Breaking Glass - "You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that - celotex interior! with - fluorescent - tubes!"

We invited friends to go with us to see The Glass Menagerie, but they opted out.  I sort of understood.  Isn't this one of those mandatory plays that's depressing and hard?  I remember long ago seeing a movie or the play, but it didn't make a lasting impression.

But it's considered one of the great American plays by one of the greatest playwrights.  So we went.

Right off, as the tiny Out North theater space darkened, I was struck by the music - unfortunately not live - but still invoking a mood that fit the play perfectly.  (I later asked the director about the music since I thought it worked so well.  He said he hadn't liked the CD that came when they bought the rights to do the play, so he composed the opening piano part himself and pulled together other music for other parts.)

A mother, son, and daughter with a limp.  Dad, whose portrait hangs over the mantle, we learn as the play proceeds, was a charmer who one day just up and left.  The southern society Mom had grown up in - complete with ritualized gentleman callers - has now been replaced by factories and, in her case, poverty.  Only the son's meager income at the shoe factory keeps the family barely surviving the Depression of the 1930s in St. Louis.

Stage before the play began

The family members, collectively and  individually, are all outsiders.  For Mom, poverty keeps her an outsider from her DAR sisters, and she lives in a fantasy world of her lost Southern upbringing.  Laura, the daughter, with her bad leg (the script calls for a leg brace, but they played it with a shoe with a very high lift) was an outsider in school where she was painfully shy.  And Tom, the son, with his interest in writing, and his strange mother and sister, never fit in with the guys at school either.    All this sets up the basic conflict:  Mom wants to marry off Laura.  Tom works at the shoe factory to support the family but desperately wants adventure which he tastes nightly at the movies.  Laura is fine in the cocoon of home, tending her glass animals.  Beyond the walls, she gets sick. 

Mock up of the set

And the family tensions eloquently explode (Scene 3 excerpt from absolutenglish):

AMANDA: You're going to listen, and no more insolence from you ! I'm at the end of my patience !
[He comes back toward her.]
TOM: What do you think I'm at? Aren't I supposed to have any patience to reach the end of, Mother? I know, I know. It seems unimportant to you, what I'm doing - what I want to do - having a little difference between them !You don't think that -
AMANDA: I think you've been doing things that you're ashamed of. That's why you act like this. I don't believe that you go every night to the movies. Nobody goes to the movies night after night. Nobody in their right mind goes to the movies as often as you pretend to. People don't go to the movies at nearly midnight, and movies don't let out at two a.m. Come in stumbling. Muttering to yourself like a maniac! You get three hours' sleep and then go to work. Oh, I can picture the way you're doing down there. Moping, doping, because you're in no condition.
TOM [wildly]: No, I'm in no condition !
AMANDA: What right have you got to jeopardize your job - jeopardize the security of us all? How do you think we'd manage if you were -
TOM: Listen !You think I'm crazy about the warehouse? [He bounds fiercely toward her slight figure.] You think I'm in love with the Continental Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that - celotex interior! with - fluorescent - tubes! Look! I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains - than go back mornings! I go ! Every time you come in yelling………
that God damn 'Rise and Shine!'- 'Rise and Shine!' I say to myself, 'How lucky dead people are ! 'But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self - selfs' all I ever think of. Why, listen, if self is what I thought of, Mother, I'd be where he is -G 0 N E ! [Pointing to fathers picture.] As far as the system of transportation reaches! [He starts past her. She grabs his arm.] Don't grab at me, Mother!
AMANDA: Where are you going?
TOM: I'm going to the movies!
AMANDA: I don't believe that lie!
TOM [crouching toward her, overtowering her tiny figure. She backs away, gasping]: I'm going to opium dens ! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals' hang-outs, Mother. I've joined the Hogan gang, I'm a hired assassin, I carry a tommy-gun in a violin case! I run a string of cat-houses in the Valley! They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, I'm leading a double-life, a simple, honest warehouse worker by day, by night a dynamic tsar of the underworld, Mother. I go to gambling casinos, I spin away fortunes on the roulette table ! I wear a patch over one eye and a false moustache, sometimes I put on green whiskers. On those occasions they call me -El Diablo ! Oh, I could tell you things to make you sleepless ! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. They're going to blow us all sky-high some night ! I'll be glad, very happy, and so will you ! You'll go up, up on a broomstick, over Blue Mountain with seventeen gentlemen callers! You ugly - babbling old - witch. [He goes through a series of violent, clumsy movements, seizing his overcoat, lunging to do door, pulling it fiercely open. The women watch him, aghast. His arm catches in the sleeve of the coat as he struggles to pull it on. For a moment he is pinioned by the bulky garment. With an outraged groan he tears the coat of again, splitting the shoulder of it, and hurls it across the room. It strikes against the shelf of Laura's glass collection, there is a tinkle of shattering glass. LAURA cries out as if wounded.]
[MUSIC. LEGEND: 'THE GLASS MENAGERIE'.]
L A U R A [shrilly] : My glass ! - menagerie. . . . [She covers her face and turns away.]

