Editorials and Opinions

Georgetowner • December 2, 2015

It has been almost three weeks since the Nov. 13 terrorist and ISIL-credited attacks shocked the world and struck Paris like a knife in the heart.

The world has not forgotten what happened—nor has there been a let-up in commemoration,  eulogizing and remembering the victims.

But the events and their aftermaths have also resulted into other things.

They have seeped almost preternaturally into the American presidential campaign, where fear-mongering and dark arts of demagoguery are practiced routinely as a response to everything from keeping us safe to the very real refugee crisis.  

Other things happen. As of this writing, Paris is again the center of the world, as it hosts a United Nations global warming gathering attended by world leaders and demonstrators.  In the U.S., the debate over race and crime has again stirred in Chicago, while in Colorado, one of our homegrown shooters managed to kill three persons, including a police officer, at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Still, it’s hard to forget Paris.  A flowered memorial still graced the entrance to the French Embassy last week.   We shouldn’t forget.  Not the terrible acts themselves, and the terrible losses of and for so many people.  But more than that, we should remember France and the city of light, every day.

The terrorist struck at the heart of Paris and what it offers to the world, what the French have always offered.  What is it, after all, what the rest of the world loves about France, French and Paris, but what they have contributed to the richness of life and its pure, deep and sometimes light-hearted  enjoyment. 

We sing songs about France and the French, revel in how its very language can add both spice, sweetness, and a kind of beauty to even the ugliest of words and concepts. Say a word or phrase in French, and it somehow becomes enriched, better. It is a kind of gift of garnish and transformation.

As with some of those killed during the attacks, we want to be in some Parisian café, talking amicably about politics, movies, the great philosophical issues of the times, without rancor, with good or not so good wine, even when it rains. 

We can utter a movie cliché and make it perfectly apt in these our times: We will always have Paris. For this, we want to thank the French people, for their gifts to our memories.

In the desire to travel, Paris is always on the mind’s list of someday. 

If you’ve ever  had the chance to spend time in Paris, the memories are indelible—memories we carry around with gratitude.  So, from a trip several years ago, we remember attending Easter Sunday Mass in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris—celebrated in French, of course. We recall walking in the rain everywhere, the poodle in the restaurant, the carousel, hearing “The Four Seasons” by candlelight in the king’s chapel, at the Pompidou, the art, the art everywhere, at the Pompidou, the Louvre, in small galleries, and on the streets and we remember the view of the city from the top of the Pompidou, the bustle and cobbled street, the view of Rue St. Germaine, the church across the street built in the year 900, the chocolate, the cats at the cemetery, the river flowing, and the mist over everything.

Merci, even, to the waiter who yelled at me in outrage for wanting to put mustard on cheese and refused to bring it.

We carry the culture with us, the writers, the books, the philosophers. We say merci for Sartre, who allowed us to understand a joke about existentialism in a Woody Allen movie, and for Camus and his loner’s empathy.  We still remember the books by Dumas, Hugo, Flaubert, Stendahl, and thank them for Quasimodo and Esmerelda, for Javert and Valjean, for D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis and “The Count of Monte Christo” and for “Madame Bovary.” Merci  for Edith Piaf, for Jacques Brel, for the boulevardiers.  Thank you for giving us not just movies, but cinema and films made by Truffaut, Renoir (the younger) Godard, Resnais, Chabrol and the stars and faces of Montand, Moreau, Signoret, Deneuve, Binochet, Gabin, Belmondo and Jacques Tati.

Thanks also for all the painters and artists and impressionists who made such an impression: the ballerinas of Degas, the colors of the picnic of Renoir, of Monet and Manet and Matisse and Cezanne.

Where did the ideas of liberty and freedom come from but the Enlightenment? From Voltaire and Diderot, and who was our staunchest allies in our revolution which precipitated the French Revolution, for better and worse. That statue from in New York Harbor is a French gift and a French idea, even in these times.

By attacking people in the midst of life, in the midst of dinner and conversation, and even loud music, the terrorist were attacking something that is not a French invention, but is nevertheless a French expression, the desire to live life fully, a “joie de vivre.” 

That is their gift to all on your good earth, nevertheless, and for which we say to our French compatriots, “Merci.”

Gary Tischler • November 20, 2015

Each day it seems we wake up in a brand new, sometimes fearful world. It comes at us in headlines: in our emails, in our post-trauma morning newspapers.

The world changed on Friday with the first halting words in the New York Times at 4:33 p.m. EST: “Police Say There Has Been an Explosion at a bar near a Paris Stadium and a shootout at a Paris Restaurant.”

