Complain about this

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

I’m so sick and tired of people complaining all the time that …

Ahem. Read more

Gotta love this weather

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

Spring has sprung.

Yay.

It’s a good thing, too.

I mean, I’m so glad to see that it’s warmed up so much, and all. Read more

Is the Wayne issue driving the city elections?

It has been seven months since Waynesboro City Council decided against acting on a proposal from the Wayne Theatre Alliance to have the city participate in a public-private project to renovate the 1926 downtown landmark.

You’d think from listening to the rhetoric in this spring’s city-council elections that the issue was still very much on the table.

“I’m not going to let that issue go – because it could come back. That’s why we’re serving this up. This is an issue,” said Frank Lucente, one of the three members of council who expressed publicly their unwillingness to back the effort to have the city partner with the Alliance in a $7.5 million Wayne Theatre restoration last summer.

Lucente and another councilman, Tim Williams, who also opposed the effort, are endorsing the third member of the trio, Reo Hatfield, who is the only one of the three whose seat is up for re-election this spring.

Hatfield has joined Lucente and Williams in doing his part to keep the Wayne Theatre issue alive for the voters.

“I’m not saying I’m against the Wayne Theatre Alliance as a group. I didn’t vote against the Wayne Theatre Alliance. I voted against the Wayne Theatre Alliance getting $3.8 million from the city and $3.8 million from the citizens,” Hatfield said.

“I will not vote for taxpayers paying for the Wayne Theatre – that is clearcut. And so far, and the campaign has been going on for months, the other two candidates have not said one way or the other whether they support it or not,” Hatfield told The Augusta Free Press.

Smith and the third candidate in the Ward D race, DuBose Egleston, for their part, are taking issue with the statements made by Hatfield and his supporters relative to their positions on the Wayne.

“There are many, many things that need to be looked at – the West End fire station, stormwater management, economic development. I’m not against the Wayne Theatre – I’m not against some form of financial support for the Wayne Theatre. I think there are just a lot of questions that have not been answered about this,” Egleston said.

“The timing is very poor. The tax rate has been cut 19 cents in the past two years. That’s $2.4 million a year. There are just more important things that need to be addressed with the taxpayers’ money than the Wayne Theatre,” Egleston told the AFP.

“The Wayne Theatre simply has no merit in terms of this race. And I’m hoping that the community sees that,” Smith said. “We need to talk about what’s really going on in our community right now – and what the Wayne Theatre Alliance is doing is not an issue that’s before city council or will be before city council.

“It’s tough for me to determine as far as why it’s being brought up relative to my candidacy. The only thing that I can come up with is that I think that this is an area that basically divided the council last year, and I think that it’s just an issue that seems to have some vulnerability,” Smith told the AFP.

The vulnerability for Smith comes in the identity of one of the members of her campaign team – Bill Hausrath, a local developer who is also the chair of the Wayne Theatre Alliance.

Hatfield points to Hausrath’s presence on the Smith team as evidence that the Wayne issue is driving her campaign.

“It’s pretty evident that the leader of the Wayne Theatre is the primary source for support in her campaign. And the fact is that he is endorsing Lorie Smith because, I feel, that he didn’t get his way with the Wayne Theatre,” Hatfield said.

Hausrath, who backed Williams in his bid for the Ward A seat on city council in 2004, makes clear that he is not supporting Smith with any idea of a quid pro quo in mind.

“If the Wayne Theatre wasn’t there, if the Wayne Theatre was completely removed, I would still be supporting Lorie Smith. If I wasn’t the chairman of the Alliance, if I hadn’t spent four years on this project, if I was just me, doing just what I do, I think what we’re seeing in Waynesboro is going too far,” Hausrath told the AFP.

“Mr. Hatfield’s viewpoint on this is a very narrow viewpoint,” Smith said. “Bill Hausrath has done a lot of things for this community. He was part of the team that got Fairfax Hall renovated. He’s been an integral part of the YMCA. And the Wayne Theatre Alliance is just another example. He’s somebody that is vested in our community in a well-rounded way.

“To say that because this was a vote that was split on the council, and because Bill is one of many people backing my candidacy, that’s an easy place for Reo’s campaign to go to,” Smith said. “Bill and I have had this conversation many times. He is not backing me because of any type of vendetta or anything that he has regarding moving on with the Wayne Theatre Alliance. Bill believes in my leadership, he believes in the record that I set and what I can bring to city council.

“My perspective on this is that the city council dealt with this issue last year. And the Wayne Theatre Alliance has now moved on – with a $3.2 million plan that doesn’t include city funding. They offered up a plan last year, and city council had the opportunity to review it and judge it, and they made their decision. Frankly, I think we need to move on. This is not a campaign issue,” Smith said.

