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DCS’ JUANITA WHITE GETS THE AX

The Tennessee Department of Children’s Services announced the dismissal of Shelby County regional administrator Juanita White today citing “personal reasons” of White and the department as reason for her termination

DCS Commissioner Michael Miller made the announcement Friday at the state office building, 170 N. Main, following a meeting with supervisors in the Memphis office. The dismissal comes as the state office is conducting an internal investigation of botched investigations by employees into the deaths of several Shelby County children.

“This office has been through a lot in the last couple of years. This is a very humbling job and we hope to put someone in place who recognizes that,” said Miller.

Miller said other firings have not been ruled out pending the results of the investigation. A Davidson County regional director was also terminated two months ago for “performance and membership on the DCS team.”

Miller said that the Shelby County office has problems with supervision and training. “What we have had is a problem with preparing sufficient supervisory staff to guide them,” said Miller.

In addition to White’s termination, the department named Trudy Weatherford and Bill Hackett interim administrators. Weatherford, a retired DCS employee and former Child Protective Services program director, will head program management throughout the region. Hackett, currently children’s services assistant administrator will lead the Memphis office. Permanent replacement for the position is expected later this summer, chosen by a panel of community leaders, child advocates, and department employees.

Former DCS employee Diana Lowry first made allegations regarding White’s involvement in alleged cover-ups of the deaths of at least six children. Lowry, who was terminated in December 2001, had previously applied for the position of regional director. She has since withdrawn her application.

The investigation into the deaths, originally scheduled for completion in a week, has been delayed following the death of of 8-month-old Dewayne Butler last week. DCS received complaints about abuse of the child in April, but later dismissed the charges as unfounded.

Miller and other administrators met last week with members of the Shelby County Legislative delegation regarding the department’s progress with the investigation and the Shelby County office. Representative Carol Chumney has also planned a public hearing on DCS July 10.

An state audit of the department issued earlier this year listed several findings involving questionable transactions by White and her staff, including the more than $5,000 rental of a yacht club for a department event, expenditures for billboard advertisements, and T-shirts from the spouse of a department employee.

White’s firing comes after the resignations of CPS director Sherry Abernathy and Lou Martinez part of the child fatality review team. Department officials have said that both Abernathy’s and Martinez’s resignations were not related to the problems in the Memphis regional office, but were for retirement and other employment opportunities, respectively.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

THE ERASER

You’ve got to hand it to those clever little problem-solvers at the White House. What a bunch of brainiacs. They have resolved the entire problem of global warming: They cut it out of the report!

This is genius. Everybody else is maundering on about the oceans rising and the polar icecaps melting and monster storms and hideous droughts, and these guys just … edit it out.

“The editing eliminated references to many studies concluding that warming is at least partly caused by rising concentrations of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, and could threaten health and ecosystems,” reports The New York Times. Presto — poof!

What do they care about health and ecosystems? Think of the possibilities presented by this ingenious solution. Let’s edit out AIDS and all problems with drugs both legal and illegal. We could get rid of Libya and Syria this way — take Ôem off the maps. We can do away with unemployment, the uninsured, heart disease, obesity and the coming Social Security crunch. We could try editing out death and taxes, but I don’t think we should overreach right away. Just start with something simple, like years of scientific research on global warming, and blue pencil that sucker out of existence. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Inspiring as the remarkable Bush approach to resolving global warming is — the simplicity of it, the beauty of it, I cannot get over it — does it not suggest a certain cavalier je ne sais quoi about the future? What I mean is, is anybody there concerned about what happens to people?

I realize the energy industry and auto industry and other major campaign contributors would prefer to think global warming does not exist, but how long do you think it will take before reality catches up with all of us? The White House editors (hi, Karl) instead chose to insert a new study on global non-warming funded by … ta-da! … the American Petroleum Institute.

Dear old API, author of innumerable ringing editorials on the desperate need to leave the oil depletion allowance at 27 percent (certain Texas newspapers that shall remain nameless used to run those editorials without changing a single comma), is really swell at representing the oil bidness. Fond as I am of many of API lobbyists I have known over the years, I am not quite sure I want those bozos calling the shots on global warming. I have watched them buy law and bend regulations for decades now, and while I admire their chutzpah, I am impelled to warn you: They have no scruples, they have no decency, and they have no shame. (See 50 years worth of reporting on the industry by The Texas Observer.) Also, they lie.

Well now, danged if that doesn’t bring us to the subject of lying and the White House. Let us set aside the vexing case of the missing weapons of mass destruction and focus on a few items closer to home. Anyone remember President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address? No, no, not the one where he said Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. The one where he said he was going to expand AmeriCorps by 50 percent, from 50,000 up to 75,000, because giving all those young people a chance to work their way through college by doing good for the community is so noble and effective.

“USA Freedom Corps will expand and improve the good efforts of AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to recruit more than 200,000 new volunteers,” he said.

Last week, Bush and Republicans in Congress cut AmeriCorps by 80 percent. According to Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, Congress, under pressure, restored some of it, but it still leaves Americorps with a 58 percent cut and tens of thousands of fewer participants out there teaching poor kids to read, helping old folks in nursing homes, setting up community gardens, and a thousand other good and useful tasks — many of which get the young people started on careers in that kind of work.

Alter notes that restoring AmeriCorps to its current level would take $185 million, about one-half of one percent of the president’s latest tax cut for the rich. The radical Republicans in Congress, apparently egged on by a Heritage Foundation study from April 2003, have decided AmeriCorps is (gasp, shudder)

What have these people got against national service?

