Author: Ruth Ogles Johnson

Our Republican candidate for president keeps telling us how much he loves America. But actions speak louder than words, and Mitt Romney’s patriotism appears to begin and end with wearing a flag lapel pin. Would that Romney were judged as stringently on his actions as was Axis Sally on her words. 

American-born Mildred Gillars found herself in Germany at the outbreak of World War II and, for love of a man, decided to stay. Faced with a choice of being sent to a concentration camp for her criticism of Germany’s Japanese allies after the attack on Pearl Harbor or participating in the propaganda war against the Allies, she chose the latter. She was given the nickname “Axis Sally,” and for her acts in service to the Third Reich, she was convicted of treason and did 12 years in an American prison after the war. 

Her propaganda broadcasts were boilerplate: suggesting to lonely U.S. soldiers that their wives and sweethearts were stepping out on them; that no one back in the states cared about their sacrifice; or that the Allies were losing. Our military in the Asian theater had to endure the same from Tokyo Rose. In love and war, it is said, all is fair. 

Sally didn’t sell any military secrets or give up the identities of American spies. Although it is hard to know if lives were lost as a result of her words, it is quite plausible that an unhappy, emotionally distressed soldier who believed less in his cause might, in fact, fight less valiantly. That’s why giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy is specifically defined in our Constitution as treason.

But when a potential president chooses to stash vast assets in the banks of other countries to escape tax consequences, the aid and comfort he renders to himself at our expense causes distress for the rest of us who must pick up the slack. As a result, we also suffer an actual material effect that a smaller amount of take-home pay has on our lives. Isn’t it plausible that a diminished confidence in a fairer future affects our own morale, perhaps our likelihood of voting, even our belief in the value of American citizenship?

Everyday Americans ought to start thinking of Romney’s deeds of off-shoring assets, like his outsourcing of jobs through Bain Capital, as the antithesis of patriotism. It’s time we considered his avoidance of taxes as economic treason.

But if we attempt to change the tax code to eliminate off-shore tax shelters, the rich warn us not to “punish” them, or they will simply take their money to where it is rewarded. But would “losing” what little money that is not already secreted elsewhere have much of an effect on the rest of us? 

As it stands, there are too few or no taxes being collected on most of these funds. Tight credit restrictions for the workaday American means it can’t be loaned to people who truly need it, and private equity long ago decided that human beings and their jobs were just collateral damage in pursuit of profit at any price. In short, little of it trickles down to the general economy and is, therefore, useless for anyone but the ultra-wealthy. 

Moreover, the money of the super rich is often employed to influence our members of Congress, so their lucre is actually worse than useless.

If Romney and his ilk want to send their money on no-expenses-paid trips to other nations, we should say good riddance and insist that they “self-deport” in order to live where their cash assets already live. They do not deserve the rule of law, civil rights protections, and the myriad other privileges of American citizenship, one of which is the payment of taxes as a way of meeting our obligations to the common good. 

Mildred Gillars was judged a traitor, not on deeds but on harmful words. Mitt Romney is being called a patriot on nothing but his words and with no consideration of the harm his deeds do.

Because the scope of treason does not include failing to promote the common good, there is not presently a mechanism by which we could make Romney put up or shut up when it comes to taxes. But I’d settle for going to that shoebox in a closet in one of Mitt’s homes and fishing out that old bumper sticker I am confident he owns — the one that guys like him smugly displayed during the Vietnam era when they wanted to show whose side they were on. Then I’d ask him to reflect on its meaning. 

You know the one: “America — Love It or Leave It.”

Ruth Ogles Johnson is a frequent Flyer contributor.

American consumers are just plain easy. We talk a lot about hating greed but seem reluctant to play hard to get with amazonian entities that want to — cue maniacal laughter here — rule the world.

And on the topic of gargantuan businesses, take Amazon, please. Not satisfied with obliterating nearly every local book emporium in America, they are now going after all other retailers, until there is only — Amazon.

You can’t blame them. That’s what empires do, whether they’re countries or companies. But we don’t have to line up for this march to monopoly. We have the power of the purse and can exercise it by refusing to participate in this greed machine. It is no secret that small, local companies are the real job creators, and instead of all the money going to a handful of guys at the top of a corporation that may not even pay taxes, shopping locally keeps the money in the pockets of your neighbors.

We already know this economic fact, but in the dim light of our favorite tech device late at night, it’s hard to resist the overtures of enormous retailers. Buy me, they whisper, and we’ll ship your stuff for free. Just lie there on the couch, they coo, and we’ll even bring it to your door. Before you know it, your wallet’s out and they’ve got your (credit card) number.

Do we really want to be that easy?