The Alliance, as Smith mentioned, has moved on – scaling back its $7.5 million proposal from last year to a $3.2 million project that will focus on bringing the Wayne, which closed as a first-run movie theatre in 1999, back into operational condition.

The Wayne Theatre Alliance’s executive director, Clair Myers, made that news public with a pair of presentations to city-based civic clubs this month – one of which was attended by Hatfield and Lucente.

“The campaign has the basic assumption that there will be no city financing of that plan. What we are looking at is assembling money from a variety of sources, but not city taxpayers,” Myers said.

The financing for the project now in the works, Myers said, includes in the area of $1 million in historic tax credits that are expected to be made available in the coming months, a $1 million capital campaign, a $500,000 grant from the Virginia General Assembly that was approved last spring and another $500,000 leadership grant.

“The spin on this from the politicians who want to use this as a negative is to paint those people as kind of greedy culture-makers who want to go out and pick the pocket of the taxpayer – when in fact that is absolutely the opposite of what has been going on,” Myers told the AFP.

Lucente counters that “while they’re saying they’ve narrowed the scope of their project down, and that they’re going to go out and do it privately now, I also read in the paper when they hired their new executive director, and he said his job was to change one of the councilmen’s minds.”

“If they get three council members in there who are for the project, then they may come back and say, Well, let’s do it. We’ve got the support now,” Lucente said.

The article that Lucente referred to did include a statement that “Myers’ job is to sway the three council members who voted against using tax dollars to renovate the theatre.” The statement was not attributed to Myers – and he said last week that it has never been part of his job description to try to sway anybody’s mind relative to the Wayne project.

“From the point one, we’ve never thought that we would change the minds of those council members who voted against it last year. I think that’s not a very productive use of time or energy,” Myers said.

Smith herself wonders aloud why the Wayne is being made an issue in the council campaign.

“Let’s start talking in this campaign on the real issues. Let’s start talking about issues of stormwater. Let’s start talking about issues that are important to the citizens right now. Let’s talk about flooding issues. Let’s talk about issues of infrastructure. Let’s start talking in this campaign what is meaningful to the citizens today,” Smith said.

Lucente strongly disagrees with the contention that the Wayne issue has nothing to do with the 2006 election.

“They’re saying that they’re not going to use any money from the city. I’m all for that – but if they get those people that they want elected, and they get the support from the council, what’s to keep them from changing their mind again?” Lucente said.

Hatfield was more to the point.
“The initial proposal was $11 million. Then recently, it went to $7 million. Now the project is down to just over $3 million. So their whole philosophy has changed – which is probably for the best, because what they originally wanted from the city of Waynesboro is more than what they’re projecting now,” Hatfield said.

“There is a misconception here. The Wayne Theatre Alliance wanted the city to be its primary partner. The three city councilmen who voted against said that we don’t want to be and will not be the primary partner in a private enterprise. And we’re being criticized for that?” Hatfield said.

The criticism, to hear Hausrath tell it, isn’t related to the council members voting their conscience.

“It seems to me that the real question is maybe not whether you’re doing this project or another project, but how you make a decision,” Hausrath said.

“I think the world of what Frank Lucente has accomplished with the Boys and Girls Club. I think Reo Hatfield is a generous, caring person. I think Tim Williams has done a wonderful job of providing for his family and serving the school board and stepping up to the plate for city council. I admire all three of those guys for what they’ve accomplished. But I think we’re out of balance,” Hausrath said.

“We want efficiency, we want economy – and I think what I sense happening is the feeling that we have about all the good things that our city is trying to do is being circumvented by one desire to cut taxes and be ultraconservative. My sense is that what we need in our city is balance,” Hausrath said.

(Published 03-27-06)

Hate is such a strong word

The Top Story by Chris Graham

The term Bush-hater today doesn’t carry with it the stigma that it used to.

One piece of evidence suggesting that is that more and more people on the left – and even in the amorphous center – are for whatever reason embracing the label.

You would think from listening to apologists for the president that this apparently increasingly mainstream Bush-hating phenomenon is unique to the current era – but in actuality, Oval Office dwellers as far back as the early 19th century have had to face down critics who seemed to dislike them as much for personal reasons as for their policy positions.

“Let’s be fair – politics is a contact sport, and it’s always been rough. And it’s always been personal, to a degree. Thomas Jefferson had to deal with rumors when he was running for president. We all know that history. It’s always been kind of rough. But the degree of dirtiness, and the degree to which it is more personal now, is greater than it’s ever been,” said Quentin Kidd, a political-science professor at Christopher Newport University.

