Editorials and Opinions

Mark Plotkin • January 20, 2016

First of all, all of you should be aware that former Mayor Vincent Gray knows the exact date of this year’s D.C. Democratic primary by heart. [Full disclosure: this columnist and the former mayor have known each other since their college days at George Washington University.]

During an exclusive interview with him last week, as I struggled with the precise date, he eagerly informed me that it was June 14. Is this not a harbinger of things to come?

Gray would not commit to stating he would definitely run for a seat on the District Council. But he did say the following: “I love public service.” Now, the question is: Will it be in his home ward (7) or District-wide (for an at-large spot)? I would bet it will be in Ward 7.

He bluntly said, “People want change out here.” The incumbent Council member Yvette Alexander, a former Gray protégé, succeeded him after he moved on to become Council chairman.

Some observers (including me) presume that if he wins the Ward 7 Council seat, he will use it as a stepping stone to run for mayor in 2018.

With some intensity, Gray told me that this was not his plan. When I pushed him, he made the point clearly: “No stepping stone.” But when asked if he would issue a Sherman (“If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve”), he refused.

The former mayor is upset and angry over the four-and-a-half-to-five-year investigation that he has endured. In a matter-of-fact tone, he said he looked on the entire matter as “nothing that complex” and “pretty straightforward.” It all came down to “Was I aware of the situation,” he said. “Was I involved?” To that central question, Gray emphatically has said, “I wasn’t.”

When I inquired about his repeated meetings with Jeff Thompson (who pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing), Gray said that Thompson first declined when he approached him to help out with Gray’s campaign. But then, Gray recounted, Thompson called him and said, “I’d like to meet with you.” Gray admitted that there were two more meetings with Thompson, but said that Thompson “never asked me for a budget, nor did I give him one.”

Gray accused former U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen, who investigated and indicted individuals associated with the Gray 2010 campaign, of practicing “voter suppression.” He feels that, because Machen held a press conference three weeks before the April 1 Democratic primary, voters in Wards 5, 7 and 8 assumed that Machen would charge Gray and said to themselves, “I won’t show up and vote. Why bother?”

Vince Gray is adamantly proud of his record as mayor, pointing to education reform, fiscal prudence (he left his term with the city having “$1.87 billion in the bank”) and economic development, especially in the “east end of the city.” He is no fan of Mayor Muriel Bowser. He starkly commented about her: “I haven’t seen a vision for the city.” The citizens of D.C. are “still waiting,” he said.

It’s my opinion that Gray feels wronged. The only way to make it up is for him to jump back into the fray. That the U.S. Attorney General for the District of Columbia closed the case was vindication—but that alone will not do. He seeks to be back in the game. Many, many years ago, I watched him play intramural basketball at the Tin Tabernacle at GW. He always went straight to the basket, and he usually scored. That won’t change.

Political analyst Mark Plotkin is a contributor to the BBC on American politics and a contributor to TheHill.com. Reach him at markplotkindc@gmail.com.
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Gary Tischler • January 13, 2016

Nothing exists in a vacuum.  Not even, and especially, presidential State of the Union addresses.

President Barack Obama’s SOTU stood out in the context of—and in contrast to—other SOTU speeches, it was framed against the political atmosphere of the national presidential election race in which Republicans and Democrats are trying sometimes desperately to find a candidate around whom to rally.  That fact alone made the House of Representatives chamber echo with a singular partisanship measured in applause or the lack of it.

The Jan. 12 speech at the U.S. Capitol came wrapped in character and expectations for it to be a kind of summing up, autumnal, and perhaps both stirring and resigned.  

It came in the context of real time and real events out in the world, where the television media was already announcing a possible world crisis after Iran ships took control of two U.S. Navy boats which had accidentally moved in Iranian-controlled waters in the Persian Gulf.   Predictably, several GOP candidates seized the opportunity to complain about the Obama administration-authored nuclear deal with Iran, which is anathema to the Republicans.

There was in Obama’s speech a flavor of both bravado and regret, and a warning, one surprisingly echoed by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who had been chosen to give the GOP rebuttal speech.

The bravado came in Obama’s repeated claim that the United States was, in fact, economically surging and sound, that it was military strong and stronger than every other country in the world, that his health care legislation had hugely expanded care to millions not covered before and that there was reason to be optimistic about the future and proud of the accomplishments of his two terms.

