Editorials and Opinions

Robert Devaney • April 11, 2016

After 18 years as the face of Georgetown University at so many neighborhood projects and events, a woman who strove to balance the demands of the community and university has announced her retirement. Linda Greenan, Georgetown University’s associate vice president for external relations, will retire, effective Oct. 1.

Here is what John DeGioia, the university’s president, had to say about Greenan:

“Linda has been a valued and loyal liaison for the university with the city and local community for almost two decades. Since joining the Georgetown University community in 1994, she has represented the university before the District government, the City Council and countless citizen groups and business and professional organizations. She is a respected authority on the city of Washington, its politics and its policies. Rare was an event with the Mayor of Washington when he didn’t single out Linda for her work on behalf of Georgetown. Most recently, Linda served as a key member of a senior leadership team that led the university in the successful passage of our campus plan.

“Over the course of a remarkable career, Linda has served on numerous volunteer and community activities both on campus and in the local community. She has served on the boards of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce and the Humanities Council and served as president of the Georgetown Business Association (2002 to 2006). From 1994 to 2008, she was appointed by three different mayors to the board of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, which was the city agency responsible for returning Major League Baseball to the city and for the construction of Nationals Stadium. She currently serves on the board of the Washington Convention and Sports Authority, which manages the city’s convention center, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, the D.C. Armory and the Carnegie Library.”

Like the university, we in the neighborhood and at this newspaper are quite aware of how Greenan has given her time and support to Washington and Georgetown efforts large and small. Even when on the opposing side of an issue concerning the school, her faith in and love for the betterment of Georgetown were always appreciated. And we always knew the situation would come to a better conclusion because she was involved.

As a successor to Greenan’s work and as part of the Georgetown Community Partnership, the university is creating a new Office of Community Engagement. Lauralyn Lee, who has been with the university for nearly a decade, will lead this office, which will be part of the Office of Public Affairs.
Yes, we also knew that Greenan could not quite be replaced. Good luck, Linda, in the latest chapter of your life. We know you will still be around, and we hope to see you soon.

Juliana Zovak • April 9, 2016

The Washington Nationals lost their home opener to the Miami Marlins 4-6 on Thursday, April 7 — after both an exciting opening day program and a rain delay.

The loss will be dwelled on for a day or two, and analysts will debate what went wrong and why the Nationals couldn’t hit with runners in scoring position.

But the game itself is unimportant — there will be 159 others this season to discuss and break down, many more exciting than this one. This opening day was about celebrating the community that makes baseball so special.

Prince William County, Virginia, police officers Jesse Hempen and David McKeown threw out the honorary first pitch in front of a crowd of more than 40,000, the memory immortalized for them in the baseballs signed by pitchers Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg.

On Feb. 27, Hempen and McKeown were injured while responding to a domestic altercation. Their colleague, Officer Ashley Guindon, was also shot and fatally wounded in the incident. She and first responders Officer Jacai Colson, Officer Noah Leotta, Lieutenant Kevin McRae and Officer Brennan Rabain were remembered in a moment of silence before the game.

In collectively remembering the slain first responders, in hearing the crowd chant “MVP” as Bryce Harper emerged from the dugout, in watching young kids with their gloves on eagerly awaiting a foul ball, we are reminded of how this sport brings people together.

Governors Larry Hogan of Maryland and Terry McAuliffe of Virginia joined Mayor Muriel Bowser and Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lynn Lanier down on the field. After he received his MVP award and a Silver Slugger award, Bowser presented Harper with a key to the city, a symbol of how much this team and its success means to Washington, D.C.

Fans left work early, braved narrow and congested streets and rode Metro’s crowded Green Line to see their team begin the 2016 quest for glory. Anyone who read the weather report knew it would rain and the game would most likely be delayed. They came anyway, and they celebrated together.

The emcee announced that this day was the beginning of “our annual right to hot dogs and high fives” (a right you can enjoy for the bargain price of $6.25 per hot dog!). He called this season’s mission “our one pursuit.” Our.

Baseball is a business. It’s about making money, selling tickets and hoping for the ultimate payoff in a World Series title. But it’s also about uniting fans behind something that inspires them. It’s about making sure that the community that supports the Nationals can count on the team to have their back on and off the field. It’s about the feelings of hope and possibility that come with every new season.

That feeling could be captured during a special moment yesterday.

The sun was shining brilliantly as it does after rain.

The United States Army Chorus Quartet sung “America, the Beautiful,” whose words rang throughout the stadium: “O beautiful for spacious skies …” The cast from “Jersey Boys” at the National Theatre then sang, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem, joined to baseball more than a century ago in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

The songs ended. The crowd roared yet again. The umpires arrived.

