Category: Blog Post

Our friend Molly Priesmeyer notes that three key curators at the Walker Art Center have announced that they’re leaving, along with the Walker’s chief operating officer. Both WCCO (who reported the news yesterday) and Preismeyer are worried about what this might mean, and they point out the alarming cost overruns of the new digs on Vineland Place as a possible goad, though we can’t see exactly why that would impact the curatorial staff. It’s not as if Director Kathy Halbreicht wants to lose her best lieutenants, nor that she can shop for better ones at a savings.

Aside from COO Anne Bitter (who somewhat cryptically “resigned” to “resume a private consulting practice”–which could be a harmless statement of fact, or an ominous, thundering euphemism) it looks to us like the time was right for some serious cashing out among the team’s top talent. Everyone agrees that the Walker’s relaunch was the event of the season–and not just locally but nationally. In fact, the Walker’s international reputation and celebrity have never been higher. If you were working in the trenches of the WAC for ten years and hoping eventually to step up a rung in the industry, to the very tippy top where you’re not supposed to stand, now would be the time to do that. We note that curators Flood, Vergne, and Fogle are all taking promotions at other major museums.

When Lance Armstrong wins the Tour de France and wears the maillot jeune down the Champs Elysees, his best captains get poached shortly thereafter by rival teams for more money, more responsibility, and more prestige. Success of the finest thread-count often breeds this sort of accretion; it is a cost of doing business well, and you either build loyalty into your budget or you read a lot of resumes.

My cousin was in the Army, stationed in Germany during the cold war. His duty for a while was commanding an anti-aircraft battery. He described it like this: “I commanded a $58 million missile launching system. I had a lifer sergeant, who really knew his stuff, but the men who actually had to aim and fire this intricate computer guided system were a bunch of high-school drop outs who never really learned how to operate the system. I figured if the Russian air force attacked, we could get the thing calibrated and get off a shot about the time the planes were over Paris. My only consolation was that I knew that there was a Russian commander a few miles to my east who had exactly the same problems.”

So, I wasn’t surprised when I saw this story in Slate. It notes, as many other stories have done lately, that recruiters are having a tough time filling their quotas for the Army and Marines. The Slate piece even reveals that we’re keeping undesirable soldiers in the military, in order to keep up the fiction that we have enough troops, when the commanders who have to deal with these bad soldiers would rather muster them out.

The Slate piece puts forth some really good ideas about how to address the problem of declining recruitment without resorting to keeping bad soldiers. It also points out one of the idiocies of the current “privatization” of military functions…the unintended consequence of bad military policy of the current administration. I became personally aware of this when a retired Marine friend of mine told me he’d been offered four times his Marine salary to lead what amounts to a private Marine rifle squad in Iraq.

“Who would be in this squad?” I asked. His reply, “Guys like me; guys we spent millions to train to be the best fighing men in the world, then pay them like crap and starve their families while they’re on deployment overseas.”

And, it seems, make them serve with guys who’ll get them killed, just so we can say we’ve got enough boots on the ground.

By the way, today is the 61st anniversary of D-day. Thank a veteran, particulary a WW II vet, today.

A crazy day around here, but lookit: We hear Washington City Paper has decided to take their paper to the streets, in an apparent effort to staunch their lightly bleeding circulation numbers. The approach is simple: Put twenty real, live human beings on the streets handing out the paper to passersby (much as D.C.’s two daily commuter freebies do in the morning, although City Paper figures afternoon is a better time to hit their readers). Now the official reason they give is that retailers who normally carry the alt-weekly line of publication–the coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and so on–are cracking down on freebies that contribute not much to their interior ambience besides litter.

For our part, we certainly are familiar with this struggle, and we make it a point of business practice to maintain good relations with the fine people who allow us to distribute the magazine in their lobbies and foyers. We know from painful experience that there are a number of challenges facing the freebie crowd–in the first place that it is a crowd, with dozens and dozens of pamphlets, broadsheets, chapbooks, real estate and automotive and sexual shoppers, and so on, cluttering up entryways and gutters throughout the city.

Most publishers of materials like this do not ask for permission before dumping their reams off wherever and whenever they please. They see legitimate and reputable publications doing it, and they assume it’s OK to do the same. It probably would be OK, if they took the same care that the better operations take, i.e. to clean up after themselves and others, to tidy things up, to show a little respect to both the business owners and the other publications, to ask permission, and so on.

Second, it is true that many of the national chain retailers have no sympathy for local publishers, and have policies and attitudes that frankly don’t win them much favor in our pages. (The irony is that a magazine like ours has found a terrifically passionate readership in the outer suburbs where national chains flourish—but we have to work like dogs to make it available to them.)

But when we look more closely at the sitch in D.C., we have couple of questions. City Paper execs say they are having trouble getting distribution, and yet they have not actually lost any distribution spots during the period that their circulation has declined considerably. Lost spots have been replaced by new ones, they say. Thus many lost retail positions have been replaced with street boxes.

So why is circulation still going down at City Paper? It seems to us that it may have less to do with uncharitable merchants and more to do with a disinterested readership, and the need for an editorial opening of windows. If readers really want a publication, if it’s a true must-read for a significant portion of the city, they’ll find it wherever it is distributed. It’s interesting that some City Paper readers say they can’t find the paper, or that it’s gone by the time they get around to seeking it out, and that strikes us as a problem of staying stocked where you are most wanted. (The two free dailies cannot be helping much, but what we’ve seen of most of these commuter papers is that they make a good seat cover on the bus, and a fine place to deposit used chewing gum.)