Reactions to Obama’s claims  depended almost exactly on where you were sitting—in the case of the members of Congress, quite literally.  The smaller section housing the Democrat senators and representatives cheered loud and often throughout, the GOP section remained glumly and notably silent throughout except for at least one very singular exception.

At one point, the president said, “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln and Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office,” no small admission for a president noted for his rhetorical abilities.

He said that change and uncertainty had activated “a particularly virulent strain our politics.” “When politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or our fellow citizens, when a mosque is vandalized or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. . . . That’s not telling it like it is. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. It betrays who we are as a country.” 

This brought some general applause and may have signaled, without calling him out by name, a risible rise against Donald Trump, whose consistently intemperate language and outrages on the campaign trail has fueled his rise to the GOP lead in the polls. 

More surprisingly, that theme—about Trump, but not by name—was also echoed by Haley, who warned that Americans should “avoid the siren call of the angriest voices.”  Haley’s voice was likely to be listened to since she came from a family of Indian immigrants to rise to the governorship of South Carolina, hardly a blue state.

Obama praised his “friend and partner,” Vice President Joe Biden, who flashed his big grin often and engaged in what seemed like comradely banter with the new and stern-faced Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Obama announced a national effort to find a cure for cancer, to be headed by Biden, who lost his son Beau to the illness last year.

Talking about common values and common ground, Obama called for a halt to gerrymandering.  He said that democracy “does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. … We have to choose a system to reflect our better selves.” But he recognized the difficult of affecting change: “It won’t be easy. What I’m asking for is hard.”

The silence that greeted those comments from the GOP side, deep and consistent, shows just how hard it will be. It’s likely that Ryan won’t be much help if his posture behind the president is any indication.  He applauded, very lightly, only about three times, two of them obligatory. He maintained a thin smile throughout, appearing to be above the fray and inscrutable, like a Cheshire Cat disguised as the Speaker of the House.

While Trump twittered that he found the speech “boring and lethargic,”  Senator Ted Cruz, who is slightly ahead in the polls in the Iowa caucus, said ahead of the speech that he didn’t show up because he had “a Canadian curling contest to attend.”  “I think the speech will be a series of acts of demagoguery,” he said.

Obama’s SOTU wasn’t anything like that.  It seemed both troubling and urgent, even impassioned,  because the political divide that took up a large part of the content of the speech was in the context of an atmosphere of apparently intractable division and rancor.

But perhaps there was progress of sorts. Nobody yelled “Liar!” from the GOP seats.

In addition, the latest word had it that the Iranians had released those 10 U.S. sailors.
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Gary Tischler • January 11, 2016

It was only the third speech President Barack Obama had delivered from the Oval Office, and it was apparently meant as a signal to the nation on Dec. 6 as to just how serious he was about dealing with international terrorism and the Islamic State—especially in the wake of the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which left 14 dead.

The Dec. 2 murders—perpetrated by the married Muslim couple, Syed Rizwan Farook, an American-born citizen and his wife Tashfeen Malik, who were both killed in a shootout—has been officially designated an act of terrorism by the FBI.  A horde of weaponry was found at the home of the killers, who had used two .223 caliber semi-automatic rifles in their killing spree at the work place of Farook.  It  was also discovered that Tashfeen Malik had apparently posted a Facebook pledge to the Islamic State.

Republican presidential candidates, especially Senator Ted Cruz, almost immediately blasted the president’s policies in dealing with the threat of ISIL.

Most of the candidates vied with each other in chin-and-chest-out bellicosity, while Cruz, in his by now customary flannel shirt, said at an Iowa gun range Friday at which he announced the formation of a Second Amendment Coalition, “You don’t stop bad guys by taking away our guns, you stop bad guys by using our guns.” New Jersey governor Chris Christy said, “What we’re facing is the next world war. This is what we’re in right now, already.”  Cruz said, “Whether the administration  realizes it, or is it willing to acknowledge it, our enemies are at war with us.”

The president apparently realized it saying that the shootings were an “act of terrorism”  and that “the threat from terrorism is real and we will overcome it. . . . We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us.”

Yet Obama announced no serious new military initiatives, but rather wants to continue on a coalition of nations, a U.S. special operations presence in the region, including Iraq and finding ways to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists. Such methods include banning weapons sales to people on flight watch lists, which would seem to be a no-brainer, but for which legislation was only this last week roundly opposed by all but one Republican in the Senate.

