November

Today's Washington Post op-ed page featured a string of commentaries about President Kennedy. My favorite of them, by the way, was a fascinating piece on the death of the president's son in 1963. My first reaction was to roll my eyes and wonder if I could endure a month of hagiographic what if. But then I gained some perspective:

• We're coming upon the fiftieth anniversary of a president's killing. 
• His death coincides with a remarkable number of turning points in America's story at home and abroad.

Though JFK wasn't innocent of vices, he was the last president to serve in an age when we tended to revere and look up to our presidents. In the fifty years since his passing we have been led by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. 

In the fifty years preceding Kennedy's death we were led by Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, FDR, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Woodrow Wilson. 

Both those lists are filled with presidents of varying abilities, but it's a little shocking to think of the difference in how those two sets of presidents conducted themselves, reacted to adversity, and commanded the respect of the people they served. Perhaps we're also mourning the loss of respect for an institution as we're mourning the loss of a compelling young American 50 years ago November. 

Follow Up

Since writing my previous post, I saw a few extra stories worth reading regarding the shutdown. Thank you, Twitter.

About why it hasn't ended already. Very prescient.

About morale among federal workers.

About the stutter-step start to the Affordable Care Act.

The Shutdown

When the shutdown of the Federal Government began on Tuesday, it was an amusement to me. There they go again was my foremost thought, and the whole affair struck me as somewhat silly. But then it actually started to interfere with my work. My economics students had a small assignment due Friday about economic indicators, and many of the websites from the Commerce and Labor departments were shut down, preventing them from easily getting answers to questions. Teachable moment, I guess. But then I tried to search for political cartoons for my politics class and I found it pretty hard to find cartoons about the War Powers Resolution of 1973 without being able to use the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

Though obnoxious, these obstacles didn't make my job impossible. I think of the people whose jobs aren't available as a result, including one relative and a handful of friends. What for me is obnoxious must for them be maddening. And then I think of the custodians, data processors, and entry-level folks who get their income streams and jobs interrupted . . . I'm sympathetic.

As I've followed the news this week it seems as if the media has come down pretty decisively against the Republicans, or at least the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party. The consensus around blaming them is probably for good reason. Even some of the conservative writers I've followed acknowledge that forcing a shut down of the government was tactically stupid. What they (Gerson, Douthat, Krauthammer, and Magliocca) offer is worth reading. Ross Douthat would probably take issue with me branding him conservative . . . I regularly find his point of view and thoughtfulness refreshing.

As a teacher, I've had cause to clarify this event for my kids, especially since many were asking me what was going on since the shut down served as a dog-at-my-homework moment. Uncle Sam is still issuing a lot of checks, I have to clarify, for the shutdown hasn't affected Social Security, Medicare, and SNAP. Nor has it furloughed members of the Armed Forces (thought the PX stores on which those servicemen rely to make costs reasonable aren't working).

So, we have a government shutdown but the three biggest drivers of the deficit (Social Security, Medicare, and Defense) keep on keepin' on. That's a teachable moment.

It's been a teachable moment for this writer who harbors conservative instincts still. Some of the lessons I'm learning:

• I'll divide my blame 60% Republicans and 40% Democrats for this episode. 
• This episode is definitely regrettable. 
• I'm incensed at how the costs of this shutdown are being felt most acutely by some unintended elements of the population. The friends (and relative) I have working for the government are middle class young parents who work hard, save wisely, contribute to their communities, and try their hardest to be good moms and dads. In the short run I guess their kids benefit from a little more one-on-time with mom and/or dad (by the way, to those parents, enjoy as best as you can this interruption with them . . . at least it's a silver lining to a gray cloud), but in the grander scheme, government has told them that their work and talents don't matter and aren't wanted, at least for a few days. What's worse, to be told one's job is non-essential or that it's essential but we don't know when we'll pay you? Either way, what a dumb message to send. Meanwhile . . .
• checks to other constituencies keep rolling. I'm talking Medicare and Social Security. Obviously we can't stop those checks from rolling (to not do so would be cruel). But perhaps that's the point. The President and both parties in Congress knew that a shutdown wouldn't and couldn't go that far. So why not shut things down? It's only the young and working folks who'll get pinched. (My apologies, that might have been too acidic of a comment). 
• I'm reminded of how public goods are good. No free access to bls.gov? No easy access to loc.gov or archives.gov? No access to the Smithsonian? I'm glad to pay taxes to keep those things open. Wait a minute, I'm paying taxes to keep them open, but they're not open. 
• And if the public goods I care about are this meaningful to me, what about services to those who really struggle paycheck to paycheck. I heard last night that Head Start is a nonessential government service. 