After Amazon is through with us, what do you think they’ll do with prices once they have effectively become our only online option?

The free market isn’t very free when there is no competition. If Americans think goods are so expensive now that we will sell out for slightly more than the price of a fancy cup of coffee, try living in a world where we can have any item we want — so long as we’re rich. The communist oligarchs in Russia were small-time compared to multinational corporations like Amazon.

So this year, as the annual shopping season approaches, instead of just showing up at whatever store has the lowest price and the glitziest advertising, shop strategically and spread some love around to local merchants and the labor force they employ. Yes, Independence Day is behind us, but we can still do something patriotic: pull out our smart phones and use them to look up the phone number and address of a local merchant and text it to our friends. Suggest that they buy the book or whatever from them instead of Amazon.

We will probably pay a bit more for the items, but we won’t pay shipping. And no, Amazon’s “free” shipping isn’t — it’s just not delineated on a separate line. Besides, having a smart phone means we’re not poor. And if we want the rest of America to have a fighting chance to dodge the poverty that we seem to be avoiding, the few extra dollars we spend today will benefit us in the long run.

So, let’s make a pledge to stop being such cheap conquests. Let’s flirt with our independent bookseller or other merchant. Go ahead, give them our phone number. That way, they can call us when the item comes in. The sales associate will be glad to see us, and no tech device or website in the world can personally greet us. To paraphrase the country song, lonely merchants make good lovers.

Yes, we will actually have to get off the couch to pick up our stuff from the store, but didn’t our mothers tell us to turn off the TV and go outside? Besides, lounging in our jammies while bathed in the seductive light of Amazon’s home page means that we have zero chance of meeting our soul mate or a new friend in the checkout line. Not to mention that it gives us an opportunity to see if we like the same books, which is a great way to get to know someone.

Best of all, we won’t hate ourselves in the morning.

Ruth Ogles Johnson is a frequent Flyer contributor.

Does anyone know where to get Valium in aerosol cans? We could use such a device to calm unruly groups of people who panic first and use their brains later.

If there were such a thing, I would buy a case and saturate the rooms where suburban mayors and citizens meet regularly to hone their anti-Memphis rhetoric in order to spring into hysterical (over)reaction to merging the city and county school systems. Perhaps then, reason and facts could become part of the discussion.

Outside of a measure of savings produced by combining the bureaucracies — and only through attrition over a decade or two — here is what will happen if the two systems become one: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The county schools will not decline, and the city schools will not improve. Merely merging the urban and suburban systems will have a net zero effect on test scores of individual schools within any combined enterprise, however it is constructed.

Why? Because the reason city schools perform less well than county schools is that a majority of city parents are less prosperous and less educated. This is no criticism of those parents. Nor is it a compliment to most county parents. The reason that county schools produce higher test scores is because the majority of those parents have more resources to give their children.

It is indisputable that a child of means will almost always outscore a child whose resources are meager.

This explains the supposed superiority of the employees of the county system, whose arms ought to be really tired by now, being that they have been in a near permanent position of back-patting for the higher achievement measures with which they are credited. Here is a fact: What the county system does merely supports the good effects parents are creating at home; it does not make them from scratch.

A reality check for suburban parents is in order, too, as the resources they provide are not comprised of Herculean tasks against overwhelming obstacles. Yes, they are to be respected for providing a safe, stable, and prosperous environment in which to rear their children. But middle-class families beget middle-class families, and if you did not grow up in poverty, chances are good that you will never experience poverty.

So, can we dial back the arrogance and the hysteria? Both sentiments preclude sensible solutions and obscure the reasons why there are two systems in more than strictly territorial terms.

As for the city schools’ insistence that they control part of the unified system, they should just throw in the towel and let the county schools take over. Not because county personnel have some magic fairy dust to sprinkle over classrooms, but since the county claims that they know better how to educate children, the city ought to make them prove it. Let’s see how easy the county thinks it is to manage a system when a large number of disadvantaged kids are part of it. Of course, that would explain the vehement opposition of county administrators to the merger. They might actually have to back up some of their self-serving bombast.

Until there is a way to erect a force field that starts near Kirby Parkway and Poplar and extends north, south, and east of the county’s own Eden, the city’s problems will continue to be the county’s problems. Every poorly educated child has a negative effect on the entire community, and if there were such a thing as a force field protecting suburban Shelby County, sooner or later one of its citizens would have to leave its confines to go to the airport or an Orpheum show or to take in a basketball game.

That impoverished child whose very existence in a county-run system so terrifies some of you is still out there, hoping for a better life but likely to be a drain on regional resources. A separate system cannot separate you from that reality.

So, suburban Shelby County: Take a breath, get a clue, and climb down from your high dudgeon. Unless you want me to pull out the aerosol.