Opponents of the president’s Middle East policies that have the U.S. military engaged in protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have the attention of the administration and its supporters – and the news media – in the here and now. But while there is without a doubt a hard-core group of Bush-haters among those who are critical of the war efforts, it would be inaccurate to use a wide brush to paint all war critics as Bush-haters – the same as it would be overstating things to say that the war issue is the only one that motivates both the critics and haters to raise issue with the way the president is running the country.

“The break for me was the Medicare drug benefit in 2003. It’s just grossly expensive, bad policy. After that, I no longer gave them the benefit of the doubt and started seeing the glass as half-empty,” said Bruce Bartlett, a conservative Bush critic whose book Impostor makes the argument that the president is not at all the fiscal conservative that he makes himself out to be.

The reaction to Impostor has included one happening that Bartlett did not foresee – he was fired from his job at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based conservative think tank.

“And no other think-tank has shown any interest in hiring me – for a variety of reasons,” Bartlett said. “I think they’re afraid of the White House. They’re afraid of losing access. I think they’re afraid of losing contributions. And some simply disagree with some aspects of my argument.”

That kind of backlash is almost par for the course in contemporary politics – where setting up camp anywhere other than the far right or far left leaves one unprotected in the demilitarized zone of the shaky center.

“Many of my sharpest critics have decided to take a position of ignoring me – because they feel that by attacking me, they would draw attention to my book and give me more publicity and help me sell more books. So I think that they decided that the best thing for them to do is to say nothing. Also, I think that some of my critics simply can’t refute my argument – and so it’s easier for them to ignore it as well, so that they’re not forced to confront the logical contradiction in their own position,” Bartlett said.

“Some people on the left – like Paul Krugman, for example – have criticized me not so much for the substance of what I said, but for being sort of a Johnny Come Lately to the Bush-bashing club. Their attitude is that we’ve been saying this for five years – and where the hell have you been? Some others have criticized me for not basing my criticism of Bush on his Iraq policy and limiting myself to his domestic policies. I think that’s more the fringe element. The people that I talk to, sort of the mainstream of the left, buy my argument because I don’t think that they have any choice,” Bartlett told The Augusta Free Press.

Bartlett, for the record, does not view or present himself as a Bush-hater. Blogger and freelance writer James Leroy Wilson is among those who have embraced the label – which is significant because of his political leanings.

“One reason that I wrote this article is that I’m not a Democrat – so you can’t put that on me. And here still are dozens of reasons to hate Bush,” said Wilson, whose January column “Why I Hate Bush” appeared in the on-line magazine The Partial Observer.

A conservative Libertarian, Wilson said he counted himself among the subset of the population that “wasn’t a fan of President Clinton” in the 1990s.

“Even as recently as 2000, most Libertarians, when pressed, would say that the Republicans were not as bad as the Democrats – and some of them would vote Republican as the lesser of the two evils. That’s changing – so that at least the two are considered to be equally bad, or the Republicans are even worse than Democrats,” Wilson said.

“I think that’s a remarkable shift – because it didn’t happen with the first George Bush, who was not a conservative at all. That kind of turnaround didn’t happen with him, and it certainly didn’t happen with Ronald Reagan,” Wilson said.

Wilson said he used the word hate in his column to refer to his feelings about Bush-administration policies.

“Many people, myself included, have used the term hate - mainly because of the policies. But after seeing enough of the policies, and hearing him again, and hearing more and more things about what’s really going on in the White House, it has become more personal. For many people, this started out as a criticism of his policy. He seemed like an affable, nice enough guy at first that it wasn’t personal – but for some people it has become personal over time,” Wilson told the AFP.

Charlottesville-based Democratic Party activist and blogger Waldo Jaquith, for one, doesn’t understand why things have become so personal for some people.

“I was raised with the idea that the word hate is extremely strong,” Jaquith said. “So it might be OK to hate Adolf Hitler. It’s OK to hate Satan. These are acceptable figures to whom the word hate can apply. I would proudly wear the badge of hater of many of Bush’s policies. But the man? I don’t like him, but hate him?”

It is bad enough that the White House has turned to defending itself by describing critics of the Bush administration as Bush-haters, Jaquith said, “but it’s worse still that there are actual critics of the administration who would allow themselves to be so pigeonholed to actually call themselves Bush-haters. No rational discussion can actually be held once you’re attacking the president himself. You’ve gone off the deep end at that point.”

“Part of my surprise comes from having come of age while Bill Clinton was president – and I found it as unfathomable then as I do now that some Republicans hate now and hated then President Clinton as much as they did. I found the politics of personal attack really distasteful – and I resolved then that I would not treat the president like that. I was so incensed to see President Clinton treated with so little respect that I find it just as distasteful to see President Bush treated like that,” Jaquith said.
“As a liberal Democrat, I hope that my fellow Democrats would hold themselves to a higher standard than the sort of Republicans who attacked Clinton as they did,” Jaquith said.

