State of the Union - New York TimesJanuary 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
State of the Union
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On Tuesday President Bush will deliver his State of the Union address and map out priorities for his last three years. The direction in which America needs to go is obvious: toward energy independence. If Mr. Bush steps up to that challenge, this speech could be a new beginning for his presidency. If he doesn't, you can stick a fork in this administration. It will be done — because it will have abdicated leadership on the biggest issue of our day. Here's the speech I'll be listening for:
My fellow Americans, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy gave an extraordinary State of the Union address in which he called on the nation to marshal all of its resources to put a man on the Moon. By setting that lofty goal, Kennedy was trying to summon all of our industrial and scientific talent, and a willingness to sacrifice financially, to catch up with the Soviet Union, which had overtaken America in the field of large rocket engines.
"While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first," Kennedy said, "we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last."
I come to you this evening with a similar challenge. President Kennedy was worried about the threat that communism posed to our way of life. I am here to tell you that if we don't move away from our dependence on oil and shift to renewable fuels, it will change our way of life for the worse — and soon — much, much more than communism ever could have. Making this transition is the calling of our era.
Why? First, we are in a war with a violent strain of Middle East Islam that is indirectly financed by our consumption of oil. Second, with millions of Indians and Chinese buying cars and homes as they join the great global middle class, we must quickly move away from burning fossil fuels or we're going to create enough global warming to melt the North Pole. Because of that, green cars, homes, offices, appliances, designs and renewable energies will be the biggest growth industry of the 21st century. If we don't dominate that industry, China, India, Japan or Europe surely will.
But to lead, we must impose the highest energy-efficiency standards on our own automakers and other industries so we force them to be the most innovative. I want to inspire girls and boys across America to study math, science and engineering to help our nation achieve green energy independence. President Kennedy said, Let's put a man on the Moon. I say, Let's make oil obsolete.
Finally, my call for spreading democracy will never be achieved if some of the worst regimes on the planet — Iran, Sudan, Venezuela — have so much oil money they can misbehave and ignore the world, and if the rest of us — Europe, America, China and India — are forever coddling them to get access to their crude.
With all of this in mind, I am sending Congress the Bush Energy Freedom Act. It is based on ideas first offered by the energy expert Philip Verleger and it argues the following:
Transportation accounts for most of our oil consumption. And many Americans have purchased big cars and S.U.V.'s, expecting gasoline to remain cheap. That is no longer the case. Therefore, I propose creating a government agency that will buy up any gas-guzzling car or truck in America at the original new or used price, and crush it. This national buy-back program will be financed by a $2-a-gallon gasoline tax that will be phased in by 10 cents a month beginning in 2008 — so people know what is coming and start buying fuel-efficient cars right now.
By removing so many gas guzzlers, we will quickly reduce our oil consumption and create a huge demand for new energy-efficient cars from Detroit, which will rescue our auto industry. We have to do something drastic. The Harley-Davidson motorcycle company is worth more today than General Motors! But by sharply raising the gasoline tax, we'll also make sure that Detroit shifts its fleet to energy-saving plug-in hybrids and hydrogen- and ethanol-fueled vehicles, which will force Detroit to out-innovate Toyota. And by generating so much income from a gasoline tax, we will be able to give gas-tax rebates to lower-income folks and have plenty left over to pay for new investment in education and scientific research.
Impossible? Read my lips: Nothing is impossible when Americans put their hearts and minds to it.
One last thing: I have accepted the resignation of Vice President Dick Cheney, who felt he could not be a salesman for the Energy Freedom Act. I am nominating Jeffrey Immelt — the C.E.O. of General Electric, who has focused G.E.'s innovation around "eco-imagination" — as Mr. Cheney's replacement.
