August 25, 2006
Local life as it is
Letter writers took us to task for two items on our Aug. 24 front page – a story about grain-alcohol sales at state liquor stores and the lead photograph of a young man on a rope swing above the river in Penacook. The complaints were similar: The readers accused us of encouraging behavior dangerous to young people.
The story covered Executive Councilor Peter Spaulding’s efforts to stop state liquor stores from selling 190-proof grain alcohol. A reader in Henniker wrote:
“So, how many students, college or otherwise, will now try and get a hold of grain alcohol?
“I understand your need to inform the public about these types of issues, but is this type of article going to really help?
“Shall we hold the Concord Monitor responsible for any future injuries or deaths caused by the consumption of grain alcohol?”
Of the lead photograph of the rope swinger, a Webster reader had this to say:
“You did it again! . . .
“The young person is in a place he is not supposed to be, therefore trespassing, ignoring the signs and the law. It looks like so much fun. That’s what any other teen would think and some young ones as well. A copycat thing to do. . . .
“This is a dangerous practice, and your photographer, Lori Duff, should use some common sense.”
These readers underestimate young people, overestimate the Monitor’s power to influence behavior and misunderstand our mission.
Young people are bombarded with bad behavioral role models every day: foul and violent lyrics in music, harsh images in video games and movies, cheating and steroid-gobbling athletes, an ad culture that uses sex to sell and values appearance over substance. Somehow, with the help of parents and educators, most kids make it through all that.
You’d have to be a naïve young person not to know that there are a lot of rope swings over our local rivers. Or that there isn’t potent liquor out there. I don’t buy the idea that the Monitor should ignore these things because showing them will somehow give kids ideas they haven’t already had.
We try to make the newspaper a mirror of the communities we cover. It is the job of our reporters and photographers to record life in our area as they find it. We can’t ignore common behavior like kids swinging on ropes because it is dangerous or illegal.
Making such acts off-limits to our photographers would not prevent rope-swinging any more than ignoring a story on grain alcohol would keep young people in the dark about some new evil.
Posted by Mike Pride at 05:21 PM | Comments (0)
August 23, 2006
Nothing like it
I am wary of analogy. When someone begins a comment with “X is like Y,” I automatically think, “No, it’s not.” Nothing is quite like anything else.
In recent days I’ve heard a particularly troubling analogy twice. I won’t name the speakers because analogy is a common rhetorical device. I’m sure if I looked back on all the dumb analogies I’ve made over the decades, I’d wince plenty.
The analogies that troubled me were to terrorism. In separate conversations I’ve heard people in the political realm compare both the nation’s health-care and environmental challenges to terrorism. The point was the same: Dealing with those issues is just as critical as dealing with terrorism.
Here’s what the speakers said: The single mother with a sick child and no health insurance? Terror. The environmental havoc that global warming will wreak? Terror.
These are bad arguments. Yes, some people without health insurance feel a desperation bordering on terror. And if the power of Hurricane Katrina was indeed an early sign of global warming (a big if, I think), the results in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast were truly terrible.
But to compare these or any other political issues to terrorism is unhelpful and misleading.
Terrorism is the deliberate slaughter of innocent human beings for a fanatical purpose. There is nothing like it. Certainly there is no political issue like it. To use it as a point of comparison will always diminish it.
Health care and the environment are important issues. But issues should be discussed, and positions defended, in their own right. I hope the effort to use the tragedies caused by terrorists to raise public interest in other issues is not the trend I fear it is.
Posted by Mike Pride at 06:18 PM | Comments (1)
August 22, 2006
Still a classic
This is the season for reading at the camp where my wife and I live in the summertime. Not that it isn’t always the season for reading for us, but it is easier in summer after a morning walk to while away the hours on the porch poring through newspapers and books.
Because I commute to work in summer, I also listen to books on tape. Over the last week or so, I have been reintroduced to an old friend – Paul Baumer, the narrator and lead character in All Quiet on the Western Front.