Now, as to whether it might be more effective to have a pushy human being in an orange T-shirt pressing the paper into your hands, we can’t say. But it is interesting that City Paper’s readership is an alarming ninety percent single, and undoubtedly starving for human contact.

Now there’s a savvy approach to a serious circulation challenge: merging the desperate, growing singles space with the declining rate base right out there on the streets of Washington D.C.

God bless good spellers. We’ve been watching the national spelling bee with some interest, and we’re proud of our two local finalists. But it should be no surprise that we’re somehow able to find something mean to say about it.

Like energy drinks, bike riding, and deep-dish pizza, spelling bees have gone extreme. Just read through the inevitable profiles of the kids who make it to the final rounds today and tomorrow. Most of them are obsessive-compulsive savants who spend most of their free time reading Websters Unabridged. True, the better competitors learn much about linguistic structures and etymology (the better to guess at the spellings of words they have never seen before) and these are noble pursuits. But there is no way around the simple truth that a great speller today is a memorizer of words that never get used except in spelling bees. (Today’s gems, typical obscurities from the sciences: “Narcohypnia,” numbness from walking; and “selenography,” study of the surface of the moon.) Many great spellers grow up to wear bow ties, and that cannot be a good thing.

Also, this: Each day we receive two or three “words of the day” from reputable sources like Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com. We used to try to make a special effort to use these words at some point during the day, but we found the exercise a real strain of credibility.

It would be interesting to interview whoever is responsible for selecting a word of the day. There seems to be a subtle art to it. The perfect word of the day often has a subtle connection to current events (say “casus belli” comes up the day we invade Iran, or “rough trade” arrives in our in-box the day we hear that our president has a thing for gay, bald male escorts), and it is a word that you think you’ve heard before, but didn’t have enough confidence in your understanding of to actually pronounce it yourself.

And we have to say we can totally detect when the editors at these services are coasting–when they give lame, elliptical synonyms that are not in common usage because they sound too much like another, better word that means exactly the same thing. (Say, “pliant” as opposed to “pliable,” or “sough” rather than “sigh.”) These words are for the spelling bees and the wearers of bow-ties, and we generally have no truck with them.

Apropos of last week’s post on this month’s cover story, we received a thoughtful comment from Christian Dude. He took issue with our casting Sen. Dean Johnson as a possible candidate to head up a putative “Christian Left.” He wanted to hear more about what Sen. Johnson has to say about the role of religion in politics. Fair enough, we thought. Johnson more or less dismissed the question, saying there is no serious role for instituional religion in politics.

Here is why: The Christian Left cannot in good conscience legislate morality from any specific denominational or confessional position. It is an earmark of the Left–whether it is Christian, Jewish, secular, or Satan-worshipping–that diversity is a positive value, and specific creeds should hold no sway in the body politic.

True, it may be possible to compile a sort of universal code of conduct that transcends religious differences, but has civic/spiritual overtones. In fact, that’s been done–it’s commonly known as the US Constittion, the Bill of Rights, and the Criminal Code. This is what scholars have long identified as the “civil religion” of the US. Modern efforts to rewrite any facet of these documents along denominational lines is to subvert them in the most fundamental way. And let’s make no mistake here: The Christian Right, as we have called it, operates like an exclusive, self-righteous, lockstep political entity–essentially a denomination that has become active where it is not all that welcome. (It is not welcome for the simple reason that most Americans are not fanatically self-righteous moral prigs who see the world only through the eyes of a conservative evangelist.) The Christian Right perceives itself as judge, jury, and legislature, and it does not tolerate dissent on the most obvious, discrete political issues like abortion and taxes. It sees “diversity,” especially of political opinion and identity, as widespread error, and it sees itself as victimized by this secular affliction. Even though there are significant differences in theologies on the right, these people do not waste much time on rational colloquy, and typically cut straight to the chase of self-service through the bizarre idolization of Jesus Christ as the personal patron saint of conspicuous consumerism. (As a wise man recently said to us, “Who do you think Jesus would associate with if he came back today?”)

As a slightly related aside, we strongly recommend last week’s article in the New Yorker about “intelligent design,” the beguiling pseudo-scientific effort to debunk Darwinism. It speaks to the deep neurosis so many Christians have that reality is not sufficient unto itself, that despite all overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there is a God the takes a personal interest in my affairs, the state of my soul, and the intricate mechanism of all life. That life itself is not sufficiently miraculous without some Prime Mover in a toga somewhere beyond the stars. More to the point, these people are pushing intelligent design not to do what science normally does–limn the working laws of physical nature without respect to the existence of an unseen deity–but to support a political and social agenda. As writer H. Allen Orr so eloquently points out, intelligent design has never actually succeeded in any meaningful way in the laboratory, which is generally where legitimate science is practiced under the arcane conceits of experimentation, repetition, and peer review.

On a recent episode of TV’s best series, House, the good doctor suffered through a near-death experience himself. He saw the white light, he saw the future. His colleagues were galled that Dr. House would dismiss these visions as “physical, chemical reactions” occuring in a decommissioned brain. “That’s it? Is that all there is? Why?” they demanded to know. Dr. House had the best, most succint answer we have ever heard, in all our years of dabbling in theology, religion, politics, and culture. He said, “Because I prefer to believe that this [life] is not a test.”