“That might be idealistic. It might be naive. But I certainly hope it is the case that these self-described Bush-haters actually hate his policies. They might find him distasteful or a simpleton – pick your insulting term. But he’s a tough guy to hate. He seems like a nice guy, when you get right down to it,” Jaquith told the AFP.

Augusta County Republican activist and blogger Steve Kijak tries to relate a similar message to friends and coworkers of all political persuasions.

“I have a few friends who are Democrats who I know I can talk back and forth on issues with. Unfortunately, there aren’t many people on the other side who are willing to do that,” Kijak said.

Recounting an exchange with an antiwar protestor in Staunton earlier this month that turned personal in short order, Kijak said he knew he “wasn’t going to change her, and she wasn’t going to change me.”

“But it got so personal that we couldn’t even have that conversation – she wouldn’t even respond to me,” Kijak said.

“You’ve got a core group. They hate him. They’re very frustrated that they weren’t able to get their man elected. They feel that the 2000 election was stolen. And then they proceed to tell you everything else the man has done wrong,” Kijak said.

“The agenda that they push has changed several times. It has gone from Bush started the war for oil. Once the blood-for-oil argument failed to get traction, they moved on to he’s fighting daddy’s war now. It’s amazing how many talking points we’ve gone through – and there’s going to be more to come, I’m sure,” Kijak said.

One effect of the Bush-hating phenomenon, according to Brian Darling, the director of U.S. Senate relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, is that it seems to be driving news-media coverage of the Bush administration.

“There’s been a lot of focus, for example, on what happened in Vice President Cheney’s personal life related to his recent hunting trip,” Darling said.

“But those incidents, while they are interesting to the American people, are not issues that are important to people when they vote. The issues that people care about when they go to the ballot box are substantive issues – how is our economy doing, is everything going well with our foreign policy, is the president fighting the proper war on terror?” Darling said.

“You do have a lot of personal attacks against the president, but they don’t detract from the real issues that matter to the American people,” Darling told the AFP.

George Mason University political-science professor Mark Rozell counters that “anti-Bush sentiments are much more influential today – because much of the general public has moved increasingly in that direction, opposing the president and his policies.”

“The Bush-hating phenomenon was not so important until the president’s popularity more generally started to decline – at which point the voices of Bush’s strongest opponents take on much more importance, because much of public opinion is beginning to dovetail with the views of those who haven’t liked Bush from the beginning,” Rozell said.

“If the war continues to go badly in Iraq, and people become more anxious about the economy, and they perceive that there have been a number of significant setbacks in the Bush administration recently, public opinion is going to continue to move much more in the direction of those who have been opposed to the president from the beginning,” Rozell told the AFP.

That the haters could wield this kind of influence on public opinion is not at all a surprise to Kidd.

“I don’t think that the Bush-haters of today are any different that what the Clinton-haters were in the ’90s or the Reagan-haters in the early ’80s,” Kidd told the AFP.

“It was dirty with Reagan and Iran-Contra and Oliver North. George Bush the elder was a transition president. He didn’t create a lot of waves. There wasn’t a lot of personal hatred toward him – but if you think back, the personal animosity on the left was directed at Dan Quayle,” Kidd said.

“When Clinton was elected, a lot of people on the right said it was a fluke, that it wouldn’t have happened if Perot hadn’t been there. So the right was offended at Clinton’s election, because they didn’t think it was fair – meaning the ideological right had a reason to be upset, and they expressed what they were upset about,” Kidd said.

“They pounded away at Clinton on moral issues. They pounded away at Clinton on health care. Politics during the Clinton years becomes really divisive and really personal. Clinton can’t do anything without somebody hitting him personally for it,” Kidd said.

“That carries right over into George W. Bush. But this time, the left is energized – because they feel like the 2000 election was unfair. So they’re energized. Sept. 11 sort of muted the politics of personal destruction for maybe a year – but with the walkup to Iraq, and then the beginning of the war, and as it drags on, the left finds its voice again, and the voice is directed at the personal,” Kidd said.

“Rather than saying I disagree with the policy on Iraq, or I disagree with the policy on health care, it becomes a personal thing. And increasingly, that’s what passes for political discourse these days,” Kidd said.

Storming the court – and paying the price

Column by Chris Graham

Elizabeth Hood doesn’t look as fondly at raucous postgame celebrations that include fans rushing a college-basketball court as some of us might.

“I stood up at my chair right there, and they knocked me over,” said Hood, a retired usher who worked University of Virginia athletics events for more than 30 years, during a recent visit to University Hall.

The chair on press row that she had been sitting in for the UVa. home basketball game with Duke a few years back rolled over her ankle in the melee – “and broke it all the way through,” Hood said.