Speaking of said same tax cut, too bad about the children of the working poor. Congress just announced it’s too busy to get around to the restoring the child tax credit to 6.5 million low-income families (known to The Wall Street Journal as “lucky duckies” because, you see, they pay little or no income tax. They only pay 19 percent of their meager incomes in other taxes.).

FYI: If you put “George W. Bush” and “lies” into the Google search engine, you get 250,000 references in nine-tenths of a second.

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ELVIS MUSICAL SLATED

A new stage musical based Elvis’ hit film Jailhouse Rock has been announced.

The show is set to open in London’s West End before the end of the year and on New York’s Broadway next year. It will be based on Presley’s 1957 movie and feature songs from the era.

The practice of building a musical around well-loved songs has proved to be a huge moneyspinner for the stage.

Nostalgia fans and lovers of kitsch have made Mamma Mia! – featuring the music of Abba – one of the biggest hits in London.

Its success has helped theatre producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh to invest £35 million in revamping his theatres.

The songs of Queen and Madness already have formed the basis for two other stage hits, while a musical based on Rod Stewart songs, Tonight’s The Night, launches later this year.

Jailhouse Rock is being brought to the stage by writer Alan Janes and director Rob Bettinson, whose first collaboration, Buddy, has been running for 14 years around the world.

The musical follows a young man who is sent to prison where he discovers a love of R&B and gospel music, setting him on the path to a singing career. But he discovers he is not ready for the corruption that money and fame can bring with it.

Bettinson said: “Although based on the film, the musical will tell a much bigger story.”

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News News Feature

JOHN FERGUS RYAN: 1930-2003

This being a space where people are normally used to reading about politics, I’ll start with a true story concerning politics and the late John Fergus Ryan. In 1954, the 23-year-old Ryan, an Army vet with a wife and baby, decided to have a go at what he might have called, in that peculiar Runyonesque Southern vernacular of his, the “politics game.”

A scion of North Little Rock, Arkansas, Ryan became the all-purpose factotum for an obscure no-name candidate for governor of his native state. He set up shop one day in a rented room at the old Marion Hotel, a venerable Little Rock establishment which was, and had been for decades, the center of Arkansas politics.. (It was later razed to make way for the Excelsior, a more modern hostelry where a politician name of Bill Clinton would get in trouble with one Paula Jones.)

Ryan — known to his family as Jackie and to his wife Carla, then as now a looker, as Jack — went to work. He put out word on the street that would-be office-holders should stop by the rented room at the Marion, make their campaign contributions and sign up then and there for the state job they could expect to get when Ryan’s man was elected. It was a methodology which cut out all the frills and differed from the actual patronage policies then in place only by being unvarnished and direct.

Naturally, the main state newspaper, the old Arkansas Gazette, got wind of the scheme and sent a reporter over to pose as a job-seeker. The ringer would write up an account that made the paper’s front page the next day and ended Jack Ryan’s career as a political mover and shaker.. Anybody looking at the old yellowed clip decades later would be forced to conclude two things: that John Fergus Ryan, the author, could have written it better; and that the details of the story were the sort that belonged to Ryan’s own patented genre of the down-home Gothic.

The latter point is key: John Fergus Ryan, one of those writers unique enough to have invented a style, was in his own way a realist. He wrote some non-fiction, too, mainly for Esquire, but he was at heart a fiction-writer, and his outlandish plots and cartoonish characters reflected his sense of the way things really were.

HE WAS A PRO. There was method and exactness in the way he worked — in a cramped and windowless converted pantry space smack dab in the middle of his modest Midtown house, hard by the campus of Rhodes College.. Back in the Ô70s, when I used to teach creative writing at Memphis State University, I used as one of my basic texts a weighty compilation of materials — donated by Ryan — that started as a series of random notes: the kind of isolated quotes, details, and plot sketches that originate in a writer’s notebook as elements in search of a story.

Another set of pages showed those notes as they went through a process of development, embellishment, and elaboration into the first draft of a story. Then a second draft. A third and even a fourth, all Xeroxed and replete with marginal notes and handwritten line changes.

Then the final product — the story, entitled “The Bazemore Gala,” as published in The Evergreen Review, a leading periodical of the time.

Over and over, that series of progressions from beginning to middle to end did the trick and actually got student writers to tackle what might otherwise have seemed the implausible task of translating random thoughts and apercus into fiction. It was a kind of how-to manual for them, and if you ask, say, Arthur Flowers, the distinguished African-American author of several novels by now, how he got started, he would probably cite that student exercise of 30 years ago as key to his development.

Hell, I know he would. Flowers is one of several actually flourishing writers out there in the world that I was lucky enough to help incubate, and he is on record in several interviews as naming that class as his literary point of origin. He started keeping a notebook there, and I well remember his first complete effort, a Ryanesque effort that freely combined the comic, the grotesque, and the nitty-gritty into a neo-Faustian saga of other-worldly muckers called “The Devil’s Hell of a Plan.” His literary model would have been — in fact, was — pleased.

ONCE HE CROSSED THE RIVER into Memphis, where he earned his daily bread as, first, a social worker and later as a probation officer, Jack Ryan (who had also been a Pinkerton man) became simply John Ryan, the name he was known by to most of his friends. (It is also these days well known as the name of his son, namesake, and kindred spirit, the Memphis artist John Ryan, whose two siblings, Carla and Andy, round out what is a remarkably good-natured and bright-edged clan.) The “Fergus” part, though his by birth and certainly suggestive of the pagan Gaelic elements of his psyche, was added on for literary purposes because the classic American authors he had studied in school all had three names and he meant, at some point, to join their company. He very well may.