That was the beginning of a time-and-world-altering series of events. Seven terrorists managed to accomplish a day of horrifying bloodshed in a city that had already suffered such an attack in January, but not on this scale.

Eight attackers apparently took part. Three suicide bombs were set off at the Stade de France, a large stadium where the French and German soccer teams were engaged in a friendly game attended by the French President François Holland, who was whisked away. At about the same time, two gunmen marched through three different restaurants and randomly killed 26, 5 and 19 people. In the night’s biggest atrocity, at the venerable and packed Bataclan concert hall, three gunmen proceeded to shoot for about 15 minutes, killing 89 people and holding the rest hostage until police managed to storm the hall just after midnight. The terrorists blew themselves up.

All of this was known here by Friday night, sending twinges of horror, shock, fear, worry and sympathy through everyone who watched the events unfold on television. By Saturday, familiar sights were seen: expressions of grief and respect at Lafayette Square, attended by the French ambassador; candlight vigils and visitations at the Embassy of France on Saturday.

This was not like the January attack, which was plainly political. This attack struck at safe places: restaurants, a soccer stadium, a concert hall on a Friday night when people took what pleasure they could in the company of others, friends, family, fellow citizens. This is where you took your leisure, enjoyed the fruits of your labor, a place where you enjoyed the popular culture in safety.

The attacks seemed to hit at the heart of Western popular culture, which ISIS and its followers despise. It sent a message of more to come, not just in Paris — a place many of us remember, with now a fondness tinged with sadness — but here in America and elsewhere. Politicians running for office here set about finding blame, a fruitless folly of bombast. Meanwhile, the French, with their American allies, struck back at ISIS.

The people — both European and American — wept and worried, and felt the ground shifting once again under their feet.

The cliché remains. As we consider how to live in a changed world, one of the fundamental goals of terrorism is not just to make you afraid, but to make you give in to your fear and radically and fundamentally change the way you live. Stay away from crowds, keep your distance from the White House, don’t go to a large concert hall, speak softly and don’t carry a stick. Now, people will say, is not the time to travel overseas because — well, you know.

Now, maybe, is exactly the time to do what you always do, to travel because you made plans to travel, even go to Paris, because you never have. Doing the things you always do — and traveling is one of those things — can be one of those small or large acts of defiance in the face of terror and terrorists, who want you to be afraid, be very afraid. Within practical limits, you can defy fear. The motto of Paris is “Fluctuat nec mergitur”—meaning “Tossed but not sunk”—and tells us so.

Indeed, we are all French.

Gary Tischler • November 19, 2015

Watching what’s going on in the world, in our country, in our own back yards over the last week or so—culminating in still another Republican presidential candidate debate—is to get an idea that some things, especially our political and electoral process, have changed dramatically while we weren’t looking, even as we were watching.

It also verified  that the old verities—that is the small glories of every day life are the best defense against the onset of surrealism in the daily news, coming from the paper thrown on your porch, the glow of the computer screen, the babble of nightly news and the ticker tape of posts, tweets and comments that make up the electronic and digital pulse of computer communication.

In the course of the past week or two, we saw Donald Trump, entrepreneur extraordinaire and celebrity, and Ben Carson, M.D., the African American neurosurgeon and inspirational author, surge to the top of the crowded heap of GOP presidential candidates—practically in a dead heat with a big lead over the remaining members of the pack. They, like shape shifters, drop out (Perry and Walker), move up and sideways, are fussed over (Jeb! Bush). Others surge—Cruz and Rubio, Rubio and Cruz, which sounds like 1) a Latino law firm, 2) a vaudeville bill, or 3) a presidential ticket—or get demoted to the lingering ranks of the second tier (Huckabee and Christie) or disappear altogether (Pataki, et alii).

Predictably, Carson, so soft-spoken in debates that you have to turn up the volume, came under closer scrutiny from an increasingly unpopular media, which unearthed little bits of misinformation, exaggeration and quasi-quarter-truths about his life story, including claims about a West Point offer and personal matters.  Predictably, Carson showed that he had the makings of a politician after all. “It’s a witch hunt,” he said like hundreds of politicians before him. He complained that he was scrutinized and vetted in ways that that never happened to other candidates like Barack Obama.