“The strength coach saved my life, they said. It was four or five football players behind me on top of me. If he hadn’t come and pulled them off, I probably would’ve died. That’s what they told me,” Hood told The Augusta Free Press.

A recent celebration following another game involving Duke – at Florida State earlier this month – brought fresh public attention to the issue of these kinds of celebrations. A national-television audience saw FSU fans streaming onto the court with time still on the game clock – prompting Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski to send his bench players and coaches and other team personnel to the safety of the locker room for the final 1.7 seconds of the 79-74 Blue Devil loss.

“There’s such a great prospect for a tragedy when you see fans rushing the court or rushing the field at the end of a game – that caught up in that euphoria, there’s a great chance that somebody is going to get trampled. And certainly there’s a great potential for property damage. Just look at all of the reporters with laptops – who could see their property destroyed because of an onrush of people,” said Michael McCann, a professor at the Mississippi College School of Law and a regular contributor to The Sports Law Blog.

“When you’re caught up in that euphoria, it’s hard to put it away and not acknowledge it,” McCann said.

“Teams and security firms hired by teams have to be very cognizant of the potential tragedies that might arise when fans rush the court at the end of games. I think we’ve been lucky, to be honest. I think we’ve been really lucky that we haven’t seen an awful event happening with fans rushing the court,” McCann told the AFP.

Greg Skidmore, also a contributor to The Sports Law Blog, said schools are lucky as well not to have been made the subject of a headline-grabbing lawsuit as a result of incidents like those involving Hood and others injured in these celebrations.

“The main concern is the inherent dangers of hundreds or more students jumping over barriers and over other fans and rushing onto the court” Skidmore said.

“It’s already happened that somebody has gotten really hurt in these kinds of situations. And what I see happening in the future is that somebody is going to get hurt or even killed again, and they’re going to sue the university – claiming that the university or whoever owns the arena didn’t take reasonable action to keep fans off the court,” Skidmore said.

Skidmore points to policies put in place at schools like the University of Florida that threaten the loss of ticket privileges and even the prosecution of fans who run onto the court after a game as being only logical in terms of trying to prevent a situation from getting out of control quickly.

“If that’s all that it takes to keep students off the court, it’s going to be hard for a university or an arena where something bad happens to say, We just couldn’t stop it. They’re not going to have a whole lot of defense to say that they were powerless to stop it,” Skidmore said.

“And really, when you think about it, it shouldn’t take a lawsuit or a tragedy to institute these kinds of policies,” Skidmore said. “We shouldn’t have to wait for a student to die or a player to get severely injured for these kinds of policies to come into effect – especially when these kinds of things have already happened.

“I don’t know how much more of this it’s going to take before schools and the NCAA and conferences realize that this is a dangerous practice, and that it needs to stop,” Skidmore told the AFP.

Even with the success of the new get-tough policy at Florida, it could end up being that the attempt to try to legislate the end to these endgame celebrations is something that is easier said than it is done.

“There is not really a way to stop them – if they really, really want to rush the court,” said Nina Simmons, the assistant director of the Halton Arena/Barnhardt Student Activity Center at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“You cannot hire enough security to truly stop them. But what you can do is create a situation where you have security bringing down students. And you don’t want that. You don’t want the PR nightmare of somebody getting hurt. It’s so much easier to try to control the chaos than it is to do that,” Simmons said.

UNC-Charlotte officials work up game plans before contests where there is the feeling that there might be the potential for fans to end up streaming onto the court, Simmons said.

“Communication with the fans is always a good idea,” Simmons said. “Let them know in advance if you anticipate that this is going to be something that takes place. We always had a very good idea – we could read the students. We had one game where we played Cincinnati, and if we won, it was an automatic storm the court. It was tradition – plain and simple. So we could anticipate that one – and we could prepare in advance.

“You can put some procedures in place to try to prevent it – but if you’re one of those schools that has that tradition, it’s going to happen,” Simmons told the AFP.

Murray State sports-psychology professor Daniel Wann explains why that is. Wann said the main reason that fans want to storm the court after games is “because that’s just what they’ve seen other schools do.”

“They didn’t sort of imagine this as the way of expressing their exhilaration. They’ve seen other schools on TV storm the court – and that becomes the celebration that’s accepted among the student bodies,” Wann said.

“What happens is, fans at high-level schools do it – and then fans from midmajor colleges or Division II colleges will watch games on TV and see it and say, Hey, that’s what the big boys do, so let’s emulate them. So now you see high-school teams where the fans storm the court. It all gets started with the media portraying it, and fans believing that is the appropriate way to express yourself,” Wann said.