Play ball.
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Gary Tischler • April 8, 2016

Here it is the day after Tuesday, and it turns out that the Wisconsin primary really was a big cheese.

It turns out that having Governor Scott Walker on your side was a good thing for Senator Ted Cruz and the hard-to-figure-out-who-belongs-to-it GOP establishment in their first really serious bid to stop Donald Trump.

It turns out — if you believe Cruz — that this primary, which Cruz won by 13 percent (48 to 33 by last count), was, while not only impressive but also  “a turning point” or a “pivot point,” as some experts would have it. Or it may be just two weeks until the New York Primary.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders further muddied the waters by scoring an impressive win over Hillary Clinton, which prompted the experts and Sanders to claim that he now had the big mo, a big thing in presidential campaigns, as in having momentum.  Here, too, there is the anticipation and the wait for the next big thing, the New York primary.

The Wisconsin primary may be all these things — pivotal, momentum-changing, a turning point, the final shoe to drop finally on Trump. Maybe this time Trump’s gaffes and outspoken bloopers (turning off women by the millions with his abortion comments) finally caught up with him.  Maybe Ted Cruz has the big mo too, although it’s not likely that he can catch up with Trump in terms of delegates before the GOP gathering in Cleveland.

Cruz, it should be remembered, is nobody’s darling among his peers in the Senate. While he has picked up supporters that are motivated by being repelled by Trump, nobody except for his family has so far fallen in love with him. What does appear to have emerged is a better picture of Cruz, the candidate, which is that he is not a demagogue but an ideologue, who appeals to the tiny government faction of the party as well as its Christian evangelist side, the side that will fight to the bitter end against Obamacare, gay marriage, planned parenthood and so forth.

It’s fair to perhaps take away a sigh of relief among the voting populace as this little spring break in primaries arrives and take a look backward as to how we got here.

More and more, we see that we have arrived at a juncture in American election politics where the process has become circus-like, a kind of long-running, regularly scheduled television show which was taken by surprise by the hostile takeover of the GOP race by Trump, himself a celebrated developer and reality show host.

While Clinton — beleaguered at times by her e-mail troubles and her status as being anointed the front runner from the beginning — has struggled once again to live up to expectations in her campaign, dogged by the surprising insurgent campaign of Sanders, the Republicans have put on a mini-series of thrills and spills, debates and election results.

There have been all kinds of commentary on the campaign from the print media as old sages and veteran commentators on both sides weigh in every week on the dangers of Trump, the collapse of the Republican party, the strength of feeling the Bern and so on.

But this has been a campaign that has been almost entirely conducted — in the popular imagination and mind — on television.  The theme, to be sure, has been anti-politics-as-usual on both sides, to varying degrees, but mainly, the campaign has been a television show, reported on by television media, with loud noises in the background on social media, which Trump has engaged with surprising ease, commandeering Twitter and Instagram.

The question in terms of experiencing the campaign this way is one of authenticity.  Look at the screen. It seems a strangely fantastical, unreal experience that follows certain patterns of scripted and unscripted dramas. The campaign so far has been full of debates, sponsored by networks who call themselves neutral, but actually are called Fox and MSNBC to the right and left, as well as CNN, and the major networks. The Trump explosion has been a boon for all concerned, except when Trump chose not to appear.

Debates led up to primaries and caucuses, and in all cases — the aftermath of the debates and the results of the elections, followed a familiar pattern — someone would have a battle at a debate or embarrass themselves (I refer to small hands, little Marco, the failure of Bush and the second-tier candidates).

There would be an election, won, more often than not by Trump. In both cases, the television media, and the talk show hosts and experts, strategist and consultants and white-haired men and women from campaigns past, would go over the results and explain to us what happened, and then make predictions (most of the time, wrong) about what would happen next.  They appeared like the priests after a consular election in Ancient Rome, brought out to slaughter a chicken and read the entrails for omens of the future.

There was nothing authentic about any of this, and none of the candidates appeared to me to be either an embodiment or a representative of the people who would decide their fate in the ballot box.  What Trump managed to do in at least the case of his rallies was articulate the resentments and failed hopes of a particular segment of voters by speaking in ways that seemed to speak to their anger and feelings — and by speaking, not in tongues, but phrases that he hurled out into the crowds like firebombs. Sanders also managed to do something similar, although without the rancor or the divisiveness that characterized Trump’s most outrageous statements.