While acknowledging that terrorism—especially in the wake of San Bernardino and the terrorist attacks in Paris—posed a growing, serious threat and present danger to the United States—the president seemed equally committed to preventing divisions  in the United States which would lay the blame on Islam as a whole. The danger isn’t far-fetched: we’ve heard calls to arms, and the internet is on fire with reckless, hateful posts.

Add to that, the fact that guns—their use not only by criminals and terrorists as well as by law enforcement—are so central to this debate, one way or another. Their over use, say to speak, gives an increasingly feverish and fearful tone not only to the way people talk about things and debate but to the intensity of the talk and the tone.

To many people around the world, things feel out of kilter, as if a plague has been set loose, amorphous but loud.

In politics, it seems a time of fearful faction, where politicians running for president can ignore facts, caution, rationality and not be punished by the public. We’ve had the know-nothing party, now we have the rise, out there in the digital world,  of  the know everything-understand-nothing party.

We seem to be living in a worrisome, twisted story of the worst sort, in which no one knows what will happen next,  but everyone knows something, somewhere, is going to happen, some new outrage that will race through the body politic like wildfire.

In times like these, the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming,” and some of its lines echo like music as a shrill warning: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide us loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

Yates wrote that poem in 1919, one year after the end of World War I.

Gary Tischler •

It’s 2016, folks.  Aren’t you: surprised, relieved, exhausted, still dancing in the streets, nervous about what lies ahead after a year that seemed full of stark surprises, most of them not boding well for the future?

We are looking ahead with some trepidation for any number of reasons, El Nino and the climatic travails it may continue to bring, the fate of streetcars in the district and the debut of the Michael Bay action movie about Benghazi. 

Reason #1:  2016 is an election year, maybe the end-all and be-all of all elections, if not the end of elections as we know them.

That’s already happened. In 2015, the the Republican Party presidential nominating process—which had evolved into a lumpy process filled with outlier candidates and PACs and SuperPACs in 2012, unraveled.

To be sure, there was another cartload of candidates that numbered 17 at one point and was so big that it produced tiered first-string and second-string debates, something that had never been seen before.  There was a favorite—Jeb Bush, all fat and financed better than a hedge fund, guaranteeing, it was assumed, a deep run in the primaries.  Other prominent candidates at the time included Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker and Rick Perry.

It was a familiar lineup except for a few distinct differences —impresario, casino owner, businessman and showman (“The Apprentice”) and birther mythologist Donald Trump announced, in a flaming rhetorical debut that included talk of a “huge” wall at the border, paid for by Mexico, and rapist immigrants, among other things, that he was running for president.  So did Ben Carson, an African American Republican brain surgeon.

Trump catapulted into the front runner in the polls, trailing behind him a string of outrageous claims, most of them made at rallies which increased in size and bellicosity, and the fervent hope by his rivals and maybe a good chunk of Americans that he would implode, like one of those Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloons, somewhere along the way, that maybe the last gaffe or slur (against women, Arabs, ethnic groups and Samuel Jackson or Megyn Kelly) would do him in.  

Today, Trump leads in the national Republican polls big time and hardly a day goes by that he doesn’t make headlines. The phrase, “President Trump,” has now been uttered by someone other than Trump—by media types and by all of us.  Meanwhile, Carson is floundering, Walker and Perry are gone, and Bush is in single digits that could become hardly any digit.

The Republican contretemps have dominated the news and have provided fodder for the campaign itself becoming not the dominant issues of the times, but material for debates and press releases, which simplify the major news of the year, including the rise of ISIS and its attacks in Paris which killed well more than in November. The terrorist attacks were joined by the killings of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, perpetrated by an American Muslim couple apparently influenced by ISIS.  There was a horrendous refugee crisis which occurred as a direct result of the civil war and general destruction it caused in Syria, where ISIS is headquartered.  

I listened to panel members at a talk at the Aspen Institute in Washington, which included a congresswoman, a Harvard professor of diplomacy and a  general, discussing American reaction to Arab radicalism, which is at the root of the cauldron that constitutes the Middle East region. They  talked about schism, Shiites and Sunnis, the Arab spring, no fly zones, the ebb  and flow of religious and political loyalties. In contrast, what you heard from men and the woman who would be president was killing and destroying ISIS, carpet-bombing parts of Syria and stopping Muslims from emigrating to the United States, fiery, tough, and inflammatory talk couched in great, crowd pleasing generalities.