There has been talk in the TV media about instituting policies that would limit or eliminate coverage of postgame celebrations to try to curb their appeal. Wann said “that might have an impact – but it wouldn’t be a very large one.”

“By now, you’ve had several years where this has sort of become the norm – and you can tell it’s a pretty powerful norm, because people storm the court after a win that’s not that big a win. It used to be reserved for beating a hated rival or winning a championship. Now you win a game against a lesser opponent, and you still do it,” Wann said.

“It’s so much a part of the sports lore that if the media quit showing it, it might have a minimal effect – but it’s pretty much wrapped up in mainstream sport now,” Wann told the AFP.

Luci Chavez, a reporter for The News and Observer in Raleigh who was on press row for the Duke-Florida State game from earlier this month that raised awareness of this issue, suffered more than a minimal effect – she was nearly trampled by fans streaming onto the court.

“I even got kicked in the head,” Chavez said the day after the game, still feeling the effects.

“In a situation like that, my personal opinion is that it had nothing to do with the level of security. With a crowd, where there’s a will, there’s a way. They were going to do what they were going to do,” Chavez told the AFP.

Chavez was back at work the next day – while Hood, for her part, was back in action not long after her brush with death.

“I missed one game – one,” Hood said. “I sat up there in the handicapped section for one game. The rest of the games, I was here working with my cast on.”

She remembers avoiding the onrush of students a year later when Virginia bested Duke for the second straight year.

“I had been told to get between the tables for safety reasons. I didn’t try to stop them that night. There was no stopping them when they get that way,” Hood said.

(Published 03-27-06)

Color me purple

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

I was feeling a little red-state the other day.

How I could tell: I found myself watching NASCAR.

“Come on, Elliot. Don’t let him jostle you like that?” I was screaming at the TV.

For no apparent reason.

And then it hit me. Read more

The good things in life

Column by Max Friedman

Sometimes you just have to stop and look around to see the good things in life. I don’t mean houses, cars, jewelry or a nice bank account. There are other things, some of them intangible, that are worth more than gold, and it is only a question of recognizing them for what they are – priceless. Read more

Southpols: The left side of the religion-political divide

The focus on faith and values issues in politics is so much on the religious right and what it does to inject itself into debates on the topics of the day that one can almost fail to recognize that the religious left gets practically nothing in this respect in the way of attention.

The news is that there is indeed a religious left – and it is aiming to offer a competitive counterbalance to Christian conservatives.

“The mainstream religious voice has been entirely too quiet,” said the Rev. Doug Smith, the executive director of the Richmond-based Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy.

“We have allowed too many extreme groups within our circles to redefine what it means to be faithful – and really to redefine what God is all about. I believe that the more mainstream religious community is speaking louder – and I think that we are certainly investing much more time and energy in making sure that the volume of our voice of our priorities is turned up,” Smith told The Augusta Free Press.

Religious conservatives have been growing steadily in political influence dating back to the mid-1960s. Their successes are many – two elections of Ronald Reagan, two elections of George W. Bush, the Republican Party takeover of Congress in 1994.

The track record of the right makes it easy to overlook the fact that the religious left was the driving force behind two significant political movements that transformed American society in the first two-thirds of the 20th century – the women’s rights movement and the civil-rights movement.

“The role of moderate and progressive religious organizations can be quite significant. History provides that lesson for us,” said Melody Barnes, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.,-based Center for American Progress.

“Looking at moderate and progressive religious movements over time, and the way they’ve joined with the broader progressive movement, has really contributed to really important social change in our country – from abolition to dealing with child-labor laws to workers’ rights to the civil-rights movement. All of those were progressive movements, and many of them were fueled significantly by the voices of interfaith religious leaders,” Barnes told the AFP.

And then, for whatever reason, the religious left fell silent.

“Many people have moved to the right politically because there is no spiritual voice that they hear coming from the left – and they feel that there’s a religiophobia that exists in some segments of the left,” said Rabbi Michael Lerner, the national cochair of the Berkeley, Calif.,-based Network of Spiritual Progressives and the author of The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right.

“Many people feel pushed away by that. People who otherwise agree with the Democratic Party or with the social-change movement, the antiwar movement, the environmental movement, the social-justice movement, nevertheless feel put down by a left that seems to be insensitive to their spiritual aspirations,” Lerner told the AFP.

One of the many challenges faced by religious-left leaders, according to Fred Plumer, the president of the Gig Harbor, Wash.,-based Center for Progressive Christianity, is that “progressive Christians have always felt that we should be judged by our actions as opposed to our beliefs, and that it was actually inappropriate as part of the culture to spend a lot of time talking about one’s beliefs – except when you did that in your personal worship center.”