Good night, and God bless America.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic - New York Times
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic - New York TimesJanuary 29, 2006
Guest Columnist
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic
By TED KOPPEL
Washington
NOT all reporters have an unfinished novel gathering dust but many, including this one, do. If that isn't enough of a cliché, this novel's hero is a television anchor (always plant your pen in familiar turf) who, in the course of a minor traffic accident, bites the tip off his tongue. The ensuing speech impediment is sufficient to end his on-air career and he finds himself, recently divorced, now unemployed, at home and watching altogether too much television.
After several weeks of isolation he discovers on his voice mail a message from an old friend, the opinion-page editor of his hometown newspaper. She is urging him to write a piece about television news, which, after some hesitation, he does — with a vengeance:
The earls and dukes and barons of television news have grown sleek and fat eating road kill. The victims, dispatched by political or special interest hit-and-run squads, are then hung up, displayed and consumed with unwholesome relish on television.
They wander the battlefields of other people's wars, these knights of the airwaves, disposing of the wounded from both armies, gorging themselves like the electronic vultures they are.
The popular illusion that television journalists are liberals does them too much honor. Like all mercenaries they fight for money, not ideology; but unlike true mercenaries, their loyalty is not for sale. It cannot be engaged because it does not exist. Their total lack of commitment to any cause has come to be defined as objectivity. Their daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality.
A wounded and bitter fellow, this fictional hero of mine, but his bilious arguments hardly seem all that dated. Now here I sit, having recently left ABC News after 42 years, and who should call but an editor friend of mine who, in a quirky convolution of real life's imitating unpublished fiction, has asked me to write this column examining the state of television news today.
Where to begin? Confession of the obvious seems like a reasonable starting point: I have become well known and well-off traveling the world on ABC's dime, charged only with ensuring that our viewers be well informed about important issues. For the better part of those 42 years, this arrangement worked to our mutual benefit and satisfaction. At the same time, I cannot help but see that the industry in which I have spent my entire adult life is in decline and in distress.
Once, 30 or 40 years ago, the target audience for network news was made up of everyone with a television, and the most common criticism lodged against us was that we were tempted to operate on a lowest-common-denominator basis.
This, however, was in the days before deregulation, when the Federal Communications Commission was still perceived to have teeth, and its mandate that broadcasters operate in "the public interest, convenience and necessity" was enough to give each licensee pause.
Network owners nurtured their news divisions, encouraged them to tackle serious issues, cultivated them as shields to be brandished before Congressional committees whenever questions were raised about the quality of entertainment programs and the vast sums earned by those programs. News divisions occasionally came under political pressures but rarely commercial ones. The expectation was that they would search out issues of importance, sift out the trivial and then tell the public what it needed to know.
With the advent of cable, satellite and broadband technology, today's marketplace has become so overcrowded that network news divisions are increasingly vulnerable to the dictatorship of the demographic. Now, every division of every network is expected to make a profit. And so we have entered the age of boutique journalism. The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then to cater to them.
Most television news programs are therefore designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences. That may be not only acceptable but unavoidable in entertainment; in news, however, it is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important, not the other way around.
Indeed, in television news these days, the programs are being shaped to attract, most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers. They, in turn, are presumed to be partly brain-dead — though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors.
Exceptions, it should be noted, remain. Thus it is that the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC are liberally studded with advertisements that clearly cater to older Americans. But this is a holdover from another era: the last gathering of more than 30 million tribal elders, as they clench their dentures while struggling to control esophageal eruptions of stomach acid to watch "The News." That number still commands respect, but even the evening news programs, you will find (after the first block of headline material), are struggling to find a new format that will somehow appeal to younger viewers.
Washington news, for example, is covered with less and less enthusiasm and aggressiveness. The networks' foreign bureaus have, for some years now, been seen as too expensive to merit survival. Judged on the frequency with which their reports get airtime, they can no longer be deemed cost-effective. Most have either been closed or reduced in size to the point of irrelevance.