By the time of his death last week, of long-term complications from diabetes and Parkinson’s Disease, the ailments that had made his once Falstaffian physique unwontedly frail, John Ryan had compiled a body of work that had been published and read and admired on virtually all the continents of Planet Earth. And perhaps that “virtually” is an unneeded qualifier.. Even before he attracted the attention of American critics and readers, he had been taken up by the British periodical press, where his affinities with writers like the poet A.E. Housman and the belles-lettrist P.G. Wodehouse did not go unnoticed..

A spate of published stories would be followed in the last couple of decades by three well-received novels — The Redneck Bride, Little Brothers of St. Mortimer, and Watching. Ryan also did a play or two (one I remember concerned a patient at a mental hospital who ended up taking over the institution and running it — as good a metaphor as any for the circumstances to be observed during Ryan’s life and times). And there were screenplays by others. Billy Bob Thornton, the celebrated actor/writer/director from Ryan’s native Arkansas announced plans to produce a version of The Redneck Bride, and another entrepreneur actually did make a movie in 1999 based on Little Brothers. Called The White River Kid, it starred the likes of Bob Hoskins, Antonio Banderas, and Randy Travis, and, though for various reasons it never got released in theatres, it is available as a DVD online.

THAT JOHN RYAN HAD GIFTS as an artist and that he leaves behind a legacy of literary achievement are both givens. Those who knew him, though, will most remember him not primarily for his tropes but for his friendship. It is ironic that Ryan liked to see himself characterized by his wry and often quoted aphorism, “People are no damn good.” The fact is, as a person he was damn good. Let me count some of the ways.

He was the kind of guy who, when he heard you were moving house, would come over to lend a hand. He did so for me when, as a Gazette reporter and newlywed, I settled into a Little Rock apartment in 1967. He was there moving furniture and yanking doors off their hinges to create the illusion — and, in the fact, the reality — of more space. (It is no accident that so many people remember him as having been a “bear” of a man.) He was the friend who lent me his typewriter when I rushed back to home-town Memphis after hearing the news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death in 1968 and discovered I’d left my own machine behind.

It was that vintage instument — the same one, or so I reckoned, that produced at least a portion of his own oeuvres — on which I wrote an account that, illustrated with classic photographs from another master, the great Ernest Withers, would appear 25 years later in a special King commemorative issue of Memphis Magazine. Never did I feel myself so honored by multiple associations.

I WENT TO THE VERY MOVING memorial service at the Church on the River in the company of several members of my immediate family Monday and heard number of graceful tributes, including one that made bold to describe Ryan — a cynic and hard-boiled religious skeptic, to say the least — as having been akin, in the warmth of his heart and in the nature of his own special ministry, to Jesus himself. To that I could say amen.

With me Monday was my oldest son Marcus, who almost three decades ago was in a Memphis hospital undergoing exploratory surgery that turned up a dreadful diagnosis and an even more dreadful — and immediate — prognosis. Keeping the vigil along with me in a waiting room had been John Ryan, and he was there when Marcus’ mother and I got the news, helping to cushion the shock. He was always available in the months that followed, in which treatment and convalescence were followed by a wholly unexpected recovery for which the term “grace of God” is the only proper signifier, and I could not help reflecting this week that Ryan’s good will had been among the elements that accompanied that miracle

I also could not help reflecting that Ryan, who had been consigned to years of unaccustomed frailty by his own illnesses, was deserving of his own miracle. What he had instead was the next best thing, an attitude that — born of his own incorrigible hustler’s optimism — was literally one of never-say-die.

As he lay on his deathbed, semi-comatose, he was still thinking ahead, according to his family, still trying to figure the angles and asking about the mail, still waiting for a publisher or filmmaker here or abroad to nibble at one of his overtures, still hoping to get news that he had received one of those whopping “genius” grants from the MacArthur Foundation that he thought, not without reason, he was entitled to.

And he was still able to stay in touch with things and to keep his hand in, even very late in the game. Once, last week or so, lying abed and seemingly unconscious, he heard family members and friends grouped around him trying to recall the punchline to a joke. Struggling to lift his head, he supplied the missing phrase:

“What’s time to a pig?” he said.

Next question: What’s time to a legend?

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CITY BEAT

THE VISION THING — AGAIN

The most studied piece of real estate in the county is about to get it again.

But the committee appointed this week by the county commission to study the future of Shelby Farms is a much more diverse and political group than the one proposed by former mayor Jim Rout and businessman Ron Terry a little more than a year ago.

The Rout-Terry proposal, which was shot down by the commission, was built for consensus, speed, and fund-raising ability. It would have taken control of Shelby Farms out of public hands and turned it over to a nonprofit conservancy with a privately funded $20 million endowment. The new 21-member advisory committee has more elected officials, more administration input, more women, more blacks, more developer-friendly types, and more people, period, than its would-be predecessor.

One thing it doesn’t have, for now at least, is private money, which was one of the big hooks in last year’s proposal. But that could change. Walter Bailey, chairman of the commission and the key opponent of the Rout-Terry plan, says he personally favors a Central Park model for management of 4,500-acre Shelby Farms. The Central Park Conservancy has managed 843-acre Central Park since 1998 under a contract with New York City. The conservancy has raised nearly $300 million for park operations and improvements. It has 60 board members.

What rubbed Bailey the wrong way last year was what he saw as an end-run around the commission by the former administration and a hurry-up mandate to approve what was essentially a done deal for the next 50 years. The new committee, he says, will take its time and hold meetings and hearings for a year or more.

“We don’t want people with preconceived ideas,” he said.