So, Washington, I'm learning. What was at first a snicker grew into annoyance and is now maturing into the philosophical.

A Parenting Dilemma

We retreated to what is becoming our default retreat, Hickory Run State Park, and camped there this past weekend. Until a storm chased us away, we were having a wonderful time.

The campsite I like best is set against beautiful woods (site 1 is my favorite but this weekend we were at site 2, nearly as great). There are no other sites to our west, and if you're there at the right time, the only sounds you hear is the breeze in the trees and a gentle roar of Hickory Run flowing at the bottom of the hill near our campsite.

Upon arrival, the boys wanted to go down the hill and play. I thought nothing of it, having played in woods for most of my childhood. But our friends kept accompanying the boys down the hill. At one point, I thought there might be some overreaction: what supervision do two good-natured boys need alongside a Pennsylvania creek? But on one trip I tagged along, and I saw something both beautiful and terrifying.

As the creek meanders to the southwest, the terrain quickly rises. Following what you think is a bank, you find yourself suddenly atop a rock cliff cut by the creek, ten feet or so above the creek. In other words: there's a cliff down there. No warning. Just a potential fall high enough to be, well, fatal.

And this is one of the great challenges of fatherhood: Do I let him play down there? Do I allow him the wonder of exploring woods, of traipsing paths dirty, rocky, or rooted? Does loving him mean I allow him freedom, or does loving him mean hovering, and squelching a good part of the joy a boy finds exploring in the woods outside of the gaze of parents?

It's Sunday afternoon and I watched no football

I didn't watch any yesterday, either, but I was only a peripheral college football fan at best. In the wake of the Penn State scandal (and the NCAA's response) I can't watch it at all.

Back to Sunday. There was a day, and I recall it not too long ago, when sitting in front of the TV nearly all day to watch football was the way to spend a day. Today, however, I turned on the 1pm matchups, saw nothing interesting, looked out the window, decided to run 3 miles, then came home and forgot football was even on. I watched three minutes of a 4 pm game, then came the commercial break, which prompted me to watch a 44-year-old Cold War thriller.

My Eagles played Thursday night. Awful game. Didn't watch much of it past halftime. When I see my team playing Thursday or Monday, I'm initially happy that my Sunday is clear to watch more, better matchups. But then the product I see on TV leave me feeling "meh."

If the NFL were a stock I would sell it. Games now are caught in something of a limbo between encouraging hyper-tempo offenses but trying to prevent players from inflicting devastating injuries. At the college level (feeder programs for the league), teams are coming up with more high-tempo schemes but have no choice but to bend and twist arcane NCAA rules to field championship teams. At the high school level, many parents wince at the idea of their kids playing football, and they push their kids into safer pursuits such as soccer and lacrosse. At suburban high schools, where I teach, hallways are bereft of the mountain-like young men who would make you nudge a colleague and say "Surely, he's a football player." Simply, there just seem to be better things to do than watch a game over the weekend. And I don't think I'm alone in that.

I'm shocked . . . good TV news journalism?!?!

CBS News has video of a debate from Face the Nation regarding the Syria episode that is quite good. It seems so much more mature than a lot of the talking head fare we're exposed too. Either that, or I really am a sucker for Michael Gerson and David Gergen. I encourage you to watch if you're in the mood for elevated debate on the Syria crisis which seems to have lapsed.

My favorite Sunday reads

So, what did I find most interesting in today's news . . .

Ross Douthat's column, centered on a faux conversation with Vladimir Putin's, is a winner.

Charles Lane writes on Cuba's decay in The Washington Post. So much attention has been focused on the hells in North Korea and Syria that the West has perhaps lost site of the Caribbean's hermit regime.

The Post also ran an essay that is a bit troubling, speaking to the observation that images from Syria aren't moving the American public to support war there. The piece makes me think a lot about how fifty years ago, moving images from TV moved the American public away from ambivalence on civil rights.

Oh, and let us not forget that today is the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.Two good links: from the National Park Service and from PBS.  

Thank you, CNET, for offering this gem on automotive excellence from Detroit at the nadir of America's industrial age.

Oh, and one interesting observation. I woke up early today and found a way of spending Sunday morning that was even nerdier than combing the news. I notice that now my Twitter feed is full of an excess number of Tweets about the Eagles' game, which I guess means that on a game day the-early-bird-catches-the-worm thing applies to getting news that way. Sometimes I can fall prey to arrogance about watching and reading things on my schedule. Is it possible that Twitter can throw us back into "appointment" viewing, just now on a smaller screen?

However, for the record when I turned on the TV for today's Eagles game, it was on the same channel as I had left it Friday night. We went 39 hours without watching any live television.