Since my youth, I have loved the literature of World War I – the great poems Of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sasson and others, the diaries and memoirs of Vera Brittain and Robert Graves, the histories by Martin Gilbert and others, even the recent trilogy by the novelist Pat Barker, the third of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize.
I first read Owen in earnest during the Vietnam War. The distance between the rhetoric and the reality of war seemed universal and timeless.
That thought came back to me as I listened to All Quiet. When American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq speak about their wars, it is easy to see what a challenge it is for them to relate their experiences on the ground to the objectives laid out by political leaders far removed from the front. I wound up thinking that All Quiet should be required reading for any young man or woman considering enlisting in the military – and for any national leader before he or she decides to send a nation to war or to expand a war. The wars we think we are about to fight seldom turn out to be the wars we thought they would be.
Erich Maria Remarque, a World War I veteran and a sports writer from Lower Saxony, wrote All Quiet on the Western Front during the 1920s. It is the story of a group of schoolmates who, in the flush and naïveté of youth, enlist together and grow up, suffer and die as German soldiers on the Western Front. The book was published in January 1929. Eighteen months later, it had sold 2.5 million copies in 25 languages.
As Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, the book was banned and burned in Germany. Nazis disrupted the premiere of the film, also a masterpiece. Remarque eventually lost his German citizenship and became an American.
Listening to the book last week, I found its power undiminished. Obviously, technology has changed warfare since World War I, for better and for worse. But in clear, powerful prose, Remarque relentlessly destroys any mystery or romance a young person might associate with soldiering. His is a riveting book – a classic for its time and for ours.
Posted by Mike Pride at 12:39 PM | Comments (1)
August 17, 2006
$17,564!
In June I listened to the arguments before the state Supreme Court on the latest challenge to the way New Hampshire pays for schools. This is the never-ending Claremont case. It was impossible to know how the court might rule on the question before it.
But the core of Claremont – the terrible inequity among districts’ abilities to provide a sound public education – still burns hot.
I am reminded of this every time I edit a letter to the editor from Mary Paradise, the head of teacher contract negotiations for the Pittsfield School Board. On behalf of the board and the teachers’ union in Pittsfield, Paradise is sending the Monitor a series of letters making the case to the town’s voters for a one-year contract that the two sides agreed to last month.
Paradise’s latest letter, which will appear in tomorrow’s Monitor, is an eye-opener. Consider just one fact from it: During the school year just past, a beginning teacher with a family insurance plan had a before-tax income of $17,564.
$17,564!
Work a little overtime, and a kid can make that much flipping burgers.
Pittsfield was an original plaintiff in the Claremont suit, and it has received some relief from the court’s rulings. But if the court needs a jolt to stiffen its backbone on Claremont, the teacher contract in Pittsfield should provide it.
Like other poor districts, Pittsfield struggles to pay competitive wages and retain good teachers. Its teachers pay 50 percent of their health insurance costs. Even before benefit differences are included, veteran teachers make between $5,000 and $9,000 less annually than their counterparts in comparable districts.
Those who argue that Pittsfield taxpayers are chintzy and do not support education might want to take a look at the property tax base Pittsfield works from. Just to cite two nearby towns, Barnstead has more than twice as much taxable property per student, Alton more than six times as much. The properties on just two coves in a big-lake town probably exceed Pittsfield’s entire tax base.
The differing tax burdens among towns were at the heart of the Claremont decisions. If anything, that disparity is widening.
Overtaxed though they are, I hope Pittsfield voters approve the one-year teacher contract at a special district meeting later this year. I hope the board and the union press on on salaries and benefits, as they have vowed to do.
But the problem here is beyond the ability of a Pittsfield or an Allenstown or a Claremont to solve. That’s why the Supreme Court ruled against the state in the Claremont case, and that’s why the court should strengthen its earlier rulings when it decides the current case.