The Glass Menagerie opened on Dec. 26, 1944 - Williams was 33 - in Chicago.  And if you do the math, you'll figure out that he would have been 100 years old this year. 

As I said at the beginning, I saw going to the play more as an assignment, but the acting was superb and the play proves itself as an enduring classic.  I suspect it will touch a lot of people in our own time of Depression and where many young adults find themselves living back home with their parents instead of having adventures out in the world.  And Mom's life in memory of a Southern charm eclipsed by a new soulless, industrial culture will seem familiar to many who have seen the rapid changes brought on by technology during their lifetimes.

There are only four characters.  Amanda, the mother, played by Scarlet Kittylee Boudreaux.  The son Tom, played by Max Aronson.  The daughter, Laura, played by Sarah Bethany Baird.  And the gentleman caller, Jim, played by Patrick Parker Killoran.

I was lost in their world with them for the duration.  Everything they did was right.  I really don't know how Laura pulled it off, but her change from painfully shy to fully engaged at the end worked perfectly.  

[OK, I need to explain this last picture.  I've learned with my tiny Canon Powershot, that stage lighting tends to wash out the faces unless I set the camera to a few steps darker than the meter automatically would do.  But since I don't shoot during the play (unless they say I can) I forgot about my camera, and only quickly pulled it out to get the actors bowing.  But it was too late to change the setting.  And then they were gone.  It was too bright and trying to get the faces better exposed in photoshop made for weird effects.  So I tried the glass filter (this is the Glass Menagerie, right?), and it wasn't that successful either, but I think the effect works better than the original. (If you double click it, you can see it much better than blogspot shows it.)  And if you know the actors, you would recognize them.]


This is, as I said, one of the great American plays.  A terrific production [really, I do support Out North, but I wouldn't lie to you either] is playing in town that makes this a great evening out in an intimate little theater where you can see the expressions on the actors' faces because you're that close.    It's playing until May 22, Thursdays-Sundays.  Get more information at Out North.

"Great minds discuss ideas . . . "

From goodreads.com:

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

How many of you can read this as simply descriptive of how things are and not judgmental?

Descriptive, say, like "Great athletes compete in the Olympics, average athletes play softball and ski after work, and poor athletes watch television"?

Somehow, "poor athlete" doesn't overlap with a moral assessment the way 'small minds' does in this quote.  I'm trying to figure out why.   Surely we can recognize that people with 'great minds' have some abilities that people with 'small minds' don't have in the same way great athletes can do things average athletes can't.

Yet 'small minds' seems to say much more about who you are as a person, than does 'poor athlete.'  Maybe it's because people with small minds don't know this fact about themselves.  After all, it's just easier to know a good athlete when we see one.  An athlete's ability is much more tangible than a great mind's ability.  We can see someone consistently sink the ball in the basket or run faster than anyone else.  But only in very specific situations do we see that someone's mental ability is tangibly better than our own such as when someone gets the last word in a spelling bee right, or wins a chess tournament or on Jeopardy. Or can fix our computer. 

But these are specialized abilities, almost oddities.  She's very smart, but . . . A great mind is something more than the ability to finish a Sudoku in ten minutes.   We know there are different kinds of intelligence, not just the linguistic/rational/spatial intelligences thought to be captured in IQ tests. Is a great mind one that has many of them?  Actually, Howard Gardner, who developed the concept of multiple intelligences, also has identified five different minds - 

• The Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of major schools of thought, including science, mathematics, and history, and of at least one professional craft.
  
  
• The Synthesizing Mind: the ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others.
  
  
• The Creating Mind: the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions and phenomena.
  
  
• The Respectful Mind: awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups.
  
  
• The Ethical Mind: fulfillment of one's responsibilities as a worker and as a citizen.

