Shareef on Shareef, part two

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JULY

“Thin skin” is what many local politicians and public administrators, irrespective of political affiliation, have in common. They can be so tough and insensitive to the legitimate needs of citizens, but extremely sensitive when their policies and decision-making are question in the hot glare of the print media.

This reality was reinforced last summer when a Salem administrator took down a bookstore owner’s sign that criticized the policies of the mayor and city manager. This was in clear violation of the storeowner’s First Amendment rights. I stated that the action was more in tune with a Fascist, as opposed to Democratic, style of government.

After the store owner threatened legal action, the sign was back up the next day.

Yet, I heard from the city manager’s office about the column. In fact, there was quite a shouting match between me and the caller. He felt the column presented the city manager’s office in a bad light but never denied that the administrator’s actions were legally wrong. The caller missed the point in worrying about the city manager’s image.

If the administrator was not severely sanctioned for his behavior, others in Salem’s administrative ranks will believe that “cowboy management” is appropriate for a citizen who is publicly critical of your boss, constitutional rights be dammed. That’s a very bad message to send from the top. Small town politics plus thin-skinned administrators usually equals administrative despotism.

Sometimes, however, the politician or official can take criticism like a grown-up, even when I err.

In my Nov. 22 column, “Roanoke Democrats lack core values”, I accused U.S. Attorney John Brownlee of having an apartheid worldview for not publicly criticizing the placement of a methadone clinic in Northwest Roanoke after he spoke out against plans for a similar clinic in Roanoke County. Roanoke City Councilman Sherman Lea had questioned Brownlee on this apparent double standard. Brownlee said that the reason he had not spoken out against the Roanoke clinic was that Roanoke City Officials had never asked him, as county administrators. I sarcastically wrote that his answer did not pass the “laugh test.”

I was wrong. County officials had requested that Brownlee speak at a forum discussing the pros and cons of locating a methadone clinic in a residential neighborhood. He contacted his superiors at the Department of Justice in Washington and got permission to make his comments, which were mostly opposed to the location of the clinic. No such invitation has been forthcoming from Roanoke city administrators. Brownlee was right and I was wrong. He and Councilman Lea worked out an agreement.

I have written Brownlee, acknowledged my error, and apologized for the mischaracterization. I often swing a sharp sword in this column. Sometimes, as in the Brownlee case, I have to fall on it as well.

Simply put, journalists culture usually give good press to leaders who have a vision for managing rapidly changing environments. Leaders who say they can’t do anything”about a problem will normally get bad press. Part of the press’ role, according to certain academics, is to reassure nervous readers that someone is in control in times of crisis.

When Roanoke City Manager Darlene Burcham says she can’t stop a methadone clinic from opening in Northwest Roanoke -- after her counterparts in Roanoke County were ready to move heaven and earth and the law to prevent the same clinic from opening in their jurisdiction -- she is going to get bad press. When Salem City Manager Forest Jones only speaks to the First Amendment violation of a bookstore owner after threats of a lawsuit from the businessman’s attorney, he is going to get bad press.

If local public administrators want better press, they will have to be more responsive to the needs of all citizens -- even those they don’t personally like. Attempting to “kill the messenger” won’t change that reality.

AUGUST

The 9-11 Commission found that “groupthink” was a fundamental reason the Bush administration reached several faculty conclusions concerning the management of the war effort in Iraq. Groupthink occurs when insular decision-makers, all seeking group acceptance, offer no alternative views on a policy decision. This pathology has lead to some of the worst foreign policy calamities in the nation’s history:

Admiral Kimmel’s failure to plan for a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; President Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion; President Johnson’s escalating war in Vietnam. The common denominator in all of these groupthink fiascos? The unnecessary loss of American soldiers.

Secretary of State Colin Powell had always warned the White House that more troops were needed to stabilize Iraq. His assessment was obviously correct. Yet, his was the dissenting voice and he was left out of the decision-making loop. Powell, an infantryman in Vietnam and head of the National Security Council to Gulf War I had more war experience than anyone in the clubby in-group of Rumsfeld/Perle/Wolfowitz.

Now Condoleezza Rice will be Secretary of State. She and the president have a close professional and personal relationship. Given the groupthink dynamic, it's doubtful she can provide objective assessments that don’t coincide with the insiders' worldview.

SEPTEMBER

In “Keep adultery law on the books,” I challenge George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley’s notion that Virginia’s law criminalizing adultery is outdated. Turley is a “value relativist” and pretends to believe that no one set of values are preferable to any other set of values. Value relativism is a component of the famous German philosopher Nietzche’s concept of nihilism.

However, all nihilists believe that the relativity value orientation should be preeminent. Yet, Nietzche did not believe in nihilism. Rather, he thought that societies had to go through the terrible experience of value relativity, and suffer through its consequences, before a fresh era of value creation could emerge.

Perhaps he was right. The challenge to universal values began in the United States in the 1960s. We have suffered through three decades of amoral and immoral behavior to the extent that many people no longer have any idea what are right and wrong actions. Consequently, many Americans now want a set of religious-based values to govern their lives. The red/blue state voting pattern is an illustration of that desire.

Turley, and his fellow travelers on the value relativity highway, hate this return to a value system based on religious teachings. They, in effect, want to play God and define cultural values. Thankfully, history is not on their side.

