Editorials and Opinions

Georgetowner • July 17, 2013

The District Council has passed the so-called “Living Wage” legislation. Like so many issues we talk about today, it is, of course, not over.

Now, it’s Mayor Vincent Gray’s turn to have the final say–or not.

The council–by the exact same vote (8-5) of the first reading of the legislation–voted for the bill–aka the Large Retailer Accountability Act–which forces large retailers like Walmart with more than a billion in annual sales and stores larger than 74,000 square feet pay a minimum (or liveable) wage of $12.50 an hour, which is over four bucks higher than the District’s minimum wage of $8.25 an hour and five bucks higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
The mayor has 10 days from the time he gets the legislation to approve or veto it. So far, he has said neither yea nor nay. All indications are he might veto it, perhaps, as he’s said to the media, also tweeting the wage rate up by fifty cents or a dollar.
District Council Chairman Phil Mendelson pushed this particular bill, which comes with Walmart after years of avoiding the District for store sites, starting three projects and is planning three more. This comes with the traditional hallmark of Walmart — low wages but lots of jobs, and more important perhaps to shoppers, low prices. Prospects of the approval of the bill caused Walmart to threaten to shelve, in the very least, plans for three stores and perhaps stop construction on the other three.
Mayor Gray — who’s always been a hard-working supporter for bringing in new and major retail projects into the poorer wards of the District, including Ward 7, where he lives, as well as Wards 5, 4, 6 and 8 — faces a dilemma. Passage of the legislation could threaten the Skyland Shopping Center project in Ward 7 which would not happen without a Walmart store as its lynch pin.

The timing for the legislation — which could also affect such local retailers as Macy’s and Whole Foods — seems strange and unnecessarily challenging, almost like an I-dare-you approach to attracting business. According to reports, at-large Councilmember Vincent Orange, who voted for the legislation said, “We’re at a point where we don’t need retailers. Retailers need us.” That kind of unwelcoming and unwelcome bravado is hardly likely to change hearts and minds.
It seems to us that the legislation is hasty, unnecessarily combative and was arrived at in a way that lacks due consideration and public input. It may — as both Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser and Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells have suggested — cost the District jobs and bargain shopping and hurt its ability and reputation to attract major retailers and business.

It also comes at a time when people are starting to think about the upcoming mayor’s race. Bowser and Wells are both running as is Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, who voted for the legislation. The mayor has not indicated whether or not he would run again. In the end, though, this legislation is a politically charged issue as well. Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander voted against the legislation, while Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry voted for it. Go figure.

Georgetowner • July 4, 2013

It’s the Fourth of July, as American as apple pie or Google, as we celebrate our country, our traditions, the way we live, eat, pray and love, march in parades, raise our children and pets, play and dance and sing our songs old and new.

In any parade, you’ll see soldiers, the drummer boy, the fife player, the revolutionary soldier with his rifle and bandaged head and faux Jeffersons, Franklins and Washingtons, heading for the park or the backyard and the barbecue and fireworks, if they haven’t been cancelled due to the sequester or the daily rain storms. We’ll look to the night skies on the National Mall, look out for squalls and bad weather and think of the Founding Fathers.

Those fathers might recognize themselves in a parade but have a little more trouble recognizing their surroundings. In Washington, D.C., they would hear echoes of the cannon fire from Gettysburg but also the noises and murmurs of our political battles from DOMA to the Capitol Dome, the shadows of big government and the foibles of small government. Today, we worry about immigration—whom to let in, how to keep them from coming or bring them to citizenship, a question asked in small towns and argued in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

It’s the Fourth of July—sodas and crackerjacks, and heroes dead in forest fires amid horrible heat. It’s baseball and spying, by the government of this nation and other governments, while in the Middle East, thousands are demonstrating for freedom.
We will watch Harper and Zimmerman and zombies this Fourth of July and celebrate ourselves in the Whitman manner, when he was celebrating not just himself but ourselves. We will again come to the National Mall by the thousands with Lincoln perched on his timeless chair, watching, it seems sometimes wistfully.

It is the Fourth of July, a Thursday like no other Thursday in 2013 in the capital city of Washington where we live in the world.

Georgetowner •

Is there anything more confusing, less understandable and more irritating than the NSA leaking sandal, or the contemps and characterizations surrounding the travels and would-be travels and status of the leaker Edward Snowden?

Snowden is being both pilloried (by the government and elected officials) and praised (by some in the media) and helped (by Wiki Leaks, the wholesale leakers of secret information), and fussed over by the world and by potential (and reluctant) asylum givers.