Less predictably, we saw the spectacle of Trump hosting NBC’s “Saturday Night Life,” which, if it did not complete the almost total immersion of the electoral process into show business that began about the time that Bill Clinton played a saxophone on the late and not so great “Arsenio Hall Show,” certainly went further in the deep muddy. Lorne Michaels, a Mark Twain awardee, apparently did not consider that such a move might erase any remaining satirical sting that the show might have—that it, like the current slate of late night talk show hosts, has become a part of the process and family of politicos.  In the end, SNL got the desired result—highest ratings in a long time—with the side effect that Trump and the show were not very funny. The whole thing was like watching an escort and her client eating dinner, pretending to be dating.

On a recent Friday night, Nov. 6, the Democrats held something like a candidate forum on MSNBC, hosted by Rachel Maddow, which appeared to be the second Democrat debate, minus three of its original candidates, who have promptly disappeared back into relative obscurity.  It also appeared nobody watched, or wrote about this particular debate, given that Hillary Clinton is now considered a shoo-in for the nomination, even though Bernie Sanders is still making a lot of credible noise with a major following.

Polls showed shifting changes among the Republican crew—Rubio on the move here, Trump maintaining there, someone leading in New Hampshire, but not in Iowa, Carson tied with Hillary. What was evident was that two rank amateurs—Trump and Carson—no matter what they said or did, no matter how uninformed,  or implausible their ideas, were a  combined favorite of the Republican party.  The issues could fit on a t-shirt and often do, or a cardboard placard, a bumper sticker or banner—small government, a wall, repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, a flat tax, abolish, oh, just about everything.

a firestorm—these days everything that gets a one-day news shot is a firestorm—over the apparent rudeness and meanness of the moderators of the last GOP candidates at CNBC, in which the candidates fought with each other and the moderators and Florida Senator Marco Rubio claimed that the mainstream media was actually the Democrats’ Superpac, this week’s debate on the Fox Business News Channel was an exercise in portentous—and not a little pretentious—decorum. 

All the candidates and the head of the GOP National Committee sang the praises of the moderators to the point of embarrassment. When you hear that much praise hurled at members of the media, you know the fix is in.  They called it a debate for grown-ups—nobody said anything really nasty to anybody, nobody glowered at the moderates, and when Trump complained that Carly Fiorina was interrupting too much, the audience hissed. 

As it was, there was a lot of policy talk: the economy, job creation, budgets and budget cuts, taxes, immigration and how to make America great again. While that was stimulating and grown-up, the end result was still the same old same old: flat taxes, stand up to Putin and ISIS, build the wall—or not—tax cuts and abolish the IRS, the Department of Commerce, if Ted Cruz had his way, and Obamacare—and push natural gas and pipelines.  Most of the candidates did not favor raising the minimum wage.,

One Fox News commentator reckoned that Carson, who had been quieter than usual, was the clear winner, perhaps because he complimented the moderators not asking about something that happened in 10th grade. 

If you listened closely, you heard the beginnings of an appealing candidate in Rubio—he has the gift for turning his response to every issue into part of his campaign speech. Jeb Bush at last seemed to recover a little—he (and the voluble Governor John Kasich of Ohio) challenged the wall and mass deportation, a brave approach.  Rubio—along with Cruz, Trump and Fiorina—fairly bristling with combative spirit, wanted to spend more on the military and got into a minor scuffle with Rand over how too much spending on the military might cause bankruptcy.  Rubio called Rand Paul an isolationist.

In a debate that gave the appearance—if not the substance—of being substantative, nothing was said about what was actually going on in the country at the moment—the explosion that brought down a Russian airliner in Egypt, the campus demonstrations centering around racial issues that brought down the president of the University of Missouri, a police chase in Louisiana which ended in the shooting of the suspect and his six-year-old son and the arrest of two police officers.  

In times like these, you take needed solace in how the season works its wonders. Everywhere you looked in the city and in the suburbs, autumn was autumnal, in a symphonic way,  the last leafs doing their dance,  the city of trees doing its thing. I found a CD at Politics and Prose that was Dylan and Cash themed, and featured so many great song that it felt like bliss. I saw, “Unexplained Interior,” a new play by the actor Jay O. Sanders who passionately explored and tried to present the whole of the tragedy in Rwanda. The play was the first offering of Ari Roth’s new Mosaic Theatre Company in the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street.

Daily realities ground you, here and there for such appreciation.  The news is that there won’t be another GOP debate until sometime in December.  Nevertheless, there is a real Democratic candidates’ debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Saturday, Nov. 14, to be broadcast on CBS News—they made it to the networks.

Yes, the beat—along with debates and polls—go on, as they must.

Georgetowner •

It hasn’t come in on horses, but there is a Paul Revere-like quality to the warnings from DC Water: “The digging is coming. The digging is coming.”