OCTOBER

Talk about new public bureaucracies in the Roanoke Valley: the Western Virginia Water Authority appears to be totally out of control. Bureaucracies reward workers for not thinking and blindly carrying out orders. This model of management is the exact opposite of high-performance organizations where workers have input into decision-making processes and are paid to think (and even question) before they execute irrational commands. The new Water Authority has unleashed hundreds of rule-bound, Gestapo-type agents on the taxpayers of the Roanoke Valley.

Roanoke, and other local municipalities, spend thousand of dollars annually sending its top managers to the best graduate schools of public administration to learn the latest management strategies. Yet, they return to manage the same old bureaucratic organizations. If the Water Authority is any indication, taxpayers are certainly not getting a good return on their investment from the time Roanoke’s administrators are spending at UVA and Harvard in the summer.

Beginning Jan. 1, we will pay higher water and sewer rates. Is it unreasonable to at least demand better customer service from the Water Authority?

The “America’s philosophes” column attempted to explain the role of the public intellectual in contemporary American society. We are not reporters and don’t pretend to be. Rather, we are interpreters of civic affairs who seek to influence the public debate. As the writer of a recent book on public intellectualism noted, we are “controversialists with a tendency to take extreme positions.”

Unlike news reporters, public intellectuals don’t contact sources before writing articles. Instead, they project their political and social worldview (whether liberal, conservative, or egalitarian) on a subject and attempt to make sense of it for the broader public through those lens.

Public intellectuals should be wary of being co-opted by the spin of public officials or business leaders who want favorable views attached to their actions. One of the questions I’m asked most frequently by these groups is “Why didn’t you call before writing the story?” In my estimation, that would defeat the purpose of public intellectualism.

And it's not just me. Leaders now have to get prepared to have their actions scrutinized by a new media type -- the quasi-public intellectual that is being produced by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. They will be full-time employees of major papers like the New York Times and Washington Post. They won’t call before they write either. They will make or break professional careers on a daily basis.

NOVEMBER

Harvard professor Graham Allison’s book, “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,” warns that the greatest threat to the United States is a terrorist group getting its hands on a nuclear weapon and detonating it in the country. Allison believes the easiest way to prevent this is by securing the enriched uranium and plutonium that remains largely unsecured in the old Soviet Union. Without these materials, nuclear weapons cannot be created. Graham raises an important question: “Why isn’t this our top national security priority?”

Controlling fissile material is only half the equation. Several years ago, MIT economist Lester Thurow wrote a book titled “The Future of Capitalism.” In the text, he talked about the 600,000 world-class engineers and scientists who lost their jobs when the Soviet Union collapsed. Where did they go? Thurow estimates that 200,000 left for Israel and have been instrumental in jump-starting that country’s high-tech industry. Others can be found in the electronic plants of Bangkok.

I hope that a sizeable number are also living quietly in the United States, working in major industries or research universities, and earning a decent paycheck. Otherwise, their services will go to the highest bidder on the open market and guys like Osama bin Laden have plenty of money to purchase their services.

We have to secure both fissile material and human brainpower to prevent a terrorist group from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The possibility of a nuclear explosion on U.S. soil did not end with the Cold War. That war has simply shifted to different front.

In “The fan: a clear and present danger,” I argue that the verbally abusive language of fans directed to players at collegiate and professional sporting events constitute “fighting words,” a form of speech not protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that this language, by its very utterance, is likely to incite a breach of the peace. Law enforcement officers should enforce this law to prevent brawls like the one that recently occurred between the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers.

One of the most interesting letters I received on this topic came from Ken Brown, chief of police and director of public safety at Georgia Southern University. His officers have a zero-tolerance for unruly fans and, because of this aggressive policing, incidents of bad fan behavior have dropped dramatically at GSU over the past decade.

Fans are not legally “entitled” to verbally or physically abuse players. The “fighting words” doctrine has to be enforced at all professional and collegiate sporting events. Otherwise, there will be more players like Ron Artest and Milton Bradley charging into the stands after fans who use language to cause a riot.

I also received a lot of mail for the “For Willingham, no more mission impossible” column. Most were from Notre Dame alumni who (1) don’t like the accusation that Willingham was fired because he is black, (2) want a winning football team, and (3) want athletes to continue to be admitted under regular -- not NCAA -- admissions guidelines. This is a zero-sum game for ND. It is unlikely that a major football power can achieve numbers two and three simultaneously.

Notre Dame faces an identity crisis. While many alumni would like to see the institution remain an elite university, the barbarians led by Paul Hornung will likely win out. Willingham’s departure probably means the deconstruction of Notre Dame has begun.

DECEMBER

Claudia Whitworth was very deserving of Roanoke’s Citizen of the Year Award. The column was picked up by the Maynard Institute (Bob Maynard was the late owner of the Oakland Tribune) and members of the Baha’I faith nationwide. It is always good to see the accomplishments of those not seeking the limelight get their deserved recognition -- especially while they are still living. Roanoke officials deserve “two thumbs up” for making this choice.

In “Title IX under fire,” I question how the laws that prohibit gender discrimination in public school and higher education athletics can possibly be enforced if teachers who see the discrimination first-hand can be fired for reporting gender bias. It makes no sense to me but the U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing this question in Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education. If the Court rules against girls basketball coach Roderick Jackson, it will me a major setback for the cause of gender equity in the United States. I don’t think that will happen and look forward to reporting, in my annual review next year, a victory for Jackson and women’s rights.