Members from the political side include commissioners Michael Hooks, Julian Bolton, Marilyn Loeffel, Tom Moss, and Bruce Thompson as well as state Rep. Henri Brooks, the city and county chief administrative officers, and Public Works director Ted Fox. From the business side, there are, among others, Union Planters Bank executive Ken Plunk, attorneys Charlie Newman and Charles Carpenter, Steve Epple from Friends of Shelby Farms, former commissioner Bridgette Chisholm, and Dawn Kinard. The chairman is Gene Pearson, director of the graduate program in city and regional planning at the University of Memphis.

Thompson was elected last year, partly on a promise to oppose commercial development of Shelby Farms. Kinard is the daughter of suburban developer Jackie Welch, the most outspoken proponent of developing part of it.

“At the corner of Germantown Parkway and Walnut Grove there needs to be a hotel,” Welch said this week.

He plans to offer to pay for a rendering of what the eastern edge of Shelby Farms would look like if the Shelby Showplace Arena, an existing restaurant, and the farmers market were replaced by a new grand entrance off Germantown Parkway, two or three hotel sites, a 50-acre lake, and other commercial sites leased by the county.

Reminded that such ideas have generally been considered political heresy in the past, he said, “The tighter the budget, the friendlier they’re going to be to it.”

Bailey said the advisory committee was created with the blessing of Mayor AC Wharton, who is on record opposing the sale and, presumably, lease of public lands to raise money for government operations. The broad makeup of the committee and its lack of a financial benefactor and driving force such as Terry could insure that Shelby Farms stays pretty much as it is for a while. The park has been under more or less continuous study since the Sixties. The private conservancy is one of many aborted ideas. A plan for a major new road and intersection in the park that was several years in the making has also been scrapped by the new administration.

Quiet controversies underlie several of the park’s bucolic and seemingly mind-your-own-business uses. On a languid summer morning the day after the commission meeting, four men were training their dogs in a pasture in the northeast corner of the park at sunrise. When told about the new committee, one of the dog trainers, Lanier Fogg, perked up like a retriever watching a shot duck.

What could possibly be controversial about dog training?

Well, trainers haul their dogs and gear in trucks, and the trucks go off the dirt roads and drive on paths through the pasture. So do horse trailers. To get to the paths they go through gates, which can be open or locked depending on park policy. If dog trainers and horsemen can drive off road, what about fishermen? Or four-wheelers? Or anybody having a picnic or looking for some privacy? And how does that impact compare with the impact of the series of eight outdoor music concerts in the park this summer and their attendant stages, light poles, and set-up crews?

In short, Fogg was very interested to know how the new committee was going to relate to the current park board chaired by Ron Terry and the current park superintendent Steve Satterfield, whose predecessor was fired by the last county mayor.

The answer, right now, is that nobody knows.

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THE WEATHERS REPORT

O, CANADA!

This past week, on Tuesday, June 17, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien announced that his cabinet had approved a new national policy allowing homosexual couples, male and female, to be legally married.

This is just one more example of how much more grown up Canada is than its neighbor to the South. If you want other examples, see Canada’s policies toward medical marijuana, greenhouse gases and the United Nations, and compare them to those of the current adolescents in the White House.

Homophobia is one of the great character flaws of the United States, which pretends to be an inclusive society, but which in fact has always preferred as little diversity as possible within its borders, except when it’s economically advantageous. If you’re poor, black, Hispanic, or mentally challenged, the power structure in the U.S. has traditionally had only one use for you: to provide the rest of us with cheap labor. Would 19th Century U.S. capitalists have welcomed the Chinese or the Irish if they had demanded a living wage? Would 20th Century capitalists have permitted mass immigration from Mexico and Central America if they hadn’t needed their crops picked and their lawns mowed for next to nothing? Tired, poor, huddled masses work cheap. If homosexuals promised to work as cheap, maybe our police, our politicians, and our judges would be more welcoming. Otherwise, privileged heterosexual Americans would prefer that gay people just go away, or pretend to be something else.

Okay, so I’m painting with a broad brush here, but I don’t think I’m far off. Outside of Broadway (Nathan Lane), an occasional Massachusetts voting district (Barney Frank), and Hollywood (Ellen Degeneres), homosexuality is still a matter of discomfort, even to most “open-minded” U.S. citizens. If you don’t think so, imagine the uproar that would ensue even in the most liberal northeastern cities if, in the next Harry Potter novel, our adolescent hero revealed that the true secret of his identity is that he is gay and in love with Ron.

Fundamentalist Baptists and puritans of other denominations, citing Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, claim that the Bible calls homosexuality “an abomination” punishable by death. Interpretations vary, and the Bible seems to talk only about male homosexuality, but the fundamentalist view is pervasive in this country, even among nonfundamentalists: homosexuality, they believe, especially between men, is icky and wrong, and the Bible justifies every attempt to stamp it out. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just more evidence that the Bible is out of date as a moral map.

(Traditional religious dogma, along with a history of poor education, also accounts for the fact that homophobia is a powerful force, not just among the privileged white elite, but among many minority groups in the United States–especially blacks and Hispanics–and among the poor. Gays are in the unique position of discomforting Americans of nearly all classes and races.)

There are people in the United States who not only want homosexuals to stay in hiding, they want them to stop being homosexual altogether. These people believe that gay sex should be outlawed and that decriminalizing it is a threat to family values and will lead to the legalization of bestiality, incest and rape. Really, they actually say that. In fact, George W. Bush has nominated some of these people to our federal courts. (See last week’s column about William Pryor, one such nominee.) Now the U.S. Supreme Court is about to decide the constitutionality of a Texas law that prohibits homosexual–and many heterosexual–sex acts in the privacy of one’s own bedroom. Let’s hope the court majority overrules the Scalia-Thomas know-nothings, discards the outdated mores of an outdated religious text, recognizes the right to privacy as real and necessary, and ushers the United States into the 21st Century.