Maybe the higher percent one has of all five, the closer one gets to being wise.


Is Eleanor Roosevelt's aphorism insightful or just a snarky put down from an intellectual woman who, because of her wealth and position, was the target of a lot of gossip?

Why is discussing events less important than discussing ideas? And discussing people even less important?  People and events are, it seems to me, the raw data necessary for the ideas of social science and philosophy.

I think we, collectively, need people with a wide variety of skills - people good with their hands, with plants and animals, with machines;  good at music and art, at raising children, at bringing people together,  at taking risks, at avoiding risks.  All these skills are necessary at different times for individual survival and communal prosperity.

One could argue that the progression Roosevelt offers is one of expansion.  At the narrowest level, the focus is people. Putting the individuals into context gets us to events.  And finally we back up further and see those events, not as random or unique, but in a larger context of more enduring ideas about what is good, what is right, what is important, etc. 

Part of me likes the elevation of people who discuss ideas, but not at the expense of people who discuss other things.   One can discuss people, events, and ideas in order to improve the general quality of life or to enhance one's own importance and power over others.

This riff could drift in many different directions.  How do we even know a great mind when we meet one?  How many great minds are there for every thousand people?  What is a great mind even?

Given the anti-intellectualism of some groups today, I think it's important for us to work on understanding what it means to be 'smart.'  In that respect, this post follows up on thoughts I've posted about on elitism.

Our current great political divide compels me to ponder why so many people seem to think they know so much more than they do, and to dismiss people who know far more.  (I'm talking about all folks who are certain about what they know, whether they dropped out of high school or continued on to get a PhD.) All of us need to expand our understanding of why we believe what we believe and how we test our truths.

Of course, Eleanor Roosevelt was probably using 'small minds' in the dictionary sense - narrow-minded; petty; intolerant; mean - and by reinterpreting it literally, I've made an issue out of nothing.

Alaska Redistricting Board: Live Streaming of Meetings And Updated Website

I subscribe to the Alaska Redistricting Board emails.  (Anyone can here.)  Friday I got one which announced that the meetings next week will have live audio streaming.  This means that people can listen in on the discussions on their computers from wherever they are and across the state.  Some past meetings have been available statewide.  The initial board meeting, as I recall, was delayed because of problems with the statewide audio feed.  The two statewide public testimony held in the Anchorage LIO were available statewide.  And at least one Juneau public hearing was broadcast as video and audio. 

Update:  Live Streaming of May 16-20 Alaska Redistricting Board Meetings 

Anchorage, AK - The Alaska Redistricting Board today announced that it will provide live audio streaming of scheduled Board meetings for May 16-20, 2011 via http://alaskalegislature.tv.

Detailed information about all Alaska Redistricting Board meetings and events can be accessed at http://www.akredistricting.org/calendar.

All Board meetings are public meetings and anyone needing special accommodations is requested to call (907) 269-7402 or email info@akredistricting.org.

The Alaska Redistricting Board is responsible for redrawing Alaska's legislative election districts every ten years after the federal Census.  For more information about the redistricting process in Alaska, please visit http://www.akredistricting.org.  

### 

CONTACT:

Taylor Bickford, Assistant Director

Phone:  (907) 269-7402

Email:  tbickford@akredistricting.org 

The board's website has also been updated.  The "History" and "Media Center" tabs have been removed and replaced with "Draft Plans" and "Archive."

Draft Plans tab has the

• district and regional maps, GIS, and population data for Option 1 and Option 2  
• Reports, maps, and/or Population and GIS data (not all groups submitted all items) for each of the private plans:
• Alaskans for Fair Redistricting (AFFR is an Alliance of Union and Native organizations)
• Alaskans for Fair and Equitable Redistricting (AFFER is headed by Republican Party chair)
• Rights Coalition (Democratic Party)
• Alaska Bush Caucus 
• City and Borough of Juneau
• Bristol Bay Borough
• City of Valdez

These are plans submitted March 31, but not the revised plans submitted May 6, 2011.

Archive tab has agendas and audio tapes for most of their

• Board Meetings and
• Public Hearings

All the Plans have been up since right after they were submitted.  Some of the audio has been up already too, but there are fewer missing meetings now, it appears. 