Simply stated, no audience is perceived to be clamoring for foreign news, the exceptions being wars in their early months that involve American troops, acts of terrorism and, for a couple of weeks or so, natural disasters of truly epic proportions.
You will still see foreign stories on the evening news broadcasts, but examine them carefully. They are either reported by one of a half-dozen or so remaining foreign correspondents who now cover the world for each network, or the anchor simply narrates a piece of videotape shot by some other news agency. For big events, an anchor might parachute in for a couple of days of high drama coverage. But the age of the foreign correspondent, who knew a country or region intimately, is long over.
No television news executive is likely to acknowledge indifference to major events overseas or in our nation's capital, but he may, on occasion, concede that the viewers don't care, and therein lies the essential malignancy.
The accusation that television news has a political agenda misses the point. Right now, the main agenda is to give people what they want. It is not partisanship but profitability that shapes what you see.
Most particularly on cable news, a calculated subjectivity has, indeed, displaced the old-fashioned goal of conveying the news dispassionately. But that, too, has less to do with partisan politics than simple capitalism. Thus, one cable network experiments with the subjectivity of tender engagement: "I care and therefore you should care." Another opts for chest-thumping certitude: "I know and therefore you should care."
Even Fox News's product has less to do with ideology and more to do with changing business models. Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment.
Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers' unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.
What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
Reaching across the entire spectrum of American television viewers is precisely the broadcast networks' greatest strength. By focusing only on key demographics, by choosing to ignore their total viewership, they have surrendered their greatest advantage.
Oddly enough, there is a looming demographic reality that could help steer television news back toward its original purpose. There are tens of millions of baby boomers in their 40's and 50's and entering their 60's who have far more spending power than their 18-to-34-year-old counterparts. Television news may be debasing itself before the wrong demographic.
If the network news divisions cannot be convinced that their future depends on attracting all demographic groups, then perhaps, at least, they can be persuaded to aim for the largest single demographic with the most disposable income — one that may actually have an appetite for serious news. That would seem like a no-brainer. It's regrettable, perhaps, that only money and the inclination to spend it will ultimately determine the face of television news, but, as a distinguished colleague of mine used to say: "That's the way it is."
Ted Koppel, who retired as anchor and managing editor of the ABC program "Nightline" in November, is a contributing columnist for The Times and managing editor of The Discovery Network.
Frank Rich is on book leave.
Guest Columnist
And Now, a Word for Our Demographic
By TED KOPPEL
Washington
NOT all reporters have an unfinished novel gathering dust but many, including this one, do. If that isn't enough of a cliché, this novel's hero is a television anchor (always plant your pen in familiar turf) who, in the course of a minor traffic accident, bites the tip off his tongue. The ensuing speech impediment is sufficient to end his on-air career and he finds himself, recently divorced, now unemployed, at home and watching altogether too much television.
After several weeks of isolation he discovers on his voice mail a message from an old friend, the opinion-page editor of his hometown newspaper. She is urging him to write a piece about television news, which, after some hesitation, he does — with a vengeance:
The earls and dukes and barons of television news have grown sleek and fat eating road kill. The victims, dispatched by political or special interest hit-and-run squads, are then hung up, displayed and consumed with unwholesome relish on television.
They wander the battlefields of other people's wars, these knights of the airwaves, disposing of the wounded from both armies, gorging themselves like the electronic vultures they are.
The popular illusion that television journalists are liberals does them too much honor. Like all mercenaries they fight for money, not ideology; but unlike true mercenaries, their loyalty is not for sale. It cannot be engaged because it does not exist. Their total lack of commitment to any cause has come to be defined as objectivity. Their daily preoccupation with the trivial and the banal has accumulated large audiences, which, in turn, has encouraged a descent into the search for items of even greater banality.
A wounded and bitter fellow, this fictional hero of mine, but his bilious arguments hardly seem all that dated. Now here I sit, having recently left ABC News after 42 years, and who should call but an editor friend of mine who, in a quirky convolution of real life's imitating unpublished fiction, has asked me to write this column examining the state of television news today.