But even if that happens, don’t expect gay marriage to be on the agenda in U.S. legislatures anytime soon. Vermont’s recent recognition of “civil unions” (but not marriage) between homosexuals is a step in the right direction, and now many U.S. gays will go to Canada, get married, and return to test their marriage rights in U.S. courts. But if recent history is any indication, U.S. courts, growing ever more Bush-conservative, will spit in their face.

Which is precisely why many, perhaps most, homosexuals still hide their faces.

Three weeks ago, a friend of mine–a colleague for ten years and one of my favorite people–was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia. In his fevered delirium, he revealed to some of us that he has AIDS. Most of us who have known Matthew (not his real name) had long suspected he was gay. But in our workplace–a sports-oriented business with lots of jock types–homophobia has been an ever-fragrant presence. I’ve since learned that many years ago, our then-CEO even tried to get Matthew fired, claiming he was “a fag,” but Matthew’s immediate boss, bless him, defended Matthew as one of our best workers. Matthew learned his lesson, though. During the decades he has worked with us, he has never mentioned his sexual orientation, and we haven’t asked. Even after letting us know last month that he has AIDS, he has still not said anything about homosexuality.

Maybe if he had said something earlier, he wouldn’t be sick now. Maybe if he had felt free to be open about his sexual preferences, he would have also been free to have an open, monogamous relationship with a live-in partner. Maybe he wouldn’t have AIDS now.

In the United States, it’s not just military policy, but pretty much the unofficial policy of society as a whole: We don’t want to know if you’re gay, and if you are, don’t show it. But for some people, “don’t ask, don’t tell” isn’t just a wrongheaded policy, it’s lethal.

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THE WEATHERS REPORT

BACKWARD, HO!

The Bush-Ashcroft-Hatch Axis is going to control your life for the next thirty years–probably longer.

In a week in which the Bushites have dithered on Iraq, blithered on Palestine and Israel, and blathered about tax cuts, the most important news on the domestic front–news that will affect at least two generations of Americans to come–was relegated to the inside pages of the mainstream media. The news was this: Last Wednesday, William H. Pryor testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Pryor, the attorney general of Alabama, has been nominated by George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Pryor is a hugely dangerous man–not so much in himself, but because of what he represents. He does not believe in the separation of church and state. He does not believe in a woman’s right to choose. He does not believe in federal anti-discrimination laws. He solicits money from businesses whom he may later be called on to prosecute–and he sees no problem with that. What makes Pryor so dangerous is that he is not alone. There are swarms of Pryors out there, and pretty soon they will be controlling your life.

If the Bush-Ashcroft-Hatch Axis has its way, William Pryor will be the future of American justice. This is because the neoconservatives, using George W. Bush as their puppet, and abetted by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and Attorney General John Ashcroft, will soon have near-total control of the federal court system. For the future of America’s civil liberties, consumer rights, voter rights, worker protection, personal privacy, environmental protection, and reproductive rights, you should look about 100 years into the past. That’s where the neoconservatives want to return us. They ought to be called the retro-conservatives.

By the end of 2004, it is likely that every one of the 13 federal circuit courts of appeal and certainly the U.S. Supreme Court will be dominated by judges appointed by the retro-conservatives in the Republican Party. These retro-conservatives are the ideological offspring of the men who, in the last century, voted against civil rights, against social security, against Medicare, against unemployment insurance, against consumer protection laws, against the minimum wage, against the progressive income tax, against privacy rights, against political free speech, against clean air and water laws, against even the most basic kinds of business regulation. They supported monopolies, union-busting, poll taxes, Jim Crow, and robber barons. If you don’t believe me, go back and read the history books and see what the world was like in 1903. Today’s retro-conservatives have a very simple agenda: to reestablish the status quo ante–the state of affairs that existed in the United States before the Great Depression. Their highest priority is to protect the wealth of the wealthiest. Their second-highest priority is to impose on the nation, by government fiat, a fundamentalist Judeo-Christian ideology. Their third-highest priority is to maintain the class system that keeps everyone in their place, especially the working class.

The Bill of Rights has no place on their list of priorities.

Here’s the horror: If Bill Pryor is placed on a federal court of appeals, he might never leave until he’s dead. That’s because federal judgeships are lifetime appointments.

Here’s more horror: In any given year, the federal appeals courts decide about 28,000 cases. These cases become law. By comparison, the U.S. Supreme Court decides only about 100 cases in a year. The federal courts make the law–and once the law is made in the United States, it takes generations to unmake it. Just ask African-Americans how many decades it took to change the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

If Bill Pryor and his ilk take over our courts, here’s some of what they will let happen:

  • the Ohio River will burn again, as it did in the days before clean-water legislation, and there will be more Love Canals and Exxon Valdezes, and more smog and acid rain, with no penalties on the corporations profiting from their own pollution

  • our national parks will be open to road-building, clearcut logging, strip mining–whatever abuses American corporate powers wish to heap upon them

  • the coat-hanger school of abortion will be open once again for your daughters and granddaughters

  • you will not be able to make love to the person of your choice in the manner of your choice without risking prison

  • the government will be able to incarcerate you without charge for as long as it wishes, in the name of national security

  • the government will be able to wiretap you, check your financial and library records, even eavesdrop on your bedroom without court order, again in the name of national security