Although Cruz would like us to believe, as he most certainly does, that he is now the anointed one (or will be at the convention), chances are we are still in for another long slog through more primaries.

The question arises, to paraphrase Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar,” regarding Trump: “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Donald?”

Probably not, but it could be the beginning of the end. Nevertheless, no one has gotten rich in this campaign making predictions about the fall of Trump.

Gary Tischler • April 6, 2016

All the harbingers of the season — cherry blossoms, the city of trees alive with fresh buds, Easter and the end of March Madness — have already come and gone. But the coming of spring really means nothing until the baseball season has begun.

More than any contemporary sport, baseball still relishes its association with hope and the season. The traditional retort “Wait until next year” follows the failure to make the playoffs or win a division flag or the World Series — not an NBA title, a gold medal, the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup. It ignores not only a losing season but insane salaries, drug tests and bad behavior, instead savoring the spirit of Ernie Banks, who said: “Let’s play two.” Ernie never complained (and never won a World Series).

Baseball fans — old and young, past, present and future — go against the modern grain because they trail with them, more than fans of any other sport, the baggage of yesteryear. It’s not just statistics, though baseball fans and sports writers are probably more obsessed with data than hedge fund managers, inventing new categories (see Wins Above Replacement) of achievement or failure every year. It’s a kind of tribal memory that blankets every city worthy of having a team.

For years, for instance, the Boston Red Sox lived not only in the shadow of the New York Yankees, but also of the Curse of the Bambino, whereby Babe Ruth, arguably the greatest power hitter in the history of the game, was traded by the Red Sox to the Yankees. For decades, the Sox remained without a World Series title. To collector of mementos of good fortune and misery alike, whisper the name Bill Buckner and see what happens.

The Red Sox finally won a World Series in 2004 (in improbable fashion, trailing the Yankees 3-0 in the playoffs, winning four in a row, then sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals). But the Chicago Cubs haves not been so fortunate, having failed to win a World Series since the first decade of the last century.

Guess who’s favored by many to win the World Series this year?

The Chicago Cubs.

This is not necessarily a good sign. Guess which team was favored by many last year? The Washington Nationals — who suffered a strange, inexplicable collapse after the All-Star game and failed to make the playoffs.

But baseball hope springs eternal. At least one Sports Illustrated writer has the Nats winning the World Series, and a number of others have brash outfielder Bryce Harper, who sports a millennial beard and haircut, repeating as NL MVP. (If those initials mean nothing to you, you should perhaps stop reading.)

The Nationals, who brought baseball back to Washington, have already built up enough history to create a tribal memory of sorts, one of per-usual expansion-team defeats, but also of never-fulfilled expectations. That is the way of baseball. These things hurt in a way that knowing Dan Snyder still owns the Redskins does not. The Nats already have a history of two playoff losses that defy explanation, wound the heart and survive as bar talk. In today’s world, there are as many explanations of how the Nats lost those games as there are regional beer brands, which is a lot.

Like no other game, baseball has the beauty of endless hope. It has no clock, and therefore anything can happen and quite often does. Time is not an enemy and not a friend; it barely exists except as a backdrop where things like a 22-inning game can occur deep into the morning, where a kid brings a glove to the game in hopes of being the one — out of 30,000 people — to catch a home-run ball.

If it’s one hit by Bryce Harper, it will be a treasure. Harper, who will be playing on a team that also includes relief pitcher Jonathan Papelbon, who very nearly strangled him in the dugout last year, is one of the game’s superior two young naturals (the other being the much more well behaved but equally lethal Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels).

Anything can happen at a baseball game. Two years ago, I was present at an opening-day game in which often wounded pitching ace Stephen Strasburg pitched a shutout and Harper hit two home runs — the kind of game which, if it had been the seventh game of a World Series, would have made many fans feel that they could die and go to heaven right then and there.
Hope springs eternal. Come next Thursday — the exhibition game doesn’t count — it starts all over again.

Georgetowner •

Jose Antonio Salinas is the owner of the stand at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Dumbarton Street. He has been a fixture in Georgetown for the past 16 years. Salinas not only sells sunglasses, hats, scarves, umbrellas and other items, but keeps an eye on the street and knows all the neighbors. He has stopped several crimes and supplies some of the charm and character of our town. With the departure of Five Guys Hamburgers at Wisconsin Avenue and arrival of &Pizza, Salinas has been told to leave by April 25.

Georgetown neighbors: Let’s help Jose Antonio Salinas stay at the corner or get a new place nearby. We’re looking for a few good ideas. To lend a hand, email The Georgetowner at editorial@georgetowner.com.