Representatives of the utility have been reaching out to Georgetown neighborhood groups to spread information about its Clean Rivers Project and Green Infrastructure Plan. At the basis of what is being described as a “massive” undertaking is a 2005 legal agreement between DC Water, the District of Columbia, U.S Department of Justice and EPA to implement a $2.6 billion Clean Rivers Project. In very simple terms, it has to do with reducing combined sewage and storm water overflows to the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers as well as Rock Creek by building of a system of tunnels, diversion sewers and green infrastructures.
Although the Rock Creek portion was modified to eliminate the need for a tunnel, the Anacostia tunnel construction is already underway and the Potomac phase of DC Water’s project will require an underground tunnel capable of holding 30 million gallons of combined storm water and sewage.

An early model of the Potomac tunnel set off major alarms, as it would have required digging up Georgetown Waterfront Park. But that section of the plan seems to have been scrubbed with the construction of permeable pavements to deal with storm water run-off that would seemingly have the most impact on Georgetown. Many streets on the east and west side of the town would have been affected. At this point, DC Water is conducting field surveys and taking soil samples before they finalize any plans for the project with the probable start being sometime in 2017.

The idea of any long-term construction project in Georgetown brings up nightmare scenarios of disruption to dig-weary residents and businesses (faced with noise, parking and traffic disruptions from what seems like an endless amount of projects). Ask the people around 27th and P Streets, already effected by DC Water’s work.

DC Water seems to be doing its best to try to add a spoonful of sugar to the unwelcome news. Besides its initial reaching out to the Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Commission, Citizens Association of Georgetown, the Georgetown Business Improvement District and the Georgetown Business Association, the utility has arranged a tour in December for representatives from those groups and local media of DC Water’s First Street Tunnel and examples of some green infrastructures. It will also be conducting a community meeting in January to answer questions and hear any potential objections or input regarding the plan.
There was some tongue-in-cheek speculation, when the project was discussed at a local meeting, that while DC Water is already underground digging the Potomac tunnel perhaps it could also work on adding a Georgetown Metro stop. While it is assumed no one will be laughing when the “big dig” kicks in, we can only hope the lines of communication and cooperation will remain open and the many issues sure to come will be addressed.

Gary Tischler • November 9, 2015

Most observers agreed that Hillary Clinton, as well as the Democratic Party at large had a pretty good week in the aftermath of the Democratic candidates’ debate, which was considered largely a) a triumph for Clinton and b) a measured substantive debate with few moments of outright verbal combat, or horrors of horrors, name calling.  And Clinton topped that by emerging pretty much unscathed from a grueling 11 hours plus of testimony before a Republican controlled and loaded-for-bear House select committee on the 2012 Benghazi attack as well as her e-mail account while she was secretary of state.

It was the Republicans’ turn again this week and you could make an argument—and they did—that they had a fairly good day and night of it. 

The CNBC-hosted GOP debate in Boulder, Colorado, took place Oct. 28 against a framework of relative triumph for some Republicans and the party—the very same day representative and avowed economics whiz Paul Ryan was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. That vote appeared for a while apparently almost against his wishes—like a prom queen who can’t stand going to parties.  The election of Ryan staved off another big budget fight, as the House passed a budget deals which more than likely staved off a government shutdown, but not another intra-party debate among Republicans.

With that disunity and gridlock averted—the Congress actually passed something—the remaining GOP candidates headed into Boulder with the media and political strategists wondering how Donald Trump, who had led the polls since whenever this year, would react being relegated to runner up, behind the quiet brain surgeon—or how the same Ben Carson might make use of his newfound front runner status.

Turned out it didn’t matter much: Trump was  muted throughout as was Carson, a not unusual state for him, who has been praised for his quiet and modest manner.  In terms of the campaign so far, the two were an unmatched set—Mr. Outspoken meets Mr. Soft-spoken.

The bigger question was who was going to break out from the pack of remaining men and one woman standing.  Perhaps to no one’s surprise, Sen. Mark Rubio of Florida looked to be the big gainer after Wednesday’s contratemps if applause meters and being able to mop the floor with Jeb Bush are any indicators.

For the Republicans as a whole, it seemed a typical performance—the candidates almost uniformly took up the theme of media-bashing and getting into verbal fights, not with each other, but with the moderators.  First, Ted Cruz, defender of the base, the man who shut down the government once almost single handedly, bristled after being asked a pointed question about his voting record, pointing out many of the candidates had been asked questions that were either negative, combative or encouraged candidates to fight with each other. “This is not a cage fight,” he said. “How about talking about the substantive issues?”