  • you will have no protections if the car you buy turns out to be defective or the drugs you purchase don’t contain what they claim to contain or if the food you buy is mislabeled

  • you will have no safety protections in your workplace–no protection if your employer poisons you or maims you

  • you will have no overtime wage protections, no right to unionize, no right to grievance procedures if you’re fired

  • if you are black or disabled or homosexual or old or female, your employer will be free to discriminate against you

  • if you are black or any other minority, your election board will be free to discriminate against you

  • your child’s classroom and your local courthouse will have the Ten Commandments on the wall, and the Lord’s Prayer read aloud, even if your child in school and the defendant in court is Muslim or Jewish

    And that’s just the start. If you don’t believe me, go back and look at the world the way it was 100 years ago. The retro-conservatives like to call their philosophy “the new federalism” and claim it’s based on “states’ rights.” If you want to know what “states’ rights” means, go back to Bill Pryor’s Alabama of the 1920s and see what “states’ rights” meant if you were an African-American and wanted to vote, or if you were in a wheel chair and wanted to go to school, or if you were a woman and were being sexually harassed. That’s the world the Bill Pryors and the other retro-conservatives want to return us to. In fact, these “neoconservatives” have more in common with neofascists than they would like to admit. After all, the fascists, too, believe in protecting the wealth of the wealthy classes, in maintaining a strict class structure, and in using the influence of religious institutions and the powers of a police state to do it.

    It is likely that very soon, George W. Bush, the retro-conservatives’ little Mussolini, will get to nominate at least two U.S. Supreme Court justices, to replace Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist, both of whom will probably soon retire. It is further likely that Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 82 years old, won’t last much longer on the court. Bush has said that he will nominate candidates who resemble his two favorite sitting justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence “Whatever Antonin Says” Thomas. With three more justices on the Supreme Court who think like Scalia or parrot Scalia like Thomas, the Supreme Court will happily return us to the 19th century.

    Retro-conservatives like Scalia prefer to call themselves “strict constructionists.” They claim that this means they interpret the Constitution “strictly,” not going outside the words found there. What it really means is, they interpret the Constitution in such a way as to maintain the status quo, to suppress nonconformity, to keep the lower classes and minorities in their place. Scalia believes that if a right is not clearly named in the Constitution, it does not exist–the right to privacy, for example, and the right of a woman to control her own body. He has, it seems, never read the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Founding Fathers worried that by listing certain rights in the first ten amendments, some stupid, evil or manipulative judge would come along and take that to mean that those were the only rights the people had. The Founding Fathers were right to be worried. Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, William Pryor and the other “strict constructionists” have done just what the Founding Fathers feared; if brought to power, they would leave us with fewer rights than ever.

    What can you do to protect our federal court system from an infestation of ultra-right-wing, retro-conservative justices? First, give all the support you can, both in time and money, to organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Freedom Forum, the Alliance for Justice and (despite its smug, pseudo-patriotic name) People for the American Way. Second, pay attention, learn whom the retros are nominating to your courts, and remember their names: Deborah Cook, Jeffrey Sutton, John Roberts, Carolyn Kuhl, Miguel Estrada, Priscilla Owen, Terrence Boyle–and study the danger of their opinions on the Internet. Third, write your senators in both parties and tell them to use their responsibility to provide “advice and consent” about judicial nominees so as to prevent the most extreme reactionaries from reaching the bench. Fourth, and finally, do everything you can to vote the Bush-Ashcroft-Hatch Axis out of office in 2004. It’s the only hope we have that our future won’t turn into our past.

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    WEBRANT

    A HAPPY FATHER’S DAY TO — MY EX!

    In his stand-up routine “Bigger and Blacker,” Chris Rock does a clever riff on the shortage of attention fathers receive for their contributions to the family.

    He rants that athletes wave “Hi, Mom” into the camera but hardly ever acknowledge their other parent. He observes that dads urge their progeny to “thank your mother for dinner” but fail to take credit for the food she prepares. He laments that society accords little status to those who provide the hot water in which the family bathes. And that dads never object because Real Men Don’t Complain.

    Much emphasis today is placed on the people who bear children, which is proper–mothers are pretty important to the smooth running of society’s machinery. But fathers are not exactly chrome wheels on the options list of family life. And Father’s Day is hardly enough credit for all the silent and unremarked upon sacrifices made by the guys who provide half the genetic material in the creation of every life.

    The third Sunday in June is a difficult time for many of us whose fathers are no longer living. In my case, this is compounded by the fact that my father died suddenly when I was a teenager and I never took the opportunity to thank him for working two jobs to provide those meals and baths that I enjoyed, but took for granted. So while it would make sense to write this paean to him, I will instead address it to someone who is still around to appreciate the sentiment–my ex-husband. He embodies the notion of a dedicated father and selecting him to help me bring two lives into the world ranks as one of the smartest decisions I ever made. And so on this Father’s Day, I want him to know that all that he has provided for his sons will not go unremarked upon.

    When I met John in 1977, he was the father of two boys, ages 9 and 6. Every other Friday when he got off from his first job, he drove his tiny Japanese car to Nashville, where his sons lived, to exercise visitation. On the other weekends, his second job was selling books door-to-door to provide money for the child support, private schools, medical costs, Little League fees and myriad other expenses that the salary from his first job could not cover.

    To this twice-monthly trek was added a less than amicable divorce which meant that it was never made easy for him to see his sons. Despite the cool reception and the effort required to make the trip, he never missed a weekend. And despite the shortage of funds, he never missed a support payment.