Where to begin? Confession of the obvious seems like a reasonable starting point: I have become well known and well-off traveling the world on ABC's dime, charged only with ensuring that our viewers be well informed about important issues. For the better part of those 42 years, this arrangement worked to our mutual benefit and satisfaction. At the same time, I cannot help but see that the industry in which I have spent my entire adult life is in decline and in distress.
Once, 30 or 40 years ago, the target audience for network news was made up of everyone with a television, and the most common criticism lodged against us was that we were tempted to operate on a lowest-common-denominator basis.
This, however, was in the days before deregulation, when the Federal Communications Commission was still perceived to have teeth, and its mandate that broadcasters operate in "the public interest, convenience and necessity" was enough to give each licensee pause.
Network owners nurtured their news divisions, encouraged them to tackle serious issues, cultivated them as shields to be brandished before Congressional committees whenever questions were raised about the quality of entertainment programs and the vast sums earned by those programs. News divisions occasionally came under political pressures but rarely commercial ones. The expectation was that they would search out issues of importance, sift out the trivial and then tell the public what it needed to know.
With the advent of cable, satellite and broadband technology, today's marketplace has become so overcrowded that network news divisions are increasingly vulnerable to the dictatorship of the demographic. Now, every division of every network is expected to make a profit. And so we have entered the age of boutique journalism. The goal for the traditional broadcast networks now is to identify those segments of the audience considered most desirable by the advertising community and then to cater to them.
Most television news programs are therefore designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences. That may be not only acceptable but unavoidable in entertainment; in news, however, it is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important, not the other way around.
Indeed, in television news these days, the programs are being shaped to attract, most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers. They, in turn, are presumed to be partly brain-dead — though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors.
Exceptions, it should be noted, remain. Thus it is that the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC are liberally studded with advertisements that clearly cater to older Americans. But this is a holdover from another era: the last gathering of more than 30 million tribal elders, as they clench their dentures while struggling to control esophageal eruptions of stomach acid to watch "The News." That number still commands respect, but even the evening news programs, you will find (after the first block of headline material), are struggling to find a new format that will somehow appeal to younger viewers.
Washington news, for example, is covered with less and less enthusiasm and aggressiveness. The networks' foreign bureaus have, for some years now, been seen as too expensive to merit survival. Judged on the frequency with which their reports get airtime, they can no longer be deemed cost-effective. Most have either been closed or reduced in size to the point of irrelevance.
Simply stated, no audience is perceived to be clamoring for foreign news, the exceptions being wars in their early months that involve American troops, acts of terrorism and, for a couple of weeks or so, natural disasters of truly epic proportions.
You will still see foreign stories on the evening news broadcasts, but examine them carefully. They are either reported by one of a half-dozen or so remaining foreign correspondents who now cover the world for each network, or the anchor simply narrates a piece of videotape shot by some other news agency. For big events, an anchor might parachute in for a couple of days of high drama coverage. But the age of the foreign correspondent, who knew a country or region intimately, is long over.
No television news executive is likely to acknowledge indifference to major events overseas or in our nation's capital, but he may, on occasion, concede that the viewers don't care, and therein lies the essential malignancy.
The accusation that television news has a political agenda misses the point. Right now, the main agenda is to give people what they want. It is not partisanship but profitability that shapes what you see.
Most particularly on cable news, a calculated subjectivity has, indeed, displaced the old-fashioned goal of conveying the news dispassionately. But that, too, has less to do with partisan politics than simple capitalism. Thus, one cable network experiments with the subjectivity of tender engagement: "I care and therefore you should care." Another opts for chest-thumping certitude: "I know and therefore you should care."
Even Fox News's product has less to do with ideology and more to do with changing business models. Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment.
Now, television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers' unwilling throats. We are obliged to make our offerings as palatable as possible. But there are too many important things happening in the world today to allow the diet to be determined to such a degree by the popular tastes of a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.