But why should they? That line drew huge applause, and it didn’t take long for the others to chime in—most notably Rubio who was asked about about donors to his campaign.  “The Democrats have the ultimate super PAC,” Rubio said. “It’s called the mainstream media.” Another round of Katy Perry’s top hit.

After the debate the Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said, “CNBC should be ashamed.”

Many of the candidates claimed that the Democrats had been treated with kid gloves in their debate, which would probably be news to Anderson Cooper who tried and mostly failed to goad the Dems into mini-brawls.

Given that this was a CNBC debate—completed with some of their more excitable questioners like Jim Cramer—money and economics and taxes were on the menu.  Given that these were Republican candidates, many tax plans and budget plans and plan plans were trotted. “I have a plan” was a preface to many a statement, including Carson’s 10-percet tax plan—upped to 15 percent, based on tithing.  Most of them sounded like old, discarded Reagan plans, versions of trickle down, tax cuts mixed with spending cuts and accusations from more or less one and all that the Democrats had robbed the Social Security fund clean and used  the  money elsewhere.

It was, all in all, a strange sort of debate: the candidates praising each other as a group to be a staggeringly talented group of presidential wannabes from whom a strong candidate would emerge that was just chomping at the bit to take on Hillary Clinton, who, Rubio said, had lied to America at the hearing. 

Chris Christie was as combative as ever. He bristled when a questioner brought up the issue of fantasy football and that it should be regulated as if it were gambling.  “Are you kidding me?” Christie replied. “We have all this stuff going on, and we should have the government get involved in regulating fantasy football? The government should be involved in as little as possible.”

That, too, was a common tone: that the government, especially the one headed by Barack Obama had ruined the United States of America and that it would take a GOP president to make things right.

In addition to the live TV debate were those little teasers and streamers on the bottom crawl of the screen that included tweets from Hillary Clinton and Luke Russert as well as die-hard admirers of Ted Cruz and battling Chris Christie. The crawl ran the comment, “Maybe no one should be president. It’s only four years. We all do our thing. And then we’ll see how it goes.”

Sure sounds good to—if not me—for sure, somebody.

Georgetowner • November 3, 2015

When you looked at Fred Thompson making small talk in a room full of Washington types, he looked like a Washington classic—only more so.  He could be a senator, maybe even a president.

The reason was fairly simple.  He was a big guy, physically but also charismatically.  Thompson was a senator—from Tennessee, 1994–2003, taking over Al Gore’s seat. He wanted to be president and so he ran for the office, but it didn’t work out.  

In television and films, Thompson also played presidents and lawyers and political operatives, a long-time district attorney on TV’s “Law and Order.” A big man in a big suit, he stood 6 foot, 5 inches and was not too thin. 

The thing of it was that when you look at Fred Thompson—who died Nov. 1 at the age of 73 after a recurrence of lymphoma—you saw an American type, which he played and was that, too.  He talked in a folksy way, with a bit of a drawl, which took nothing away from his imposing look, or the fact that he was a highly educated attorney. It was as a lawyer that he got his first taste of fame, as chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, headed by fellow Tennessean and Republican, Sen. Howard Baker. It was Thompson who asked the critical question of White House aide Alexander Butterfield whether or not there were any listening devices in the president’s office.

We all know the answer, and what happened.  The whole nation had been thinking about nothing but Nixon and Watergate.  Before there was any other kind of gate, there was Watergate, and it shot Thompson’s name into the limelight.

When he ran unsuccessfully for president in 2008, he acknowledged that, for the first time, he had not achieved success politically. When he was a senator from Tennessee in the 1990s, he noted that congress had become more partisan than in the past.

On television, and in movies, Thompson was almost never out of a suit—he was in some ways or another, an authority figure.  He filled the role of New York District Attorney easily and with power, even Sam Waterson’s prosecutor rarely tangled with him. He did tangle with Clint Eastwood in the film, “In The Line of Fire,” as a political operative. 

What Thompson really was was a classic American figure from a small-town Southern upbringing, who played basketball, went to college, became a lawyer, raised children, became a little famous, and then a lot more. In Washington, D.C., it was clear he’d acquired a lot of political and personal polish—he wasn’t just imposing, he carried class around like a really light but expensive suit.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a pretty classy guy and fellow Tennessean himself, said, according to the Washington Post, that Thompson was one “of our country’s most principled and effective public servants.”

Thompson also had a sense of humor. His  memoir was entitled “Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir of Growing Up and Second Chances.”