Click on image to go to Board Webpage

The Board also now has a window on the front page (right hand column below "Public Comment") that lists the dates and times of their scheduled meetings.  This improves the ease for people trying to find out the next meeting.  And with the audio streaming of these meetings makes access to what the board is doing easier for people across the state.  Clicking on each meeting gives more information, though they are still having trouble with the linked Google maps.  To my knowledge, the meetings will be at their office:


411 West 4th Avenue, Suite 302
Anchorage, AK 99501


Their Facebook page has also been updated.

The World Ends October 21. Followed By The Next 10,000 Years

[Sorry, Blogger wasn't working for a long time yesterday, and today I had things to do.]

According to Harold Camping of Family Radio Ministry in Oakland, California as reported in the Baptist Press:

the rapture will occur on May 21, 2011 and God will destroy the world 153 days later on October 21.

But while the Baptists don’t disagree with the idea of the end times coming (after all, their members helped keep the Left Behind series on the best seller lists), they just don’t date it May 21, 2011. 

Ralph Tone at the Baptist Press continues:

Should we join the movement? Probably not. Biblical teaching can be an inconvenient truth to those who would set a month, day and year to Christ's return.

Jesus left no doubt about the futility of playing the dating game when he told his disciples three times in Matthew 24 not to go there:

-- "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Matthew 24:36).

-- "Therefore keep watch because you do not know on what day your Lord will come" (Matthew 24:42).

-- "The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect Him" (Matthew 24:44b).

But that’s not their only objection.  It seems Camping doesn’t like organized religion at all.  Tone continues:

Somewhat lost in the hoopla over doomsday dates is Family Radio's more sinister teaching that Christians should not be part of a local church. Yes, you read right. Family Radio is not local church friendly.

The tract further states, "The Holy Spirit has abandoned all churches (and) those still following any church on May 21, 2011 are not saved"

The Next 10,000 Years

Across the Bay from Camping’s headquarters, The Long Now Foundation is building a 10,000 year clock.  They are concerned that the world has lost its sense of the future.  Michael Chabon, in an essay (pdf) linked on The Long Now website, talks about how tangible,  exciting, and worth living for, the future recently was.  But now the future seems to no longer exist.  Chabon writes it had been a long time since he'd given any thought to the world ten thousand years off.

At one time I was a frequent visitor to that imaginary mental locale. And I don’t mean merely that I regularly encountered “the Future” in the pages of science fiction novels or comic books, or when watching a TV show like The Jetsons (1962) or a movie like Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). The story of the Future was told to me, when I was growing up, not just by popular art and media but by public and domestic architecture, industrial design, school textbooks, theme parks, and by public institutions from museums to government agencies. I heard the story of the Future when I looked at the space-ranger profile of the Studebaker Avanti, at Tomorrowland through the portholes of the Disneyland monorail, in the tumbling plastic counters of my father’s Seth Thomas Speed Read clock. I can remember writing a report in sixth grade on hydroponics; if you had tried to tell me then that by 2005 we would still be growing our vegetables in dirt, you would have broken my heart.

It wasn't all good - lots of the images were negative:

Sometimes the Future could be a total downer. If nuclear holocaust didn’t wipe everything out, then humanity would be enslaved to computers, by the ineluctable syllogisms of “the Machine.” My childhood dished up a series of grim cinematic prognostications best exemplified by the Hestonian trilogy that began with the first Planet of the Apes (1968) and continued through The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973). Images of future dystopia were rife in rock albums of the day, as on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974) and Rush’s 2112 (1976), and the futures presented by seventies writers of science fiction such as John Brunner tended to be unremittingly or wryly bleak.

So, what happened to the future?

I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too- distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list— interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)— have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.

Most telling is his comparison of his childhood notion of the future and his son's.

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book.

He wrote all this after hearing about the 10,000 year clock being designed by the Long Now Foundation.  

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects , as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

*The zero in front of 1996 above is in recognition of the need for five digits when you talk about 10,000 years. 

So, why does this matter?  Stewart Brand, one of The Long Now Foundation founders (and 40 years ago of the Whole Earth Catalogs) writes:

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. 

The mechanism is a 10,000 year clock and the myth . . . Well, the myth isn't so clearly spelled out, but it seems to be grounded on replacing "today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set" with  "'slower/better' thinking."