What is, ultimately, most confusing about the behavior of the big three networks is why they ever allowed themselves to be drawn onto a battlefield that so favors their cable competitors. At almost any time, the audience of a single network news program on just one broadcast network is greater than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.
Reaching across the entire spectrum of American television viewers is precisely the broadcast networks' greatest strength. By focusing only on key demographics, by choosing to ignore their total viewership, they have surrendered their greatest advantage.
Oddly enough, there is a looming demographic reality that could help steer television news back toward its original purpose. There are tens of millions of baby boomers in their 40's and 50's and entering their 60's who have far more spending power than their 18-to-34-year-old counterparts. Television news may be debasing itself before the wrong demographic.
If the network news divisions cannot be convinced that their future depends on attracting all demographic groups, then perhaps, at least, they can be persuaded to aim for the largest single demographic with the most disposable income — one that may actually have an appetite for serious news. That would seem like a no-brainer. It's regrettable, perhaps, that only money and the inclination to spend it will ultimately determine the face of television news, but, as a distinguished colleague of mine used to say: "That's the way it is."
Ted Koppel, who retired as anchor and managing editor of the ABC program "Nightline" in November, is a contributing columnist for The Times and managing editor of The Discovery Network.
Frank Rich is on book leave.
Monday, January 23, 2006
New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Clinton vs. Rice? Now, that's the ticket!
New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Clinton vs. Rice? Now, that's the ticket!Clinton vs. Rice? Now, that's the ticket!
First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Rice left Washington last week for Liberia. They were flying to attend the inauguration of the first female president in all of Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
When the First Lady was asked by CNN when she thought this country would elect a woman, she answered that she thought it would happen fairly soon, perhaps in the next two presidential elections. The reporter then asked who she thought would be a good candidate for the job. Bush said she would want the woman to be a Republican and that she thought Rice would be just fine, even though Rice has said that she has no interest in running.
Things have changed so much in our nation since the civil rights era that there was no talk of Rice's ethnicity. All Bush said after acknowledging the secretary's stated lack of interest was, "I'd love to see her run. She's terrific."
I don't know if the First Lady was voicing an opinion that has a strong standing in the Republican Party, since many of its members have learned to wear high collars that keep their red necks from view. But we cannot be sure of anything at this moment, especially since one of the most remarkable developments in the 20th century was Lyndon Johnson evolving from a segregationist into the nation's most revolutionary President in the arena of civil rights since Abraham Lincoln.
If a strong call for Rice begins to build, those elephants who are more politicians than they are suspicious of black people in power might just leave their hoods in the closet for good and start an unprecedented campaign for the White House. They might then live up to their history of being "the party of Abraham Lincoln," which seemed even more ironic during Richard Nixon's presidency when the "Southern strategy" meant opening the arms of the party to Southern rednecks disenchanted by the destruction of segregation by the Democrats.
Colin Powell might have been the first black American President if he had run against Bill Clinton because big guns would have backed him and he was, at that time, a man who would have given Clinton far stronger competition than Bob Dole did. But things would be rough for Rice if she were to run.
Because she is an elephant and because she will have been in the Bush administration through two terms, her "authenticity" will be called into question. Because she is neither a hard- nor a soft-core leftist, Rice is considered a "race traitor," a problem special to black people who do not adhere to an agenda from the Black Power era of the late 1960s.
That is the kind of single-mindedness that keeps black Americans out of big-time politics. That is because the "leadership" always seems to be calling for a reservation modeled on Leisure World, not high-quality public education, safer communities and a chance to compete.
Whatever Rice is and whatever she represents, she has the right to be what she wants and has no obligation to repeat the clichés of the civil rights establishment, which have become little more than predictable clouds of hot air. If she and Hillary Clinton were to square off in 2008, that campaign would be one of the most exciting in our time. Let's hope we see it.