It is a travesty and a tragedy that the state of New Hampshire continues to ignore its constitutional obligation and to turn its back on the children of poor towns.
Posted by Mike Pride at 01:59 PM | Comments (1)
August 15, 2006
Are we safer? Wrong question
I have a bad feeling about the coming political season. I foresee an argument about a question to which there is no satisfactory answer: Has the George W. Bush presidency made America safer?
You’ve already heard the answers.
From the Democratic side: Of course not. Bush has led us into a quagmire in Iraq. His policies have created more terrorists, not fewer.
From the Republican side: Of course we’re safer. Isn’t it a great relief that we are fighting the terrorists over there rather than fighting them here?
The Monitor editorial board heard a version of the Republican argument this morning from Gov. George Pataki of New York. It’s better to have our soldiers fighting them there than our civilians fighting them here, he said.
But Pataki also used an analogy that resonated with me. He compared the War on Terror to the Cold War, in the sense that ideology was at the heart of both. Much as the Cold War was a fight between freedom and rigid state control, our current war is a fight between freedom and Islamic extremists who detest freedom. Without criticizing any past actions of the Bush administration, Pataki called for creating international alliances to join the United States, Britain and our few other allies in the fight.
On the drive to work this morning, I listened to The Exchange, the New Hampshire Public Radio talk show. The subject was the 45th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. This was a defining moment of the Cold War. Laura Knoy’s guest, Jackson Janes, a German studies professor from Johns Hopkins University, commented on whether people in the ensuing years thought the wall would ever be torn down. Someday, they said, “but not in my lifetime.”
I lived through the entire Cold War. Janes's “not in my lifetime” comment was apt. When the wall actually fell and the Soviet bloc disintegrated, I remember thinking that the mind-set of my generation had been stripped away. It was so sudden. One day, all world events had to be viewed through the East-West prism. The next day, the prism had disappeared. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History whose title and ideas struck a chord with us old Cold Warriors.
But of course history did not end. A new enemy found us: Islamic fundamentalists bent on destroying the West and all that we stand for.
As I listened to Professor Janes talk, a question occurred to me: Were the fears spawned by the Cold War – principally the Strangelovian madness of nuclear annihilation and the state control over individuals at the heart of the communist regime – more potent and present than the fears spawned by the War on Terror?
I don’t know the answer. Frankly, although I did duck-and-cover drills as a boy and served two years right at the Iron Curtain as a young man, I don’t remember ever being afraid. I can’t say the same about the War on Terror, but that may simply be that I know more now than I knew then. Or that my worries now are more focused on future generations - my children's and my grandchildren's - than on my own.
What I am sure of is that the politics of fear are empty, whichever side they come from. “Are we safer?” is the wrong question. It is also the perfect question for a political campaign – one with no clear answer and one bound to be polarizing.
I’m not quite sure what the right question is for the coming campaign and the 2008 presidential race, but it might go something like this: Which political leaders are best equipped and most inclined to persuade other free nations that the War on Terror is their fight, too?
Posted by Mike Pride at 03:00 PM | Comments (2)
August 14, 2006
Action Jackson
My daughter-in-law tells a riddle about parenthood that goes like this:
Why do you put 2-year-olds to bed at 7:30?
The answer: So you can go to bed at 8.
More than two decades after we last had a 2-year-old of our own, my wife and I spent this past weekend taking care of our grandson, Jackson. Alone. Just us and Jackson.
People in the office have heard me refer to Jackson (lovingly, of course) as “Bruiser,” “The Linebacker” and “Pinball.” He is ripped: big shoulders, bulging chest, all muscle, no fat. One of his favorite words is “run,” and off he goes, a miniature Forrest Gump. “Pinball,” by the way, refers to the way he bounces off things and seems to gain speed and energy from each collision.