Many Americans don’t know exactly what to make of it all—the words traitor and hero regards Snowden seem to be used interchangeably. His travels have put international relations among major powers in a state of tense stasis
Now Vladimir Putin has Snowden on his hands in Moscow, and he seems hesitant to let him go or let him stay, send him on his way or protect him.

This seems to me momentously serious stuff, but in terms of understanding, a little like trying to hang on to jello. Secrets, freedom of the press, (including the freedom to perhaps cool it for a while), the dark spectre of governments spying on each other (as if they didn’t before) are all part of the stories. It seems like a muddle from which we, and for sure the Obama administration will never disengage itself. I spy, you spy, we spy, they spy, but does anybody really know (or want to know) what Everybody is doing?

Mark Plotkin •

As we begin our celebration of our nation’s birthday, we in Washington, D.C., have a special reason to celebrate. On June 19, for the very first time, the citizens of D.C. were finally represented in the U.S. Capitol Building.

No, unfortunately, it was not with a voting representative or two U.S. senators, but with a glorious and magnificent sculpture in Emancipation Hall of D.C. resident and freedom fighter, Frederick Douglass.

Each of the 50 states has at least one statue. We, until a few weeks ago, had none.

A little history is in order. Many years ago, I observed a memorable ceremony in Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building. Sacajawea, the Native American who guided Lewis and Clark on their Northwestern expedition, was being honored with a statue. It seemed to me the entire state of North Dakota was there. There was such a wonderful spirit of state solidarity and pride. I thought to myself: why doesn’t D.C. have a statue of its own?

I once had a very brief conversation with former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert about this idea. Hastert was extremely unpleasant and hostile to the idea. In fact, he mumbled that “Then, the territories will want one,” (as if they were not U.S. citizens too).

On my radio commentaries and in articles, I frequently mentioned how a statue could be a catalyst for concrete action towards full D.C. statehood.

On July 15, 2012, I wrote an op-ed piece in the local opinions page of the Washington Post, headlined “Monuments to the Mistreatment of the District.” Accompanying the article was a picture of the sculpture of Douglass which Steven Weitzman had so beautifully done.

On June 19, the ceremony finally took place. But the ceremony was seriously marred by one of our own elected officials, who failed to share the credit for this momentous moment. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton navigated the bill through Congress but she never once mentioned the essential role that others played.

First of all, Norton did not even have the courtesy to acknowledge or recognize our present Mayor Vincent Gray or former Mayors Sharon Pratt, Anthony Williams and widow of the first appointed and elected Mayor Walter Washington, Mary Washington. She couldn’t have missed them. They were sitting in the front row.

Second, she ignored the sculptor Steve Weitzman, who lovingly created this powerful presence in bronze. This was inexcusable.

And, finally, the councilmember who secured the funding and was most responsible for the statue actually being constructed, Jack Evans, was never acknowledged. This brazen and deliberate omission by Norton has to be called out.

The highlight of the day was the inspiring remarks of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and, best of all, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s stirring endorsement of D.C. statehood by saying he had “signed on” to the D.C. statehood bill.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the introducer of the bill, said he would hold hearings in the fall. The statue had achieved its purpose. Now, things are starting to happen.

Georgetowner • June 20, 2013

This should be an interesting, even energetic time for politics in the District of Columbia. While the lineup may not be complete, with the official announcement of Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans into the mayoral fray, there are now three council members in the race to replace Mayor Vincent Gray.

Gray himself has so far declined to say whether he will run for re-election or not. Although it’s fair to say that in normal times, he’s got a pretty good record to run on, what with a boom in population and development projects all over the city and a fat budget surplus in the kitty.

Except . . .

What is everybody—the politicos, the media, the wags in the neighborhoods—talking about? Michael Brown, the ex-at-large-Independent-Democrat councilman caught in a federal sting operation accepting money-for-influence from agents posing as small business folks. In addition, there’s a wire donation to Brown from developer Jeffrey Thompson, who, along with the mayor’s election campaign, is still being investigated by U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen, Jr., and his office for running a shadow campaign which collected more than $600,000 for the Gray campaign.

At the same time, it appeared that at-large councilman Vincent Orange was being talked to by federal investigators in relation to contributions from Thompson.

Brown pleaded guilty last week to bribery charges and admitted a relationship to Thompson and accepting an illegal contribution from him.

Corruption in D.C. politics and rumors that the ongoing federal investigations were about to heat up were the talk of the town, not the relative merits and chances of Evans, Ward 4 council member Muriel Bowser and Ward 6 council member Tommy Wells, all of whom have announced that they are running for mayor.

Wells has made a point about focusing on ethics in his campaign.