Originally published on January 15, 2006
First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Rice left Washington last week for Liberia. They were flying to attend the inauguration of the first female president in all of Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
When the First Lady was asked by CNN when she thought this country would elect a woman, she answered that she thought it would happen fairly soon, perhaps in the next two presidential elections. The reporter then asked who she thought would be a good candidate for the job. Bush said she would want the woman to be a Republican and that she thought Rice would be just fine, even though Rice has said that she has no interest in running.
Things have changed so much in our nation since the civil rights era that there was no talk of Rice's ethnicity. All Bush said after acknowledging the secretary's stated lack of interest was, "I'd love to see her run. She's terrific."
I don't know if the First Lady was voicing an opinion that has a strong standing in the Republican Party, since many of its members have learned to wear high collars that keep their red necks from view. But we cannot be sure of anything at this moment, especially since one of the most remarkable developments in the 20th century was Lyndon Johnson evolving from a segregationist into the nation's most revolutionary President in the arena of civil rights since Abraham Lincoln.
If a strong call for Rice begins to build, those elephants who are more politicians than they are suspicious of black people in power might just leave their hoods in the closet for good and start an unprecedented campaign for the White House. They might then live up to their history of being "the party of Abraham Lincoln," which seemed even more ironic during Richard Nixon's presidency when the "Southern strategy" meant opening the arms of the party to Southern rednecks disenchanted by the destruction of segregation by the Democrats.
Colin Powell might have been the first black American President if he had run against Bill Clinton because big guns would have backed him and he was, at that time, a man who would have given Clinton far stronger competition than Bob Dole did. But things would be rough for Rice if she were to run.
Because she is an elephant and because she will have been in the Bush administration through two terms, her "authenticity" will be called into question. Because she is neither a hard- nor a soft-core leftist, Rice is considered a "race traitor," a problem special to black people who do not adhere to an agenda from the Black Power era of the late 1960s.
That is the kind of single-mindedness that keeps black Americans out of big-time politics. That is because the "leadership" always seems to be calling for a reservation modeled on Leisure World, not high-quality public education, safer communities and a chance to compete.
Whatever Rice is and whatever she represents, she has the right to be what she wants and has no obligation to repeat the clichés of the civil rights establishment, which have become little more than predictable clouds of hot air. If she and Hillary Clinton were to square off in 2008, that campaign would be one of the most exciting in our time. Let's hope we see it.
Originally published on January 15, 2006
Saturday, January 21, 2006
The Plank
The PlankDARK CHOCOLATE, WHITE MILK:
Wow, Ray Nagin is the gift that keeps on giving. Following up on his MLK Day speech, in which (as I inexcusably failed to note in this post) he proclaimed that God wanted New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city, today Nagin had this to say:
"How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about. . . . New Orleans was a chocolate city before Katrina. It is going to be a chocolate city after. How is that divisive? It is white and black working together, coming together and making something special."
Maybe "mocha city" would have been the better phrase. All joking aside, however, Nagin is, in his own blundering way, making a worthwhile point. While he was certainly dumb to say that God wanted New Orleans to remain a majority-black city, the issue of how the city is rebuilt--and whether, in the process, it gets intentionally whitened--is a serious one. And Nagin, and other black New Orlineans, aren't being paranoid when they worry that some white people in the city are secretly, and not so secretly, hoping that a rebuilt New Orleans is decidedly more vanilla, or, to use Nagin's terminology, white milk-like. Of course, the most important thing is that the city be rebuilt in a way that not only allows its black residents to return there, if they so choose, but also allows them to return to neighborhoods that are not squalid and dysfunctional and impoverished in the way they were before Katrina. I don't know if Nagin has any sort of gastronomic analogies to make that point, but I'd love to hear them.