I grew up in a household where money wasn't spent carelessly (in the literal sense of taking care to think about why one was spending money).   The idea was to buy things of quality that last - my grandfather's pocket watch, for example, which was purchased probably before 1920, still works.   I posted in December 2007 about all this and how our consumer society has created a story about how we need to buy and throw away constantly.  This is tied to our daily economic reports, which, on the one hand, complain that Americans don't save enough and are falling deeper in to debt, but, on the other hand, that we aren't spending enough to keep the economy going.

The 10,000 year clock is a visible symbol of thinking further out.  This kind of thinking isn't new.  Europeans planned medieval cathedrals which took up to 100 years to complete, knowing they might never see the finished buildings.   Some North American Native peoples believed that decisions should consider the implications for the next seven generations so that one's descendants inherit a healthy land.

Few if any of our national and state or family decisions consider anything near that.  The clock project is an attempt to recapture a different way of thinking about time.

Signs of Anchorage Summer

Green, brown, and white is one way to describe the different times of the year in Anchorage.  Or light and dark.  Spring and fall are more like curtains opening and closing the main act of Winter, and the shorter but just as spectacular Summer act.

By the calendar, summer doesn't start for five weeks, but the sun doesn't set until after 10pm already, and we're seeing green poke out, and today the sun was warm.  Is that spring?  By my calendar it's summer already.  The first dandelion is already mirroring the sun.  And we had our first breakfast out on the deck yesterday.

And the birch leaves out front are halfway open.



 The names of the seasons are just labels, created by people who lived where there were four distinct seasons.   In Thailand it was rainy and dry, or hot and hotter.  Growing up in LA, the English season names never made sense.  And in Anchorage, the labels don't quite fit either.

With Every Tug - Underpass Art and Poetry

Alaska may not have any billboards, but cyclists in Anchorage do have some poets and artists offering them unique galleries that drivers never see. But 'lay' would be better. 

Those dots and dashes in the corners give Prevail's signature a certain elan.

Not too far away, a little less elegant, and unsigned. 

Clean Trails - Thanks to the Muni and State

I've complained in the past when gravel added treachery to biking around Anchorage, but this year both the State and the Muni were out early cleaning the trails.  I noticed it first on A and C Streets.  One day, the trails were full of gravel, and a few days later it was gone.  Lake Otis and Providence/36th got cleared.  Even Benson and Northern Lights have gotten attention. Thanks!  [I checked out the bad trail link above and it has pictures of very sandy Dimond trails.  Dimond was still pretty bad this year when I was out there a week ago. Midtown and downtown are good.] 

With $4+ gas, a lot more people are likely to discover that biking is a reasonable alternative to driving for many of their short (under 4 miles) trips.  You have to think a little differently - I like side streets with little traffic, you aren't going to make big Costco purchases by bike, but you can park right at the door without paying.  And you get your exercise as you save gas and reduce Anchorage traffic. 

I challenge everyone to think about which trips they can do just as well by bike instead of car this summer.  And for those within 5 miles of work, get your bike out, maybe even serviced if you haven't used it a while, do a short recreation ride or two to get your butt and other muscles back in shape, then target at least once a week riding to work.  It's ok to push the bike up a hill at first.  Eventually, you'll feel great when you make it all the way pedaling.

Next Friday (May 20) is Ride To Work Day.  They even have registration and teams - I guess they've found people need some peer pressure to help them do this.  Whether you do it officially or just on your own - try it.  From the Muni Health Department website:

Anchorage Bike to Work Day 2011 is Friday, May 20th!

Back with the features you've come to know:

• team registration
• drawing for tee-shirts among registered teams
• Bike to Work Festival (May 6th)
• our generous community sponsors 
• on-line survey
• trail count on Bike to Work Day morning

The League of American Bicyclists named Friday 'Bike to Work Day 2011' and many Anchorage events will take place that day. But more than half the cyclists in 2010 also rode another weekday, so ride to suit your schedule!

Link to Bike to Work newsletter

Our Tulips Got Moosed Up

Our tulips disappeared some time in the last few days.  There are remnants left.

But a moose clearly found them tasty.  I watched once from inside the house as a moose, two feet away on the other side of the glass snacked on one flower after another.


I didn't see it happen this time, just the remnants. There weren't any flowers yet.  

In this case it even pulled the whole plant out, bulb and all.  I guess the bulb isn't as tasty as the greens.  




There is evidence in the yard that moose were here, though this pile is among half a dozen that the melting snow revealed  and isn't from the tulip tasting party.  