If you look at the latest developments, you can see several things happening. One of them is that to be a political blue blood in this city is no guarantee that you are safe from temptation, even if you’re electorally successful. With Michael Brown’s guilty plea, the chit chat starts all over again: what is the matter with elected officials in the District?

We’ve sat down with Michael Brown—the son of Ron Brown, President Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce, who was killed in a plane crash—and found him, as other colleagues have, to be smart and full of ideas. Kwame Brown, who resigned as chairman of the District Council, was a highly thought-of, risen-from-the-community and local-politics native son. Harry Thomas, Jr., a powerful, stirring orator and the son of a long-time council member, is serving time in prison for taking money from funds earmarked for youth programs.

All of them had the best jump starts politicians can get here—membership in successful political families and being highly regarded members of their communities. That’s a lot of political talent squandered to the interests of what can only be called venality of the sort that smacks of entitlement and arrogance.

They’re also cautionary tales about the political arena and anybody who steps foot in it. There’s always the danger that you’re going to step in it. The local list includes former Mayor Marion Barry, a man once so powerful that the media’s sarcastic honorary title of mayor for life was not that far from reality until he was toppled in spectacular fashion. Barry, now the Ward 8 council member, was one of the most gifted politicians we’ve seen around here—he had the same ability to embrace crowds and people and was as popular as Bill Clinton, who also managed to trip up spectacularly.

The list of successful politicians who’ve also entered the valley of “What-were-they-thinking?” is a long one. Local pundits are whispering that may get longer soon.

We can only cross our fingers and hope that the outcome is otherwise.

Georgetowner •

Today, a stirring statue of Frederick Douglass, who rose from slavery to fight for the emancipation of slaves and stirred the conscience of a nation will be unveiled at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center’s Emancipation. The statue, the work of sculptor Steve Weitzman, was given by the city to Congress after residing for six years in the lobby of Judiciary Square.

The unveiling Wednesday—even though it involves the city and its residents and government representatives—appears to be a closed affair, courtesy of House Speaker John Boehner, who apparently has his hands full .

At a press conference this week on the statue, Boehner was asked by Fox 5 reporter and long-time statehood champion Mark Plotkin why D.C. residents hadn’t been invited. Boehner did not comment.

According to a Huffington Post story, Plotkin had reported that Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton had asked that the city’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners be invited, a request to which the Speaker had not replied.

This seems to us to be another example of the cavalier and disrespectful attitude of the powers that be in Congress on matters concerning the District of Columbia and its government and residents. Even a fragmentary memory of local and national history ought bring about the idea that such treatment is insulting to all of us who live in the city.

We’re not actually sure if Boehner even bothered to thank the city or anybody else. Most likely he did. After all, even Boehner couldn’t be that careless.

Racquel Richards •

The Obama administration has decided to release the resistance against the age limit placed on the morning after pill.

The administration’s decision means that any woman or girl of any age can walk into a drugstore and purchase the pill, Plan B-One Step.

I think that every decision made by the current administration should be thought about in context to the time and culture that we live in. As a conservative, I cringe at decisions that seem to facilitate reckless behavior.

With that being said, I would definitely consider this new change to be of that nature. Personally, I think that this country is morally decaying from the inside out. Therefore, this addition does not completely surprise me.

In today’s culture, sexuality seems to be exploited to the highest degree. Evidence of this exploitation is clearly evident in almost everything we see and hear in media. By allowing females of any age to have free reign on the morning-after pill, severe repercussions can ensue.

I think that underage teenagers that are already sexually active will feel as though they can continue being careless because they have the “safety net” in the form of a tiny pill. This will only encourage people to be more sexually active, but probably at a younger age, as well.

Proponents of this change could easily make the argument that if a teenager wants the pill they can obtain it through other means.

However, making the pill so accessible will not only make the problem worse, but it gives the public a false sense of security. There is no 100-percent guarantee when taking any contraceptive.

I think my biggest questions to all of this are: “What’s next? How far will we go?”

Should we create more boundaries that will increase the likelihood of accountability and responsibility? Or should we continue to give people at any age the opportunity to make these personal decisions on their own?

Racquel Richards is a student at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

Gary Tischler •

-My dog Bailey doesn’t read. He’s like that dog on the commercial for bacon bits, sniffing, panting that “you know I can’t read.” Bailey, like all dogs, is all nose, or so he let’s me believe.

I think he reads, in his own way.

I read books, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, novels, short stories, poems, sentences,
blogs, and fragments of words. My office could pass for a used bookstore. As a reader, I worry. I read signs of change as if they were omens, portents, signs, predictors of a bookless, wordless future. As a writer, I worry about the deterioration of the English language — of any language at all.