The other crisis in America was also fueled by the sound of guns and the doing of violence.  It was the stirring of a debate over connected issues—the alarming rise in police killings of young African American men and the equally alarming rise in mass shootings and homicides by gunfire. In the area, after the arrest of a young black man named Freddie Gray resulted in his death while being transported,  a violent riot and demonstrations and fires broke out in Baltimore, which in the end resulted in the indictment of six police officers. The first trial ended in a hung jury. 

The police shootings have sparked “Black Lives Matter,” a national protest movement which in turn sparked protests on campuses about racial issues.    

The shootings themselves were a part of the  mosaic of national homicides and deaths by gunfire, which, along with gun control,  has now became an issue both local and national, after a visibly emotional President Barack Obama issued executive orders which would require background checks for gun shows, among other, modest proposals.

The issue reverberates in  cities all over the country, especially in Chicago, but also in the District of Columbia, which saw a 54-percent  increase in homicides with a total of 162, almost of them by gunfire. 

Mass shootings of various sizes occurred throughout the year, most notably in Columbia, South Carolina, where a young, bitter white shooter killed nine African American bible study members at a historic church.

It is not that there was no other news— much of whatever good news there was served as a balm and antidote to the ongoing alarms and issues of the day, including the weather itself.

The visit of Pope Francis to Washington in September was emotional, dramatic, stirring and jubilant, but in spite of the best words of the pope, the spirit it engendered at the time did not appear to have staying power.

It was the small pleasures offered in our neighborhoods and city—Halloween celebrations on your block or mine, a gospel group singing resonantly at a neighborhood hospital as part of a porch front music festival, the arrival of a panda cub, the Easter egg roll, the New Year’s Eve celebration at the Kennedy Center, realizing you were still joyfully out and awake at one in the morning,  the birthdays and weddings, the art on building walls and city museums,  communing with friends over coffee.

These things will remain through the year and continue, long after the last bombastic promise and insults on the campaign trail(s).

Gary Tischler •

In the waning days of the old year, death—which stops for nothing and everyone—took a little and a lot from our culture, and its aesthetics, to boot. 

The three persons we lost at the end of 2015—an American artist  with giant standing in contemporary art, a singer who escaped the shadow of her father’s stardom only to merge with it for arguably her biggest success, and the biggest star of a basketball institution which played the game for laughter and lightness even while amazing us with its difficulty—were contradictions in their fields and originals as well.

In the end, their lives exemplified the ideas that art is never simple, even when it seems that way, that music embraces the personal, no matter what the song, and that difficult games, when played and watched, are full of improbabilities and a gag and joke or two.

NATALIE COLE

Natalie Cole was the daughter of an American icon, not an easy thing to be under any circumstance, but when your father is Nat King Cole, an African American super-star in an time that had few, and when your dad’s song stylings are on television, jukeboxes and radio airwaves, and when the folks that visit at your house regularly include the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin and Duke Ellington and Count Basie, it leaves a mark both rich and heavy.

Natalie was Nat’s daughter to the core, even though she initially studied to be a child psychologist. Almost naturally, she  fell into music, mostly not because of her father, but because she had a singular voice and talent, and an appealing personality.  She began recording and soon had a huge R&B hit with “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love),”  a smooth number that’s a part of million of people’s soundtrack of their lives, along with “Unpredictable,” “I’ve Got Love On My Mind” and “Thankful.”

The career went up and down, along with an addiction problem, but then the work went supernova, and returned to the music of her father, in a recording of “Unforgettable” (which was a Nat King Cole super hit), duetting with her father on the track and a video.   The result was indeed unforgettable (it got a Grammy and a Song of the Year Award), and sold seven million copies, followed by an album.) She sang the song at the Grammies to and with a video image of her father . It was exhilarating (because it seemed like some kind of wizardry) and heart-breaking in a good way, because it was a kind of reunion, a love song.

Cole had a series of medical problems, including kidney issues and hepatitis C.  She died on the last day of 2015 at the age of 65 in Los Angeles.

ELLSWORTH KELLY

The American artist Ellsworth Kelly, who died at the age of 92 in New York on Dec. 27, became over time, and in a quiet manner, a giant in the field of Modern Art, partly by not joining the club: although his works could loosely be termed abstract, and sometimes pitched into total abstractions, they were also wholly his, not the representatives of a school, or pied piping for abstract expressionism.