During the weekend, when we weren’t out harvesting blueberries and blackberries, for which Jackson has an extraordinary capacity, I spent the good part of the weekend trying to divine the mind of a 2-year-old. I mean, what is going on up there? At times, the boy seemed charming, loving and perfectly normal. He put the plastic flamingo on the letter “F,” aped animal sounds on command and counted to 13 over and over. But then, suddenly, he would zone out and slip off into the next room in search of an electric socket or, more likely, do precisely the opposite of what we had told him to do. And do it again. And again. "Tantrum" might be too stark a word for his most headstrong moments, but probably not.
As far as I could tell, there were no logical connections between the responsive Jackson and the devious Jackson. Only one thing gave us comfort in these personality flips: They were accompanied by expressions very reminiscent of those that crossed his father’s face 28 years ago. These were familiar expressions, even though Jackson seemed to be just trying them out: the Clinton-lip pout, the evil eye, Don’t Tread on Me.
When you first become a grandparent, other grandparents tell you how wonderful it is to spend time with grandchildren – and to send them home to their parents. I’ll admit I had this thought last night when my wife drove away with Jackson and peace returned to our domain.
But that is not the thought that lingers from his visit, nor was I left thinking about the few difficult moments of his stay with us. Rather I woke up this morning thinking what an amazing challenge it is for his parents to guide him through this phase of his life. Also, how this adorable little tyke brings to the world such a headlong desire to grasp life and how we, as grandparents, have the high privilege of watching him become.
Posted by Mike Pride at 06:59 PM | Comments (1)
August 11, 2006
The real man from Hope
We met the real man from Hope when Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas came by for an editorial board yesterday. Huckabee, a Republican whose first career was as a Southern Baptist pastor, is considering running for president.
President Bill Clinton left Hope, Ark., as a young boy and grew up in Hot Springs. Huckabee, who is nine years younger than Clinton, was born and raised in Hope.
Huckabee made a joke about this that he has no doubt told a hundred times during his political career. Clinton, Huckabee said, used the line “I believe in a place called Hope” because it sounded so much better than “I believe in a place called Hot Springs.”
As I listened to Huckabee, I heard a politician comfortable in his skin as an Arkansan who was trying to figure out what from this repertory would work on the national stage and what he would have to invent. Although he and I are far apart in our thinking on many issues, I liked him.
For one thing, Huckabee is a governor. Governors who want to be president are usually far more down to earth than senators who want to be president. As a governor, you have to deal with real people and real issues. You have to get things done. The meaningless prattle of Washington does not pollute your speech.
Huckabee’s most appealing quality is humanity. When he said that his first reaction in dealing with Katrina refugees in Arkansas was to feed and house them and worry about the cost and the paperwork later, he was totally believable. When he spoke with passion and urgency about health care, you could see how his own heroic conversion from an obese man to a trim one had led him to look outside himself. Certainly one of his most practiced answers was his take on why his background as a pastor is not a political liability but an important qualification.
“There is not a social pathology in this world that I couldn’t put a name and face to,” he began. Soon he was detailing the human misery – alcohol problems, money problems, marital problems, unwanted pregnancies – that he regularly dealt with as a preacher. This experience, he said, led him to be more understanding of the human condition.
“If faith is real, it does affect what you do” as an elected official, he said. Asked to name his party’s biggest flaw, he said that while Republicans had been keen on seeing that their policies helped those at the top, it had not been sensitive to people on the bottom. When he began to analyze the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the difficulties of the middle class, he sounded like a Democrat.
Huckabee is one of a large cast of characters whom New Hampshire and Iowa voters will see a great deal of during the next year and a half. He has a lot to learn. Although I came away with a good first impression, he was fuzzy on the war in Iraq and unresponsive on Social Security.
If he decides to run, he will profit greatly from grassroots campaigning in New Hampshire. He will have a good touch for it, too, shaping his positions by what he hears from voters.