Gary Tischler • March 30, 2016

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, the not-so-holy day when nearly a dozen states hold primaries or caucuses — mostly in the South which is why its also referred to as SEC Tuesday in some quarters — from which Republican and Democratic presidential candidates can reap delegates, gain momentum or be labeled winners or losers or potential drop-outs.

Call it Super Tuesday, if you will.  If you look at the Republican race for the presidential nomination, you might as well as call it Apocalypse Tuesday.

It’s come to this.  Insurgent candidate, businessman, developer and television celebrity Donald Trump is threatening to run away with the process and the party after three straight, convincing primary wins in states as diverse as New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada (he finished second in the Iowa caucuses).  An alarmed GOP establishment as represented by the party, Super PACs from the now defeated Jeb Bush campaign, the media, especially old-line print stalwarts, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and Trump’s principal rivals, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator and Christian evangelist presumed darling Ted Cruz are finally fighting back by all available means necessary.  The collateral damage, of course, is the American electoral process and perhaps the Republican Party, as we understand it.   

Such damage became evident in a fractious spectacle of a CNN-sponsored debate Feb. 25, when both Rubio and Cruz attacked Trump, taking turns questioning Trump’s conservative and party bona fides. Rubio, especially, since he appears to have inherited the financial backing of Bush allies, seems  to have decided that the only way to trounce Trump is to descend into the muddy, mucky waters of personal attacks, questionable claims made repeatedly and without letup, exaggerations and rumors, accusations and claims mixed together artlessly and loudly.

Artless assertions are the kind of things that Trump has done from the get-go, broad promises—no Muslims, Mexican rapists, thousands of Muslims cheering in New Jersey and on and on goes the list.  He has attacked opponents, critics, media members, the president, women, members of Congress and the judiciary, and his rivals, with Bush a particular piñata for him, as he continuously and in the crudest terms questioned Bush’s courage, stamina, energy, and manliness.  During all this, Cruz, and Rubio—who also took on Bush—stood by without standing up to Trump. They were for the most part, silent.

Now, it’s Trump’s turn to receive sustained criticism: for his not disavowing the KKK, hiring foreign workers and Poles, messing with his makeup, mis-spelling words on twitter, supporting Planned Parenthood, not make his tax returns public— could there be a Mafia connection? — and so on.

The debate battle in Houston, with Rubio shouting over Trump and Trump calling both liars and idiots, was a spectacle that tempted many people to change the channel to reruns, any reruns, or to run to the bathroom.   It’s been like this non-stop ever since, with the media at once tut-tutting, grilling Trump to little avail, while seeming to enjoy the drama.  The strategy, certainly on the part of Rubio, the candidate around whom the media and the so-called establishment seems to have gathered, is to take off the gloves and go on a 24-7 attack mode.

Mind you, this is not about a cogent strategy to deal with ISIS or the Middle East or creating jobs or balancing the budget and policy.  This is about hair, makeup and pants stains and foreign workers and calling Trump a con man, something many of us have known for a long time.  If you listen to the Conservative Solutions ad for Rubio, you see a chin-held-high, young but seasoned man, “a Reagan disciple,” strong and looking to the next generation of Republicans to lead. That generation apparently includes the likes of Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, but never mind. The contrast with Rubio, the presidential-timber candidate and the campaign trail and debate Rubio, his teeth sometimes bared into a gleeful smile, as if he’d just stolen some brash kid’s marbles, telling people to google Trump and Polish workers, or looking at his Blackberry for misspellings or talking about Trump wanting a full-length mirror to check for pants stains couldn’t be more dramatic and sadder.

This is what the campaign has come to and is bound to continue.  In order to fight Trump, his rivals — Rubio and Cruz and some media types — have decided they must become Trump.  On appearances, they seem to have succeeded.  Most of the information and surely some misinformation that’s splashed into newspapers, talk shows and news shows, must have been out there for months.  If political courage and character are such highly valued qualities by the GOP and its candidates, where were Rubio and Cruz all these months when Trump was making outrageous claims, insulting women, apparently lying about his record?  They stood back, content to watch others fall by the wayside, and to assume, like most of the experts and the media did, that Trump would sooner or later implode from the sheer weight of his bull and that people would see that the developer had no clothes.

Instead, Trump appeared to re-invent newer and strong versions of Teflon. Yes, he deserves the treatment he’s getting, but perhaps he should be getting it from better men than himself, instead of from people who are imitating him.

Is it working?