    When I first met him I was not yet a parent, and wondered how he could continue to be devoted to two children for whom visits were like Sisyphean tasks. Later I learned that besides loving the time he spent with his two sons, his own father had abandoned the family when he was 3. John’s father exacerbated his absence by showing himself just often enough to destroy the fantasy that he was dead–a far easier explanation to have tolerated as to why he was never around. Because of the feeling of abandonment by his father, John vowed that any children of his would feel loved, whatever sacrifice had to be borne. I do not know if John has ever thought about the bitter irony of it, but from his own early loss, his four boys have gained immeasurably.

    When our two sons were born in 1981 and 1984, he poured his paternal energies into them without neglecting his older two. I am still impressed when I think of the times he drove to Nashville on a Friday night to watch his sons wrestle or play football and then returned in time to coach our boys’ baseball or basketball teams on Saturday morning. He led their Scout troops and took our older son on a two-week hike to Philmont Scout Ranch. He helped them build their science projects, took them on canoe and ski trips, and never blanched at doing all of this in the precious few hours left after putting in a full day at the office.

    Despite our split six years ago, he continues to be involved in every aspect of their lives. Recently his two older boys moved to Memphis, and so, for the first time since his initial appearance in a hospital delivery room in 1968, he can see and talk to and embrace the four most important people in his life on a daily basis. Even though he has not told me so, I can guess that he has never been happier.

    I hope that when John hears Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” on the radio or in an elevator, he is secure in the knowledge that his sons will not grow up to live out the lyrics of that song. Not if they use their own dad as an example of what it means to be a father.

    From me and the kids, thanks. And Happy Father’s Day, John.

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    FROM MY SEAT

    WHEN JUNE FEELS LIKE FALL

    This will be a disorienting week for Cardinal Nation. The most successful franchise in the history of the National League will play six games in two of the most hallowed venues in American sport, let alone the American League. But a critical element will be missing when St. Louis takes the field at Fenway Park (Tuesday-Thursday) and Yankee Stadium (Friday-Sunday). This will be, after all, the first time St. Louis has faced either of these AL counterparts without a world championship at stake.

    Red Sox fans will have plenty of vitriol behind their booing of the Birds on the Bat. The Cardinals are a primary reason Boston hasn’t won a World Series since 1918. In 1946, St. Louis won the last two games of a seven-game series to deny the legendary Ted Williams a championship in his only World Series appearance. Enos Slaughter’s mad dash from first to home on Harry Walker’s double made the difference in a classic seventh game. Then in 1967, behind Bob Gibson’s three wins and Lou Brock’s brilliance (he hit .414 and stole seven bases), the Cards again took a seven-game series from the Bosox.

    As for the Cardinals-Yankees rivalry in the Fall Classic, where to begin? Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby tagged out none other than Babe Ruth (attempting to steal second base) to end the 1926 Series, four games to three in favor of the Cards. The mighty Yanks and their Murderer’s Row — Lou Gehrig hit four home runs — swept St. Louis just two years later. Stan Musial played in the first of his four World Series in 1942, a five-game victory over Joe DiMaggio and the Bronx Bombers. New York gained its revenge only a year later with its sixth world championship in eight years.

    In 1964, a fading Yankee dynasty — built around Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford — took on a spirited Cardinal club that seemed to personify the civil rights movement on a baseball diamond. Gibson, Brock, Bill White, and Curt Flood were dynamic winners on the field, and each exuded surpassing dignity when out of uniform. The seven-game victory by St. Louis became the kind of legend about which novels are written . . . just ask David Halberstam. Having taken three of their five series against the Yankees, St. Louis is the only club to hold such an edge on baseball’s one true empire. (We’ll let Arizona beat New York a second time before allowing them in the club.)

    The advent of interleague play in 1997 meant these kinds of regular-season meetings would be inevitable . . . in theory, a boon to the national pastime’s sagging popularity. And the guess here is that the turnstiles will be flipping, TV numbers spiking as these six games unfold. If you took a U.S. map and colored in the regions that are devoted to the Cards, Yankees, and Red Sox, you’d have very little white space left. Considering the list of Hall of Famers to have suited up in the seven World Series mentioned above, it’s fitting that a plethora of modern stars will carry the torch this week. Nomar Garciaparra, Manny

    Ramirez, and Pedro Martinez (coming off the disabled list to pitch Wednesday night in Fenway). Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi, and Roger Clemens (aiming for his 300th win and 4,000th strikeout Friday night at the Stadium). Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, and Matt Morris. The Yankees and Red Sox look to be among the top three or four clubs in the Junior Circuit. Alas, an underachieving Cardinal team — depleted by some key injuries this season and a miserable bullpen — will have to elevate its play for these games to be competitive.

    So take your calendars off the wall this week, grab a sweatshirt, and pretend it’s October. Interleague play has its detractors; the format still feels like a blind-to-history marketing gimmick. But for a week in Cardinal Nation, the concept feels almost — almost — classic.

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    THE WEATHERS REPORT

    AS LONG AS WE BOTH SHALL LOVE

    I live with a woman who is not my wife. Her name is Gail. We share the same bed, and occasionally we make love to each other. We have been doing this for 17 years. At least once a week, Gail and I look at each other, shake our heads, reach out to hold hands, smile and say how lucky we are to be living such a pleasant life. Honestly. We do. You can ask her.

    People use different terms for the way Gail and I live: cohabitation, living in sin, fornication. I call it simply “living together,” because that’s what it is, and the phrase has a kind of understated poetry: We live, and we get to do it together. According to the 2000 census, there are about 11 million other Americans living together as we do. The Census Bureau says we are “Persons of the opposite sex sharing living quarters”–POSSLQs, for short. But POSSLQ doesn’t quite capture the poetry of it.