Posted by Mike Pride at 03:34 PM | Comments (0)
August 04, 2006
Boys will be boys
Brownbag lunches at the Monitor give our staff an opportunity to hear from experts. We’ve had many poets, writers and journalists speak with the staff over the years. Later this month, Bill Chapman, the paper’s lawyer, will give a lunchtime seminar on the Right-to-Know law and libel laws. And yesterday, Peter Francese paid us a visit.
Peter is a genial and knowledgeable demographer who lives in Exeter. Although reporters often call him as a news source for their stories, he last spoke with our whole staff three years ago. His charge then was to help us lay the groundwork for the Monitor’s content-driven redesign, which continues to this day, by telling us about our readers.
Peter’s main message in 2003 was that New Hampshire had a large and growing elderly population. One result of this session was the creation of a reporting beat at the Monitor on the issues of aging. Meg Heckman has ably filled it from the start.
During yesterday’s session, Peter gave us more of the same with a new twist: New Hampshire’s burgeoning elderly population is accompanied by a mass exodus of young people. Our state is getting older both because people over 55 are moving here in droves and because people 25-44 are leaving. I’ve written a column for the Sunday Monitor Viewpoints section about the consequences of this demographic shift.
While we had Peter here, we also touched on another troubling subject: the falling percentage of young men going to college. For years, the proportion of males to females in colleges and universities has shrunk. I asked Peter why. Here is what he said:
1. Eighteen-year-old men can make pretty good money in the job market – for 18-year-old men. Thus, for them, the short-term cost of attending college is greater than for girls.
2. Boys mature later than girls. Many young men say when they graduate from high school that they’ll go to college someday, but they never do.
3. College is generally seen as leading to office jobs. To an 18-year-old man, “working in an office sounds like some form of slow death.” (Women form 47 percent of the American workforce but 52 percent of the whire-collar workforce.)
4. The cost of a college education has grown disproportionately.
The problem with this trend is that whatever short-term benefits young men may enjoy in not going to college, the long-term costs are far greater. As Peter told us, there are more and more young men out there who really should have gone to college.
Posted by Mike Pride at 05:51 PM | Comments (2)
August 01, 2006
Graphic content
The writer of a letter that will appear in tomorrow’s paper writes:
“I find the trend that reporters feel the need to include specific details of sexual assaults in their articles to be disturbing. . . . Including the graphic details of Matt McGonagle’s assault of a 14-year-old is salacious and crude. Isn’t the connotation of sexual assault horrifying enough?”
The story in question led Saturday’s front page. It told of the guilty plea of Matt McGonagle, an assistant principal at Rundlett Middle School, to charges of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old student in Gilford six years ago. The story gave the specifics of the charges in the second paragraph: McGonagle had “repeatedly touched and kissed the student and, on one occasion, penetrated her vagina with his finger.”
There was a time when this level of detail would not have appeared in a news story. But as unpleasant as these facts are to read, I think they provide essential information that readers are better off knowing.
Consider the letter writer’s question: “Isn’t the connotation of sexual assault horrifying enough?”
The connotations of sexual assault are many, some worse than what McGonagle admitted to, some not. Especially if I were the parent of a girl at Rundlett or any other school where McGonagle had worked, I’d want to know specifically what he did. Many of the Monitor’s readers are such parents.
The specifics of the charges were cited in a press release on McGonagle’s plea. The reporter, Melanie Asmar, asked her editor, Hans Schulz, how graphic she should be in the story. He instructed her to use the specifics. That was the right call.
But I have two further thoughts about this matter.
First, the details appeared in the second paragraph of a story on page A-1 of the paper. They might have been a little less jarring to readers had we reported them lower in the story.
Second, it seems to me our staff has been reporting more extensively on more sex crimes than in the past. This is an impression, not a fact, but I want to talk it over with editors, see what they think and act accordingly.
That said, a local middle school assistant principal pleading guilty to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old student was an important news story, worthy of the play we gave it. And the specifics of the charges were vital information, allowing the public to gauge how well the authorities had handled the case and whether the punishment fit the crime.
Posted by Mike Pride at 06:00 PM | Comments (3)