--Jason Zengerle
Wow, Ray Nagin is the gift that keeps on giving. Following up on his MLK Day speech, in which (as I inexcusably failed to note in this post) he proclaimed that God wanted New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city, today Nagin had this to say:
"How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about. . . . New Orleans was a chocolate city before Katrina. It is going to be a chocolate city after. How is that divisive? It is white and black working together, coming together and making something special."
Maybe "mocha city" would have been the better phrase. All joking aside, however, Nagin is, in his own blundering way, making a worthwhile point. While he was certainly dumb to say that God wanted New Orleans to remain a majority-black city, the issue of how the city is rebuilt--and whether, in the process, it gets intentionally whitened--is a serious one. And Nagin, and other black New Orlineans, aren't being paranoid when they worry that some white people in the city are secretly, and not so secretly, hoping that a rebuilt New Orleans is decidedly more vanilla, or, to use Nagin's terminology, white milk-like. Of course, the most important thing is that the city be rebuilt in a way that not only allows its black residents to return there, if they so choose, but also allows them to return to neighborhoods that are not squalid and dysfunctional and impoverished in the way they were before Katrina. I don't know if Nagin has any sort of gastronomic analogies to make that point, but I'd love to hear them.
--Jason Zengerle
Monday, January 09, 2006
[print version] Treo 700w: A marriage not made in heaven | CNET News.com
[print version] Treo 700w: A marriage not made in heaven | CNET News.comTreo 700w: A marriage not made in heaven
By David Pogue
http://news.com.com/Treo+700w+A+marriage+not+made+in+heaven/2100-1041_3-6023310.html
Story last modified Sun Jan 08 06:00:00 PST 2006
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You thought the apocalypse was upon us when Apple Computer switched to processor chips from Intel, which Mac fans had considered the Dark Side for more than 20 years?
Well, try this on for size: Palm's new Treo 700w cell phone-organizer runs on software from Microsoft. Yes, that Microsoft, whose palmtop software was mocked by Palm employees for years as bloated and inefficient.
What's next--a new radio show with Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken as co-hosts?
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The first question, in Palm's case, is: why? The answer is: corporate sales.
For years, Palm has stood by, gnashing its teeth and losing market share, as corporate tech buyers lived and breathed the credo, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." So maybe, thought Palm, it could join that party by offering its much-admired Treo phone with Microsoft inside.
The second question is: how?
From the beginning, Palm's and Microsoft's design philosophies were miles apart. Microsoft lived for long lists of features and 65 different ways to get at them, while Palm strove for simplicity and directness. (At one point, Palm actually employed a tap counter--a guy whose job it was to make sure no task required more than three taps on the PalmPilot's touch screen.) How on earth can these two approaches be reconciled?
Click here to Play
Video: A look at the new Treo
Palm's Treo 700w comes with Windows OS
As it turns out, not very easily. The Treo 700w ($400 with a two-year Verizon commitment) is a Frankensteinian mishmash. Some of its features are so inspired and well executed, you can't help grinning, while others are so clumsy, you smack your forehead.
In the first category, you'll find a cluttered but fantastically useful new Today screen, your starting point and home base. It offers speed-dial buttons for your most frequently called contacts, displayed either as names or, cleverly, as photos.
The Today screen's Search box summons names from your address book as you type on the excellent micro-keyboard. In fine Treo tradition, you can generally pluck one name out of a thousand in your address book just by typing the person's initials. One more button press places the call or sends a message. You can also set up the Treo's alphabet keys as speed-dial buttons--B for Big Boss, for example.
The Today screen also lists your appointments and the number of unread e-mail messages. All of this information is synched effortlessly from Outlook on your Windows PC, either via a USB cable or (if your corporation uses Microsoft Exchange Server) wirelessly, over the air. Added-cost Macintosh compatibility is in the works from MarkSpace.
Finally, the Today screen includes a Google search box that takes you directly to the Web. (Google? Does Microsoft know about this?)