Time To Stop and Reflect on What's Really Important

I got a call today asking me if I knew anything about Ron Miller.  I met Ron when I started blogging the Alaska Redistricting Board.  He was the Executive Director helping to coordinate the enormously complex task of redrawing the map of the state's 40 house and 20 senate districts.  It's complex because it has to meet various Federal and State constitutional and statutory requirements, involving a lot of data analysis.  There's great pressure because the board has only 30 days to come up with its preliminary draft plan, and then 60 more days to complete the plan.  And how the maps are drawn will greatly influence who gets elected for the next ten years and thus the future of the state.

The board has spent the last few weeks making sure that people in over 30 locations had a chance to meet with the board.  Ron was the man in charge of coordinating all this - both the administrative side (just making all the travel arrangements for five board members and some staffers was a logistic challenge) to the arrangements for all the computer support and working out the districts.  He was the person the board turned to help them get their work done.

My caller had heard that Ron had died.  I've just gotten a confirmation e-mail from a member of the staff.  From that first day when Ron invited me to snack on a cookie in the back after a long, lunchbreak-free six hour meeting, Ron has been unfailingly helpful and cooperative - as have all the staff and the board.  He told me that they weren't allowed to use State money for food, it was staff and board member contributions.  I last saw Ron just two days ago at the final public hearing on Friday. 

Ron tended to stay in the background, but it was clear that the board depended on Ron and his staff to arrange all that was necessary for the board to do its job. 


It's important to sit back regularly and pay attention to what's really important in life, to the people who are important in our lives, to let them know we love them.  Life is short.  Live it well.

Ron, I didn't know you long or well, but my life was better for having met you.  My thoughts are with your family now as they summon the strength to endure your passing and to carry on with you in their hearts.

Writing For the ADN - Trolls and All

About ten days ago, I called Anchorage Daily News editor Pat Dougherty and asked why the ADN hadn't run anything on redistricting, except a couple of cut and pasted press releases.  How the maps are drawn will determine who gets elected to state office for the next ten years.  They're no longer a paper of record he said.  We just don't have the staff. Sean's in Juneau.  There's lots of things to cover, we have to make choices.  I suggested at least they publish the Anchorage district maps proposed by the board.  He said he'd look into it.  Then he asked if I would write a commentary.  I wasn't thrilled, but decided I had a responsibility as a citizen to take the opportunity to share what I knew. (I realize that might sound sappy, but it's exactly how I felt about it.)

A compass piece is limited to 700 words.  That wasn't easy because there was so much background information to convey - it didn't leave much to say.  I sent it in - much in outline form - and said I knew they might not like the style, but it seemed the most reader friendly way to get the facts.  I got an email back from Editorial Writer, Frank Gerjevic, suggesting they post the background bullets in a box and that I write more opinion.

700 words.  It's good discipline, but it also means you have to limit what you say, how you qualify things, the examples you give.  I got it out Wednesday afternoon I think.   It was published Friday.  I had to sign a form saying it was an unpaid, one time affair and that the ADN had rights to it.  And I was supposed to send a photo, but I forgot and they used an old one they had from the last time, which was probably six or seven years ago.

They added the headline, which is normal, but it was definitely one I wouldn't have chosen.  It politicized the piece much more than I intended.  Plus they highlighted a sentence I would have left buried at the end. If they changed anything in the piece itself, I didn't notice,  except in the box they said the board would present its final plan.  I had written, "Present Plans." This was for plans presented by interested parties, the board's final plan isn't due until June 14.   Otherwise, the box contained the necessary background information - though I didn't see it in the online version.   

I tried to be as objective as I could be. I would show where things were uncertain and give evidence for hunches.  I set up the key criteria the board has to meet in creating the plan, then went through each one.  There were others, but I was limited in words, so I chose the ones I thought most important.  700 words didn't give me space to even say that.