Well, a CNN-ORC national poll out Monday — not state by state — shows that Trump is at 49 percent with GOP voters, with Rubio trailing at 16 percent and Cruz at 15 percent.   A RealClearPolitics poll has Trump leading in nearly all of the Super Tuesday states, except Texas, where Cruz is expected to win.

It’s telling that the one moderate—Governor John Kasich of Ohio, who has a primary in mid-March—is trailing behind even Ben Carson.

Meantime, Democratic Party leader Hilary Clinton, fresh from a big win in South Carolina and a squeaky one in Nevada, is heavily favored to garner big primary wins March 1.

Gary Tischler •

Two people—reminders of different times—passed away recently. One of them was a fixture near the White House for more than three decades; the other, a key member of a legendary 1960s and 1970s rock group, thus adding another name to the recent losses in the rock-pop world.

Concepcion Picciotto in her shawl, heavy hat, standing by her signs and tent protesting nuclear proliferation directly across the street by Lafayette Park, due north of the White House was a familiar figure to passers-by—and the world did pass by and pass her by almost at the same time.  Tourists came and walked by as did the day-to-day busy people, especially after two blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House were closed to vehicular traffic in 1995.  She and a compatriot William Thomas joined forces—Thomas as a man who founded a more or less steady peace vigil in front of the White House, Picciotto with her long-handed papers protesting and battling the presence and proliferation of nuclear weapons. 

Every city has people like this—all different and unique—and places where they gather.

When things happen—the election of an African American president, the killing of Osama Bin Laden—people gather to demonstrate and let their feelings be known, for or against, in front of the north side of the White House.  It happens in New York’s Times Square, along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where the intellectuals and the lost got together in the 1960s, accompanied by rock and folk music, or in the parks of Chicago.

People were in front of the gates of the White House at each of the American forays into Iraq or holding vigils for peaces during the holidays. They come to the National Mall in gigantic numbers on Earth Day, on inauguration day, on MLK’s birthday, historic remembrances.

Every big demonstration usually has castoffs, people who come and then somehow forget to leave and go elsewhere. They stick around, having found a place or a home.  Picciotto came here after emigrating from Spain in 1960 and eventually, according to various stories, stayed after a failed marriage. She found her cause and her place around 30 years ago.  Soft-spoken and quiet, she never yelled or screamed, but rather put up pamphlets, whole tomes on the danger of nuclear war and proliferation. In a story by George Joseph Tanber in the Toledo Magazine in 1988, she would begin her days at 8 a.m., feed squirrels  and set up her place and the signs: “Live by the Bomb; Die by the Bomb” and so on.  As far as any one knows, she must have seen a few presidents go by, beginning with Ronald Reagan, but no exchanges have been recorded. She had run-ins with the Secret Service Police, often talked with people and remained a regular presence.

She died at the age of 80 on Jan. 25 at N Street Village, a homeless shelter and rehabilitation center for women, six blocks from the White House.

If you lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, were young, restless and a little hippified, lived in Marin County or thereabouts and read about the new music in stories by local sage Ralph Gleason, you knew who Paul Kantner was.  More accurately, you knew him as the guitarist and founding member of Jefferson Airplane, one of the major rock groups of the 1960s, legends in their mind and the minds of the fans who were often carried high by the music and the smoke.               

His death evokes not only the memory of the sound of the Jefferson Airplane’s music but the memory of a scene—that was San Francisco in the mid-to-late-1960s, when some of the most legendary singers, bands, and musicians rose out of the ashes of the folk scene to become major stars and emblematic of a pop culture (in the Haight Ashbury and in and around the Bay Area).  At the Fillmore and the Avalon, the Airplane, Janet Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Byrds and Steve Miller’s Blue Band were at the forefront of a musical movement and moment.

The Airplane’s big star was Grace Slick, the slickest female singer around, a kind of glamour queen of the movement, which had Joplin as its break-your-heart soul. Slick and Kantner were the power couple of the movement—they had a daughter named China.  The band—Slick, Kantner, vocalist Marty Balin, guitarist Jorma Kaukopnen, bassist Jack Casady and drummer Spencer Dryden—took off with such hits as the irresistible “Somebody to Love” (as in “Don’t You Want Somebody To Love”) and the enigmatic-to-Middle-America “Go ask Alice”, which married Lewis Carroll to the counter culture.  The band broke up in the late 1960s, and Kantner and Casady founded Hot Tuna while others centered around “Starship.”

At its height, Jefferson Airplane was something to behold and hear, one of the centerpieces of a whirling, colorful, unforgettable scene.

Kantner died January 28 in San Francisco at the age of 74.