Bailey reads the wind, the grass, the sides of trees, the flashes of sunlight, and the cracks in the sidewalks, and he perceives all sorts of things: the arrival of new puppies, the sore bones of a tall shepherd of advancing years (Bailey commiserates.), the small yapping poem left by a teacup poodle, the echoes of which lie like sparkly dust in the growing leaves. The scents are full of news of his world and beyond.

He reminds me a little of the dog called Mr. Bones in Paul Aster’s novel “Timbuktu”, about a homeless, mad, lost writer, who at some point tries to appraise Mr. Bones of the arts through smells. But while Mr. Bones enjoys his efforts — what fun! — he knew he was already blessed: “For once Mr. Bones was glad he was not endowed with the power of human speech. If he had, he would have been forced to tell Willy the truth, and that would have caused him much pain. For a dog, he would have said, for a dog, dear master, the fact is that the whole world is a symphony of smells. Every hour, every minute, every second of his waking life is at once a physical and spiritual experience.”

Just so, and in the same way, dogs read and spread the news and take in gossip and heartbreak from earth and wind, if not fire.

On the other hand, we, who write words, who take them in like elixir and drugs and the sweetest alcohol, who use stories and poems and biographies to inspire us and make us whole or get through the day, who love the feel and weight of books, the heft of a fall Vanity Fair issue, the rows upon rows of words in the New Yorker, or the black and white drama of a really big headline, who, when we’re lucky, can make sentences dance, worry.

Newspapers are shrinking. Magazines are disappearing. Daily, the evidence mounts up. The New York Times publisher gives an interview in London, in which he says that the print edition of the world’s most venerated paper might not exist for very long. Here, a Border’s, of all things, closes up shop downtown with a great big remainder sale. One of the city’s more original bookstores, Bartleby’s in Georgetown, is said to be closing in the near future, and a few days past, Carla Cohen, the founder and former owner of Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue, passed away from a rare form of cancer.

Bartleby’s is awash with old books, very old books, and books nobody’s read in a while — books about Waterloo, the Civil War, Wagner, and the early editions of state histories. Usually, there’s only one copy of each book in the hundreds to thousands that stack the shelves or the outdoor racks on sale. Not too much of James Patterson here, the mystery writer who seems to write a book every night except Sundays. Bailey would be right at home here, sensing, scenting the odor of old pages, the silky sigh of “Nevermore”, the thunderous thick words describing battle, the delicate quality of fragile pages from 1839 or some such lost year, the leaf and gold.

Patterson would have probably been on one shelf or another at Politics and Prose, out of necessity
and the good graces and the New York Times Bestseller List, but there were always books on politics — some esoteric and some written by people in the neighborhood, this being Washington. Often, the authors would show up in the flesh, and every time you went to a book reading at the store, it made you feel hope for the future of well-made books, articulate writers, and the charms of the written word spoken out loud.

Like Indian summer, these portents of hope are somehow sad for their infrequency. Used book shops seem to do quite well actually, but newer bookshops have their problems of price and volume so that they resemble more and more a supermarket with books, toys, records, videos, accessories, and digital dandy stuff. Of course, this includes books on your telephone and Kindles — a different version of the same thing — for which little slips resembling book covers are provided at an extra cost.

Riding a connector bus the other day, I saw a young woman reading one of those things. I look over her shoulder and asked her what it was and why she was using it. It was the very same digital book in a cover. “I have a huge bunch of books,” she said. “The last time I moved I had to get them up to a third story walk up. I am never. Doing. That. Again.”

She extolled the virtue of the digital book. It’s easy to carry in your pocket, unlike a hardback of “War and Peace” or even James Patterson’s latest. “You can control the type-size, make it bigger. Better than needing glasses.”

A young woman on my block showed me a Kindle — John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” right in your pocket, in big type. I looked at the comfy little cover of the digital book the young woman had. I thought of advancing age. I thought about the coming Christmas, and for a minute I was tempted. But a voice said, “Not yet, not yet,” if not, “Nevermore.”

I picked up my copy of the latest Reacher novel and left. Somehow I remained unbowed and unblemished but fretting about what texting and blogging are doing to words and sentences. I came home. I walked Bailey. He did his business. He sniffed all through the walk: the poodle’s poem, the song in the wind, the news of a stiff paw on a blade of grass, the telling of the tale of the new basset puppy, the songs straight out of the sun, and the scent of drying leaves. What he reads will come to him every day, the same way.

Tomorrow, I’m pretty sure The Post will come and The Shopper, but I’m not always sure about either one of the Times.

Bailey sniffs the tree for news and stories. I worry. It’s probably like Mr. Bones said — that it’s a good thing they can’t talk.