1.  One person, one vote - was fairly easy:  they had the stats that showed their districts were well within the allowable deviation. (I didn't independently run the numbers to verify this, but I assumed what they said was true.)
2. No retrogression - I gave the board a thumbs up on this one too.  I did say that the DOJ had to approve it, so they were motivated to keep the nine Native 'majority/effective' seats.  I doubt they would have tried that hard on this one without the DOJ watching.  I don't think a Democratically controlled board would either.  But when you know it won't be approved if you don't do it 'right', that does get your attention.  I didn't have room to talk about why this isn't racial gerrymandering - as one or two board members suggested at one point - and how, in fact, it helped to make sure that Alaska Natives, who make up nearly 20% of the state population now, get  their voice is heard in the legislature.  
3. Districts compact and contiguous - I noted that there was one humongous district (well I didn't use that word) but that the existing approved districts also had one.
4. Socio-economically cohesive - hard to evaluate - there are some questions.  Could be better, but probably a pass.
5. Senate districts composed of contiguous house seats - one that doesn't pass this.  But I pointed out that they couldn't find a way to have not retrogression without this non-contiguous pairing.  (But at Friday's hearing some people found a way.)
6. No political gerrymandering - I knew I needed to be totally factual here.  I acknowledged it was hard to know intent.  I gave an example of a board member saying he didn't know the impact of his plan on constituents.  Given that he is an ex-politician who lost to a currently sitting politician, I said I found it hard to believe.  I didn't say he lied, because I don't know that.  I do know it is hard for me to believe he didn't know.  That is definitely true.  But I also acknowledged that the politician who beat him ended up in a safe district.  I said watching them do the Anchorage map was like watching the pea under the walnut shells.  That's how I felt when it happened.  I simply couldn't keep track of whole districts as they moved neighborhoods back and forth trying to get the population numbers right.  I mentioned some seats where, after the fact, it looked like the lines had been drawn to just get some Democratic incumbents into the same district so they'd have to run against each other.  But I couldn't put up the maps in compass piece. [Hmmm, maybe I could have, I didn't ask.] But I can here.   

The gray area is the board's option 2 for district  21. (Option 1 is the same for these districts.)  The black lines are the old district boundaries.  On the far left is a green triangle that shows  Democrat Les Gara's home.  This was basically his district.  On the right, you can see a little chunk of gray gouged out of the green.  The little green triangle there is Sharon Cissna's home.  You can see it was in her old district inside the black boundaries.  There's enough spill over from all the nearby districts that one could easily draw lines that would have left them in their old districts and gotten the right population numbers.  And Cissna's old district now has no incumbent.     NOTE:  These maps are from Alaskans for Fair Redistricting, a group of union and Native organizations.  I haven't verified them independently. 

Another I mentioned was my own district - or rather former district since my neighborhood was cut out of it.  The old black borders were vertical.  Now, the colored districts are horizontal.  Democrats Berta Gardner - green triangle lower right of pink - and Mike Doogan are now in the same district.  And there's an incumbentless district in much of Gardner's old district, now 26.

I also pointed out that at the public hearings people from Eagle River and Muldoon complained about being paired together in a district.  Yet the board took just enough of a chunk east of Muldoon from Democrat Pete Petersen's district to get the part where he and Senator Wielechowski live and put that into a much more Republican district.

I didn't have enough words to point out the Republicans who were paired with other incumbents and why I think these were either out of necessity (in Southeast they lost a seat and four of five house members are Republican)  or into situations where they were likely to beat the Democrats, but I did mention that there are now 24 Republicans in the House and only 16 Democrats, yet 8 Democrats and only 6 Republicans were paired with incumbents.  The fewer there are, the fewer one would expect to be paired.

I also pointed out  that there were four Republicans and one Democrat on the Redistricting Board, so it was inevitable that the plan would have Republican fingerprints.  I didn't say it would be gerrymandered or corrupt, though there is a hint of possible wrongdoing. I pointed out the circumstantial evidence - I don't think I left out anything significant that pointed in the other direction - and I left it open.  Accident?  Inevitable?  Gerrymandering?

As I mentioned earlier, newspapers, not writers, pick the headlines.  Of course, the Daily News chose a headline that would get readers' reading - "For Republicans, Redistricting Is All Good."  And they highlighted the quote about the fingerprints.  So, if readers thought that I had written the headline, I can understand they might think I was partisan.  But then everyone is partisan to some extent, but I do think I stuck to the facts in my analysis of how the board was doing.

I did also ding the board a bit for their minimal website and poor public notice of meetings and the fact that there are no public computers available to try out the software they use for the mapping, and without which it is really difficult to get all the numbers matched up right.

What I'd forgotten about was the online version gets comments.  I'd given up reading the comments for the online ADN a long time ago, because they are frequently so nasty and shallow.  Here on the blog I let people say what they want, as long as they do it with some reasonable civility.  I don't moderate comments before they are posted, but I reserve the right to take down comments. . . well you can read my criteria below the post.  So, the next post will be on the phenomenon of trolls.