Sometimes, Kelly, who spent a considerable time in post-war Paris where he loved the “gray” aspects of the city, would almost define what people either loved or hated about abstraction, but in the end, he defined and explained its roots.  Many museum or gallery goers, confronted by blank or monotone canvasses of distinct similarity that give art critics the status of high priests, feel left out, not because they’re keen on representational art and miss Norman Rockwell, but because the result is puzzling. It’s missing a connection.   Mondrian’s minimalist works are both admired and yawn-inducing, depending. 

Kelly seemed that way a little upon first view, especially exhibitions and works that emphasized the abstraction without context. But we recall a smaller exhibition of his works at the National Gallery of Art which was an eye-opener and explained exactly what Kelly meant when he said, “I don’t paint paintings. I paint objects and things.” He was in his own way and especially in his paintings a kind of reductionist, giving us, not the thing itself, but its source, common objects revealed as if presenting a flower with only its roots.

There was in his works—sculptures, too—the eye of an engineer, chunks of lines and math, a love for architecture, and a master drawer. He had an eye for the odd detail and made it fit and big and made it take wing: he was once after all an avid birdwatcher, a designer of camouflage patterns at other times in his life.

In a way you had to learn Kelly, not like a foreign language, but as a way of seeing things that were hidden, waiting for the insight, the ah or the oh, the bulb going off brightly in your line of sight.

MEADOWLARK LEMON

Basketball—the antics and commerce of the NBA aside—is a difficult, often grueling game.  It requires certain physical skills, peripheral vision, a magic touch of wrist and fingers, stamina of a kind that would wear a footballer and baseball out in the course of a couple of quarters of play.  At its best, it’s a precise game—the swish of the net, the perfect bounce pass, the fakes and moves, seeing things out of the corner of your eyes.  Above all, while it isolates stars, it is at its best a team sport—five-on-five, live.

Meadowlark Lemon was a tremendous basketball player. He was a Harlem Globetrotter—they did indeed globe trot and brought the game to world audiences, especially young people and people unfamiliar with the game.  He was the star of a team from 1954 to 1978 that said something else about the game—it’s a lot of fun to play, and maybe even more fun to watch. 

He was called the “Clown Prince of Basketball,” playing for an all-black team that almost always won against home-grown competition. The team and its members—driven by a whistling tune—laughed, joked, acted like magicians, played with  beauty and precision, although laughter was the soundtrack of their game.

“My destiny was to make people happy,” Lemon said.  That he did, and they were indeed happy.  There’s barely an ounce of sadness among the comments sections online about his passing, and none of the usual snark.  People reacting by saying that they broke out into a smile, instantly imaging him and them on a court.

Surely, if there is justice, there’s a basketball court in heaven, ready or not.

Meadowlark Lemon died at the age of 83 in Scottsdale, Arizona, Dec. 27. He was the father of ten—or two basketball teams.

Gary Tischler • January 9, 2016

We are living in a time when certain politicians who shall remain nameless (for once) advocate closing America’s borders to members of a religion that is not Christianity. We are living in a time when radical, extreme members of that religion are advocating, encouraging, inspiring and committing killings in the name of that religion.

All of this is happening in the time in which we live, and we see it, hear it, read it on all the things that we carry in our pockets, that we set up in restaurants or in our homes. All of this is happening with increasing intensity in a season in which we celebrate the opposite of the mindsets that lead to atrocities and inflammatory rhetoric.

We are celebrating a season that notes the birth of a child, a season that embraces love and hope and a possible future that would accentuate peace and human kindness. In this time.

We should think about that birth and that event for a moment. On its face and as an event, it was a small thing, noted only, if you believe so, in prophecies and by those who happened to witness it either by choice or happenstance.

It happened in the smallest of towns in what is now Palestine, home now to still-warring factions, but home then to mostly its Jewish residents, and part of the Roman Empire, ruled by a local king who paid tribute and political obeisance to Rome, personified by its first emperor, Augustus Caesar, who would become the first emperor-god of Rome.

The baby’s name was Jesus, and his earthly parents were Mary and Joseph, the latter a carpenter. In that time, there were as yet no Christians or Muslims; as yet, no Communists or Democrats or Republicans or Americans. The world as a whole was mostly unmapped, but it contained even then multitudes of different kinds of people, most of whom were unaware of each other.