    Last week, for the five hundredth time, a friend asked me, good-naturedly, “When are you two finally going to get married?”

    I gave him the answer I always give to that question: “Never.”

    Sometimes I’m asked the question differently: “So why don’t you two get married?”

    Again I always answer the same way: “Why should we? There’s absolutely nothing marriage can add to our life together that would make it any better.”

    I was married once, for six years, long ago, to a good woman who was a fine wife and a wonderful mother to our son. The marriage license did nothing to change the fact that we were not right for each other. It did nothing but keep us together longer than we should have stayed together and make us a little unhappier for longer than we should have been. We were, for each other, clothing we had both outgrown, and the law did everything in its power to keep us buttoned tight and strangling.

    It’s popular in some circles (you know which circles they are) to say that today the “sacred institution” of marriage is under attack or threatened–by Hollywood movies, by rap lyrics, by the gay rights movement. In fact, next week, on June 12 (in this month of weddings), the Family Research Council–a group that is deeply in love with the institution of marriage–is giving a lecture called “Marriage on Trial” in Washington, D.C. Among the questions they plan to address is this: Does the federal government have a role in rebuilding a “culture of marriage”? Presumably, their answer is a loud YES! The lecture will be given in the Dirksen Office Building of the U.S. Senate. Their object is to lobby senators and congressmen to pass legislation which rewards people who get married–in other words, to promote the institution of marriage and protect it from the cultural forces which are supposedly attacking it. They will get much support from the Bush administration.

    I wish I could be there to offer a counterpoint. Personally, I think that if marriage is under attack, that’s a good thing. If the institution of marriage were ended tomorrow, I think the world would be a happier place. (“Marriage is an institution,” goes the old joke, “and I’m not ready to be institutionalized yet.”) If we keep the institution, I think people should have to live together for years and pass all kinds of written and psychological tests before they are allowed to get married, and I think divorce should be easy. This sounds very Counterculture Sixties, I know, but on this issue I think the Counterculture was right.

    For centuries, of course, marriage laws were a way for the church or the state to control the distribution and accumulation of wealth and land, and to keep the powerful in power. To protect his family legacy, a father made sure that his son married a woman of equal or greater property value, preferably a woman who came with many fields and farms, plus a castle or two; legally joining the wealth of two powerful families helped keep them both powerful. To protect the elite in other ways, certain castes were not allowed to marry other castes, lest they pollute the upper classes; and certain colors were not allowed to marry other colors, lest they dilute the color scheme that kept the dominant color dominant; and certain creeds could only marry within their own creed, lest the church lose its force. Marriage, in other words, was a way to legally assure that like bred with like, so the status quo could be maintained.

    Marriage was also a way to institutionalize the repression of women and to protect the power of men; once married, a wife was legally subject to her husband, and all she owned became his–but not vice versa. Marriage was moreover a way for women to acquire, in exchange for sex and child-bearing, the small measure of economic security legally required of their husbands. And marriage in America has always been a way for the Puritan power structure to suppress the fun of sex. In fact, for nearly all of its history, marriage has had almost nothing to do with love and everything to do with power and control.

    Are things different today? Not much, despite the propaganda to the contrary. But I’ll grant that more men and women than ever before now marry “for love.” Marriage, they say, is a way to demonstrate their lifelong commitment to each other. What I don’t understand is this: What kind of commitment is it that requires a license, a wedding cake, and a thousand laws to ratify it?

    I can honestly say that I don’t comprehend why marriage is so “sacred” to the general population, unless it’s to sustain the economic voltage of those publishing powerhouses, the bridal magazines. There is no need for marriage anymore, if there ever was a need for it. Making sure that fathers provide for the children they sire used to be a respectable reason to encourage people to marry when they had kids, I suppose. But it’s easy enough to put laws on the books that require fathers to support their children, even if the kids are born outside of marriage, and in fact such laws already exist.

    The problem is, love may die, but the law lives on. It’s hard to tell in many marriages where love ends and the law begins. Marriages are not made in heaven, they’re made in licensing offices. They’re not blessed by God, they’re blessed by bureaucrats. There is love in many marriages, but it is love under the umbrella of the law, where the wind and rain and sun that both test and nourish other relationships can’t reach until it’s too late. In many marriages, a single strong gust–a fight over money, a lustful glance at someone else–can blow such a relationship away, because its roots are too shallow, having been sheltered too long by the law.

    It’s not just that marriage is unnecessary, I believe, it’s that it’s actually harmful. It replaces choice with compulsion. It makes that which should be voluntary, compulsory. If I am faithful to my partner because I am legally bound to be faithful, that is no more emotionally meaningful than stopping at red lights. If I live in the same house as my partner only because the law makes it massively inconvenient for me not to, we are no longer living together, we are simply moving toward death together. If statutes are the only thing driving me to provide for my children, then I am a father by statute only. Marriage replaces affection with the law.

    But love does not flourish under the sheriff’s gun. If I were to marry the person I care for, and the weight of the government can be felt behind my every act of caring, how do I then prove my personal commitment to my spouse? In marriage, every caress becomes an act of public will, not purely personal affection. In marriage, every hug can be seen as a hug of convenience, every kiss a kiss from a court of law. The marriage bonds get all tangled up with the simplest ties of affection.

    Things are clearer for Gail and me, and for others who live together. We know why we’re there on Sunday afternoon, reading the paper on the sofa, looking at each other occasionally and smiling. It has nothing to do with covenants and courts. We’re there because we like each other best. And we’ll be there as long as we both shall love.