“A lot of things have not been articulated probably as well as they should have been – about who we are and what we are – as a result of that cultural understanding,” Plumer said.
“It is frustrating to me that we get judged for our silence – and have been pushed to the fringe. But times are changing. There is a response to feeling like you’re being marginalized by the more ultraconservative Christians – who I don’t feel speak for the majority of Christians in this country,” Plumer told the AFP.

The resurgence of the religious left, to Plumer’s dismay, is a result at least in part of progressives “learning to articulate out of a need rather than probably what we may or should have been doing all along.”

That the left is still struggling to emerge from the right’s shadows could lead to the temptation for spiritual-progressive leaders to adopt the tactics of religious conservatives.

“To their credit, part of what has happened is that the religious right had a much larger megaphone – that while the civil-rights movements and those other movements were under way, the religious right became really concerned about that and, to their tactical credit, developed media outlets and developed a way of communicating with people who shared many of their views to try to elevate their goals in a way that moderate and progressive religious leaders did not,” Barnes said.

Progressives are working busily to develop their own communications strategies – but significantly, they do not plan to use the right as their model in this.

“Last week, I was asked to debate a pastor of one of the largest churches in the state of Washington – and this person started out his debate by quoting things that I’d written 30 or 40 years ago to try to embarrass me. This technique is one that you can find on Fox News – and it’s not one that I want to see the left engaged in. I don’t want to see a spiritual left end up being a bunch of spiritual bulldogs fighting the right with the right’s weapons,” Lerner said.

“Are we going to be able to hand out voting guides? Probably not with the same impact – not with the same effect. Because we can sit in the church and have Republicans and Democrats and independents who believe that basically we’re all trying to work for a better world and a more just world – and we can have conversations about this. And we do that all the time in our more progressive churches,” Plumer said.

“It is difficult for us to put out something that says, This is the way that a real Christian should vote. And I hope that doesn’t change. I want to struggle with those issues,” Plumer said.

The impact of the re-emergence of the religious left is not likely to be the counterweight that progressives would like to see.

“I don’t know that it can be comparable,” said Charles Kimball, a religion professor at Wake Forest University.

“There aren’t as many easy themes or uniting themes that people who come from the left side of the political and religious spectrum all agree on the way we’ve seen some of the issues on the religious right that have been easier to rally people around. So I don’t know that you’ll see something comparable – but you are certainly seeing more people getting actively involved in the political sphere from what we could call the religious left,” Kimball told the AFP.

“I do not anticipate the religious left to become as big as the Christian-conservative movement. The reason is that the numbers of people who would describe themselves as members of the religious left is just not as large as the religious right,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political-science professor at the University of Mary Washington.

“It’s also not clear where to draw the line of where the religious left is. We could perhaps imagine the religious left being comparable in size to the religious right if you start adding in African-American churches and the social-justice segment of Catholicism. But it is by no means clear how big this movement is going to be and how unified it’s going to be,” Farnsworth told the AFP.

Conservative scholar Joseph Loconte is more to the point on this.

“I don’t see that kind of political strength coming from the religious left – because they don’t seem to be terribly representative of ordinary people, ordinary Americans, the values that ordinary Americans have. They don’t seem to be terribly representative. They do seem to be out of step with the mainstream,” Loconte said.

“I know it’s difficult for my American friends to acknowledge it, but part of the reason that religious conservatives, Christian conservatives and others, have been so successful is that they tap into the commonsense instincts of so many Americans,” Loconte said.

“It’s not just a failure of liberals to quote-unquote ‘get their message out’ – we hear that constantly from liberals and Democrats, that it’s a failure to get their message out. They’ve gotten their message out, and many Americans are throwing it back in their faces. They’re not interested in some of – not all, but some of – the more radical aspects of their agenda,” Loconte told the AFP.

Lerner hears these kinds of statements from conservatives about the potential of the religious left and realizes that the impact is being felt in the here and now.

“It’s not just, Let’s be more left, or let’s be more right. It’s, Let’s go back to the spiritual values that we hold, and truly put them in a position to shape our daily lives and our institutions. That’s a different way of doing politics – and I think it could have a very big impact on the Democratic Party and across the political spectrum,” Lerner said.

Barnes is there as well.

“This is why moderates and progressives in the religious community are not interested in replicating the religious right,” Barnes said. “There are a number of concerns that they have about the way the religious right has done business over the years – their my-way-or-the-highway, we’re-gong-to-turn-our-view-of-Scripture-into-law kind of approach. The moderate and progressive religious community is more interested in being prophetic than being partisan – in speaking from the values that they hold dear and they hold true from their religious beliefs and speaking truth to power.

“There’s not a desire to take the model of the religious right and change some of the words and, voila, you have the views of the moderate and progressive religious movement – but in fact to elevate the voices so that there’s an elevation of the values and the views of those who come from the moderate and progressive community,” Barnes said.