Jesus was born a Jew and would die on a cross and, in the end, by his life and actions — by noted miracles and by preaching a gospel that showered the least of us with love and compassion, by spreading hope that made suffering on earth bearable as a passing thing, that made even poverty seem blessed with dignity. He talked in parables and stories, and it was said at the time and so passed on into gospel that hundreds if not thousands were fed at one of his sermons in the countryside.

That night, he was a mewling baby, blessed nonetheless. He was as small as humans get, and as frail, and his presence would inspire fear in a king and in the rest a spirit of love and humility and kindness that we all wish for. His presence on this day remains in the hearts and minds of many who long in this time of a kind of madness for peace and understanding, for gracious thoughts and compassion that remind us that there are millions out there living in worse places than a stable.

In the town of Bethlehem, as the story has it, there was not room at the inn, and so Mary and Joseph made their place in a stable, where the child, who was named Jesus, was born, no doubt crying as newborns do. It was a clear night sky, made clearer by a star, and by the baby itself, which was the light of the world. It was probably chilly that night. Joseph and Mary and Jesus, at that time of the beginning of Jesus, were known to no one. Shepherds came that night, prodded by celestial beings and not a little awe and curiosity and love. Later, three kings arrived from exotic places bearing exotic gifts and giving homage to the child. They arrived with the star.

Amos Gelb • December 22, 2015

Oh, the drama to end the year. The stuff of “Desperate Housewives of Wherever,” it’s all happening right here in D.C. But nobody seems to have noticed.

Not D.C. politics, nor our not-quite sports teams. I am talking about Cumulus radio station WRQX, better known as 107.3.
The second-largest radio group in the U.S. (454 owned and operated stations reaching 245 million listeners with more than 8,200 affiliated stations), Cumulus has been buffeted for at least the last two years. Would such turbulence within the Murdoch empire go unnoticed? But such is radio, a medium declared dead more than 50 years ago that continues, like James Bond, to refuse its fate.

The saga began in the spring of 2013. At that point, the station was anchored by morning DJ Jack Diamond, né Harvey Fischer. For 24 years, he had enlivened his audience’s mornings bantering with various sidekicks, the last two being Jimmy Alexander and Erica Hilary.

Then, one morning, they were gone. No warning, no graceful hand-off. One of the brothers who founded and controlled Cumulus was quoted at the time as saying that the audience had spoken through declining ratings. Other reports had it that Diamond was offered a healthy bonus to transition to his former sidekick Bert Weiss, but wanted none of it. Nice things were quoted, but Diamond was unceremoniously replaced by Weiss’s syndicated show out of Atlanta.

And then, a year later, just as suddenly, Bert and his crew were gone too. Management reportedly decided they needed a more local host. In stepped afternoon DJ Marco to handle duties until a new cast appeared: Sarah, Ty and Mel — two former sidekicks from the rival 99.5 Kane show: Sarah Fraser and Melanie Glazener, joined by Ty Bentli who moved down from New York.
Promising a new kind of show, the three found a unique voice. And while the morning callers suggested they were getting traction, the all-important ratings apparently never reached management’s threshold for success.

Last month, the revolving door spun again. The new crew was gone and Jack, the man who stormed out in a huff, is back. Diamond commented that you can indeed go home (a fact proven by numerous college graduates). But it was not just Jack. The station also reversed the change in name and format that started the whole ruckus, moving back to a Hot AC (hot adult contemporary) mix from the Contemporary Hits Radio format (the subtle differences in music programming escape us) and reverting to Mix 107.3. Just like that, forward to the past.

Sarah, Ty and Mel handled the clear disappointment of their midnight execution with the stoicism of people who know better than to burn bridges in the very small radio world. Ousted Sarah Fraser penned the well-worn euphemism of “the station is moving in another direction.” It was announced that she would move to a noon slot to go with an all-Christmas music lineup.

But head to the Mix 107.3 website (as of deadline), and there’s no Fraser. In fact, there are no names other than Jack Diamond. The Christmas music never appeared either.

Slate cleaned. High drama in Radioland.

But that was just the surface waves. Underwater, there has been just as much turmoil. It is hard to get an accurate count, but it seems that RQX had four program directors since Diamond strode out the door, the last ejection being that of Jan Jeffries, the person who engineered Diamond’s return. Current program director Louie Diaz paused when asked to remember whether he had actually begun at the Jennifer Street studio before Diamond’s reappearance.