Ruth Ogles Johnson is a frequent Flyer contributor.

DON’T REBUILD!

My mother grew up in New Orleans and I grew up on her stories of life in the Crescent City. She moved to Florida in the late 40s where she met and married my father and gave birth to my brother and me. The sweet memories of her childhood caused her to move back briefly after my father’s death in the early 70s and my leaving home. She returned to Florida after only four months, despairing at what had happened to her beloved hometown and its once stable, working-class neighborhoods.

That is why I feel certain that if she were alive today, she would agree with Jack Shafer, author of “Don’t Refloat: The Case Against Rebuilding the Sunken City of New Orleans” which appeared in Slate on September 7. He posits that rebuilding New Orleans is not only geographically and oceanographically questionable, but nostalgically delusional because the city that tourists see is little more than a mirage. Dennis Hastert was right, he contends, because the question of whether to rebuild is a fair one that should not have political consequences.

Shafer writes that ” . . .the Gulf of Mexico is a perfect breeding ground for hurricanes; . . . re-engineering the Mississippi River to control flooding has made New Orleans more vulnerable by denying it the deposits of sediment it needs to keep its head above water [and] . . . the aggressive extraction of oil and gas from the area has undermined the stability of its land.”

In a New York Times op-ed piece last week, a geophysicist named Klaus Jacob agrees, as does Timothy Kusky, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. Kusky tells reporters from two different national periodicals that “New Orleans naturally wants to be a lake” and “[a] city should never have been built there in the first place.”

Then there are the human considerations. Beyond the decadence of the Quarter and the affluence of the Garden District, lies an economic wasteland. Overwhelmingly black and poor, if one were to look up “areas of centralized poverty” in a dictionary of sociology terms, there would be a picture of New Orleans. The 80% of the city that was flooded overlays neatly with a demographic map that illustrates the bleakness of the neighborhoods that are now awash in befouled water. Neighborhoods where 27% of its residents lived below the poverty line, and only 25% of its adults had a high school diploma. Neighborhoods that contained 73% of New Orleans’ schools considered “academically unacceptable” or “under academic warning.”

Before Katrina, New Orleans was a great tourist destination. I am sorry to see it destroyed. But to rebuild any city that is so geographically vulnerable is just plain irresponsible. And when one asks whether reconstructing a city so rife with social problems makes any sense, the answers seem too obvious to ignore.

And this writer asks if anyone has an absolute right to live in an area that the rest of us could be expected to rebuild in less than a generation, just because their family settled there generations ago. Thousands of people were displaced in the TVA projects of the Great Depression when river valleys were flooded to provide massive power capability for the region. Most of them didn’t want to give up the land they worked and the homes they built. Should the citizens of New Orleans be treated any differently?

These are issues that might need to be examined about any of our natural disaster-prone regions from California to North Carolina. Hard questions to answer, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be asked.

There is no doubt that billions of dollars will be spent to clean up New Orleans in a public works project of unimagined scope. America’s current economy could certainly use the stimulus of a TVA-like endeavor, and what is government’s job if not to help provide opportunities for its citizens? We could use any public works initiative to provide jobs for the poorest citizens displaced by Katrina. So, as horrible as the devastation is, we can utilize this opportunity to make New Orleans and its environs better than ever.

But we might want to modify our ambitions and rebuild only the Quarter and other parts already on higher ground, with bridges leading to residential districts that would be less prone to flooding. Or move the historic areas to higher ground as Missouri did after the 1993 flood. Or turn the low-lying areas south to the coast into a wildlife refuge similar to Donana National Park in Spain which is accessible only by park vehicles or on foot. Or create a lake resort with tourism services on ground above the current city.

Whatever the area becomes, however, it should not be a place that requires an evacuation of a million people trapped by topography. Or breeds, perpetuates and concentrates poverty so great that a cycle of bad weather traps not the tourists that now clamor for its renaissance, but those for whom the old New Orleans was anything but a glamorous break from daily life.

I am an amateur historian who loves to travel. Few things delight me more than visiting culturally significant places and sitting in a cafe soaking up the local flavor. But as the bumper sticker says, stuff happens. I am sorry that my grandchildren may not see a city so colorful and rich with traditions as New Orleans. But places come and places go, and human tenure on this planet in geological terms is almost not worth measuring. We need to get over the notion that we can save the planet. The planet will survive. The question is whether we want to battle the planet when the odds are so solidly stacked against us.

The Netherlands’ ability to keep the sea at bay in their dyke-surrounded country notwithstanding, it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. Perhaps we should stop working against Her and let the city of New Orleans become the lake it was meant to be. She usually takes the last word anyway. This time we may need to let Her have it.

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