(Published 03-20-06)

Absolutely great putting

Golf Things Considered column by John Rogers
JSpencerRogers@msn.com 

Until Tiger came on the scene, Jack Nicklaus was widely considered to be the best putter of all time, at least in terms of making a putt when it’s needed the most. Nicklaus’ unique crouching stance and his stroke make one thing clear about putting – it’s not just about having “textbook” mechanics. No doubt Nicklaus’ putting stroke managed to satisfy the laws of physics, or he would not have dropped so many putts during his incredible career; but what set Jack apart was his ability to make a great stroke despite the gremlins of fear and all the other demons that whisper in our ears when we pick up the flat stick. Read more

Grappling with Attitude: Virginia promoter talks about changes in industry

Story by Chris Graham

It used to be easier for Travis Bradshaw to draw a few hundred fans to his Vanguard Championship Wrestling shows.

“The whole business changed after The Attitude era,” said Bradshaw, whose Smithfield-based promotion runs shows across the Commonwealth.

“Kayfabe got killed, and wrestling got a bad reputation. That made it harder on us little guys,” Bradshaw said.

“Now when I go into schools and try to rent the gymnasium, I get turned down left and right. It’s an instant, We don’t want that in our building,” Bradshaw said.

“They compare what we do to what’s on television. They think that I’m going to bring people in, and I’m going to have half-naked women wrestling in Jell-O, and I’m going to have all other kinds of distasteful skits. I try to argue all the time – You can’t judge me based on what you see on television. But it happens,” Bradshaw told Off the Top Rope.

Bradshaw wouldn’t have guessed a decade ago that it would have happened that he would be involved in the pro-wrestling business as a promoter.

He trained to be an in-ring performer – though his early paying gigs had him working for the most part as a ring announcer. He got involved in the VCW operations behind the scenes in 1996 because of his work as a ring announcer in indy promotions scattered across the Mid-Atlantic – helping line up workers from outside the Hampton Roads area for bookings.

In 1998, Bradshaw took over for the promotion’s founder and original owner, Ronald “Big Daddy” Nowel.

“I was scared to death at first, to be honest with you,” Bradshaw said of the transition. “We all have our dreams of making it one day, and my original goal, like a lot of people’s, was to be a worker. I wanted to be a wrestler. I wanted to be on television, rich and famous, et cetera.

“Obviously, that didn’t work out for me. What did work – and I was always told, stick with what you know, stick with what works for you – ring announcing was working for me. I was being booked all over the place. I was working every weekend,” Bradshaw said.

“I enjoyed ring announcing, and decided to stick with that. But never in my wildest dreams did I think I would run my own show. It just wasn’t a dream or goal of mine to do that. And I didn’t think I knew enough. But when it all got dumped in my lap, it was like, wow,” Bradshaw said.

“I had to do hands-on learning. The only good thing I can say about is that I had so much experience working for other people and knowing how they ran their locker rooms – and sometimes how not to run a locker room. I kind of learned from my experiences,” Bradshaw said.

Bradshaw has also learned to adapt – somewhat – to wrestling in the post-Attitude era. Originally Virginia Championship Wrestling, Bradshaw went with the name change to Vanguard to facilitate the marketing and distribution of the promotion’s DVDs.

“It was suggested to us that we make the name change because the thought was that nobody would buy the DVDs on-line if they thought it was limited to Virginia,” Bradshaw said.

“I agreed and disagreed with the point. The point that was made was that if you were from New York City, you would see the name Virginia Championship Wrestling and think it was Southern wrestling, and that it would be terrible. I could see the point – and the goal, of course, was to expand geographically,” Bradshaw said.

The promotion focuses on the Hampton Roads area – but it also puts on shows in Roanoke and the Shenandoah Valley, with plans to come to Harrisonburg later this year.

The biggest challenge facing Bradshaw is – well, there’s the issue with the way people view the wrestling industry today.

“I don’t think it’s anywhere near where it was when I first started. It was very easy in our earlier years to draw 200 or 300 people. Now we have to scrap and fight to get those 200 or 300 people. It takes a lot of work just to draw a little crowd,” Bradshaw said.

Just as challenging is keeping the talent happy.

“The bigger problem we have is that we have some local talent and some guys that are more established. The challenge is trying to use those people properly and maintain their storylines and characters and yet still bring in new and fresh faces, which you have to do,” Bradshaw said.

“It becomes personal to the point where you almost are scared to become friends with anybody because you don’t want anybody to take it personally if you can’t use them for a show,” Bradshaw said.

“You have to rotate out people that you really don’t want to not use, but you’ve got to make room for somebody new,” Bradshaw said.

(Published 03-20-06)

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