Even bigger, after a failed venture and declining stock, RQX’s owner, Cumulus, pushed aside the founding brothers and brought in a magazine turn-around artist.

So, can you ever truly go home? The time between Diamond’s departure and return has seen perhaps more changes in the media landscape than his entire previous two-decade reign. Facebook today is a premium content distributor. Podcasts are hot and audience time-shifting is the norm rather than an anomaly. But people still commute, so there may yet be an audience for Diamond.

Diaz says the format reversion was driven by the realization that while a younger audience was tuning in to the new format, the older Mix audience wasn’t sticking around. The numbers just weren’t working, he explains, and it was time for the station to get back to what worked before (ignoring the ostensible reason Diamond was ousted). According to Diaz, it is a new Jack Diamond, with a far livelier program that includes new segments and increased listener interaction and engagement. (We don’t recall an issue with Diamond’s audience engagement.)

Diamond did not reply either to emails or attempts to reach him by phone. He has no small mountain to climb. The current ratings put the station at half the listenership of main rival Hot 99.5.

Diamond says you can go home. Cumulus has bet that he is right. Stay tuned, and we’ll all get to find out.

Amos Gelb is director of the Washington Media Institute.

the Georgetowner Editorial Board • December 18, 2015

A Georgetowner newspaper tradition for decades, the naming of Georgetowners of the Year includes a woman who has devoted the better part of her life and talents to revealing and promoting an old Georgetown estate’s history and renewing its splendor to all of Washington and then taking this wonderment to the next level; a women and a priest with similar interests but different backgrounds and abilities who forged a bakery with delicious results that helps veterans—from our city or Iraq—gain real-world business skills; an educator with roots deep in Georgetown’s African-American past who is a force for good—whether bringing neighbors closer or getting the streets repaved—in our community to be reckoned with, now and in the future.

LESLIE BUHLER

Leslie Buhler stepped down as executive director of Tudor Place after 15 years of what the historic house and garden non-profit called, “transformational leadership.” Buhler arrived in 2000 and made sure one of Georgetown’s crown jewels was maintained to the highest standards and included a master preservation plan of restoration and upkeep. She also made the historic home at 31st and Q Street more accessible to all — from children to preservationists to neighbors. She leaves Tudor Place in a perfect place for its bicentennial next year. For all this and more, Leslie Buhler is a Georgetowner of the Year for 2015.

FATHER RICK CURRY and CONNIE MILSTEIN

If ever there was a bakery that’s more than a bakery, it’s Dog Tag Bakery on Grace Street, where a lot of grace goes on at a daily basis. The bakery, part of Dog Tag Inc., has as one of its slogans “baking a difference.” The enterprise operates a six-month training program aimed squarely at “driven, entrepreneurial-minded wounded veterans and their spouses.” The bakery is run and worked by wounded veterans. Its founding heart and soul are its co-founders, philanthropist Constance Milstein and Rev. Rick Curry, S.J., of Georgetown University.

A developer and lawyer, Milstein is committed to helping veterans. Blue Star Families is one of her projects, and she has opened several non-profit bakeries in New York, all of which show her commitment to helping veterans. She is in the top ranks of philanthropist-business leaders in Washington, D.C., providing leadership on the boards of cultural D.C. mainstays like Ford’s Theater, the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera.

Milstein and Father Curry, a Jesuit priest who brings compassion and experience, form the perfect partnership for the bakery. Curry founded and headed the National Theater for the Handicapped, a non-profit theater and training institution for persons with physical disabilities for three decades. He is also the author of two books, “The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking” and “The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking.”

Their partnership has resulted in a do-good, feel-good Georgetown institution that’s already become a go-to place for locals and does Georgetown proud. For all this and more, Father Rick Curry and Connie Milstein are each a Georgetowner of the Year for 2015.

MONICA ROACHÉ

Monica Roaché is one of the newest members of the Georgetown-Burleith Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E, but her family has been here for many years. As part of this town’s original African-American families, Roache is a fifth-generation Georgetowner who has always promoted this part of our history — from the book, “Black Georgetown Remembered,” to the October dedication of the Rose Park tennis court to black tennis star sisters, Margaret Peters and Roumania Peters Walker. The Peters sisters taught tennis and life lessons to Roache and many other children. For all this and more, Monica Roaché is a Georgetowner of the Year for 2015
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