaign spokeswoman to fill the office of the Controller's communications director, vacant for three years, and Mr. Green's office staff prepares his campaign material. All of this helps for the September primary, since the campaign funds limit, $5.33 million for each candidate, must be earmarked for the expensive TV commercials. Are the stories planted to help the Wealthy Republican candidate? If so, it is all in vain. The City Campaign Board and the City Conflicts of Interest Board will not find anything wrong with the campaign activities of these time-hardened politicians, no matter how much the competition prompts them.
Enough of domestic strife, let's look to international events. How does the Intifada II fit within Dr Paranoia's scenario? Well, it all started with the Camp David peace negotiations in OCTTTTT. The three participants agreed to meet because they needed the event to establish credibility with their constituents, and they succeeded. Prime Minister Ehud Barak could up his offer to return an incredible 92 percent of the West Bank occupied territories because he knew that Yassir Arafat could not come back to his constituents without acquiring a big piece of Jerusalem. A surrender of Jerusalem to Israel would assure his assasination, with Hamas, Hezbollah and any number of other Palestinian Muslem fanatics contending for the honor. By holding out he pumped up his flagging stature with his Palestinians.
Barak, by making the offer, established his standing as an earnest advocate of peace, who would go to the limit, and thereby prove the irrationality of the Palestinians' demands. He too would have been a goner, assassinated or otherwise, if he had surrendered Jerusalem.
President Clinton knew all along that an agreement between the two parties was impossible, but organized the peace talks and pushed and prodded the two antagonists to establish his own bona fides as an earnest broker who tried, both for the benefit of the peace community and for his stature in the history books.
So, why then, after the breakup of the talks, did the two parties not go back to another eight years of a post-Oslo like hibernation? What prompted the new deadly Intifada?
Well, folks, there are also other interests. In Dr. Paranoia's scenario, the Likud leader Ariel Sharon needed a cause to bring forth a political upsurge in the standing of his party. By provoking the Moslems with his jack-booted visit to the sacred Temple Mount, he expected to evoke Palestinian attacks, suicide missions and riots that would prove to the peace Israelis that the Palestinians cannot be trusted. The pro- peace Israelis had begun to envision a final solution of co-existence, and there were those who would have surrendered parts of Jerusalem to be the capital of a new Palestinian state, for the sake of providing a peaceful life for all future generations. Sharon's plan succeeded, the Palestinian extremists used the excuse of his visit to start up a new Intifada and reactivate their demands for reclaiming Jerusalem and restoring the borders of 1947, and Arafat had to move fast and talk tough, so as not to lose his leadership of the troops to some real militant. The poor disenchanted pro-peace Israelis, convinced that there is no way to assure a co-existence with the Palestinians, groaned and formed a national unity coalition behind Sharon. The Labor an Likud parties are now one, for national security purposes, and the Mideast world is back to the permanent low-grade war status. In a sense, that is reassuring, since the Gulf kingdoms, afraid of the Palestinians, will not finance a big war, and the Israelis, afraid of a Kosovo-like reaction on part of the UN or the NATO forces, will keep their retaliations to a minimum. Note that the Israeli tanks came back from the Gaza Strip in a day, after securing their objective of destroying the hiding places used for mortar attacks, and the work permits for Palestinians have been expanded. The Intifada may wind down.
Now, what about the US and China, are we going for a big confrontation? Nah, says Dr. Paranoia. Look, we left a lot of secret stuff on the plane that will reassure the Chinese of our peaceful intents. As for our promise to protect Taipei, we did not sell the Aegis system to the Taiwanese, we gave them the Kidd-class destroyers, built for the Shah of Iran - in the 1970s, for goodness sake - to be delivered in three years, and diesel submarines that we have to build, with parts to be bought from the Germans or the Dutch. In their secret hearts the Chinese leaders should feel quite comfortable. If Dr. Paranoia did not know better, he might think that the US dropped the EP-3 plane on the Chinese in Hainan to give them an opportunity to learn what we are doing, as part of an effort to reassure them of our peceful intents (Dr. Paranoia has misspent his youth reading Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy and studying Winston Churchill, the Spectra case and disinformation). The tough talk that President Bush and the Chinese leaders mouth is strictly for public consumption and preservation of face. President George W. must have some agreement up his sleeve, else the wily Rxx, the stra ight-talking Powell and the plain-thinking Laura Bush would have held him back. He is no Jack Kennedy, and even the K. brothers did not threaten Khruschew into withdrawing the rockets from Havana without a secret quid-pro-quo of withdrawing our Jupiters from Turkey. The Beijing crowd has to maintain the posture of tough independence, and hope that the US Congress will not mistake it for the real thing and decide to respond in kind by screwing up the trade talks.
Dr. Paranoia suggests that we should stay cool, the behind-the-scenes world may be more rational than we think.