Those are only some of the ways in which Palm has improved on the standard Windows Mobile operating system. You can tap VCR-like buttons (Play, Skip, Delete and so on) when checking your voice mail so you don't have to memorize keystrokes.
Conference calling is practically effortless on the Treo, compared with the standard Windows Mobile method (which involves shuttling between the Contacts and Phone programs). Palm has gone well beyond Microsoft's limited use of sound cues, too. For example, you can use MIDI files, MP3 files or even video clips as ringers for individual callers, as alert sounds or even as alarms to wake you in the morning.
All of this comes in the sleekest Treo yet, a gleaming slab whose glowing, domed keys and buttons are a delight to the fingertips. (Palm says that it has ironed out the hardware glitches that drew complaints on earlier models.) The usual Treo hardware goodies are here: a switch that instantly silences all sounds, a camera (with improved resolution--1.3 megapixels), speakerphone, a beefy battery (4.5 hours of talk time), a slot for an SD memory card (to hold music, photos and videos), and a five-way rocker switch that lets you operate most functions with one hand and no stylus.
The Treo has always been a great little Internet machine, but the 700w takes a leap forward in speed. Because it can use Verizon Wireless's high-speed Internet network--called EV-DO by geeks and Broadband Access by Verizon--the 700w gets you online at nearly the speed of a cable modem, at least in major cities. (Verizon Wireless offers bundles like $80 a month for 450 minutes of calls, or $110 for 1,350 minutes, with unlimited EV-DO Internet use.)
Alas, even after all that plastic surgery, you can't escape the fact that you're basically running Windows.
For instance, you open programs from a tiny Start menu, which you activate by pressing a dedicated Windows-logo key. Fine, except that the Start menu has room to list only seven programs. For access to anything else, you must open the Programs folder. But even here, only nine icons fit on each screen, and no list view is available. So you have to do a lot of scrolling.
Alas, even after all that plastic surgery, you can't escape the fact that you're basically running Windows.
Like it or not, Windows Mobile also teaches you about memory management. Every time you open a program, it stays open in the background, even if you close its window. Sooner or later, you'll run into the "Program Memory Low" error message, requiring you to shut down programs manually in a special list box.
The 700w's beefed-up memory (60MB free) makes this situation less frequent. Still, the whole ritual should be unnecessary. Doesn't anyone at Microsoft realize how silly it sounds to say, "Just a minute--I have to quit some programs on my phone"?
That's not the only hit to efficiency. Microsoft must believe that all its customers bill by the hour. Just rotating a photo requires four steps. The Treo 700w no longer has buttons for Calendar and Address Book, either; those functions are now buried in menus that require more steps to reach. Buttons for Mute and Speakerphone used to appear right on the Treo screen during calls. These, too, are now in menus. What once required one step now requires two--if you even know where to look for them.
Here's another example: On older Treos, you could write a new appointment directly onto, say, the 3:30 p.m. line of the calendar's Day view. Microsoft's version offers no such instant gratification. Instead, creating a new appointment requires choosing starting and ending times from pop-up menus inside a dialogue box. Only half-hour increments are available; let's hope you never have a 4:45 train to catch.
Palm didn't help matters by adding a prominent OK key, which actually means just the opposite. That is, instead of Yes, Go or Forward, it means Cancel, Back or Stop. You use it, for example, to cancel out of a dialogue box or window, to backtrack to a previous screen, or to close a menu without making a choice. It must have been designed by the same person who, in the full-blown Windows, put the Shut Down command in the Start menu.
Speaking of steps backward, Treonauts should note that the 700w's screen resolution is only 240 by 240 pixels, far coarser than the previous model's. (Palm maintains that this restriction is imposed by Microsoft's software.)
Verizon Wireless is the first carrier of this Treo--a surprising development since it was the last major cellular company to offer the previous Treo model.
Yet Verizon Wireless is partly responsible for the 700w's crippled Bluetooth (short-range wireless) features. For example, Verizon has turned off the feature that lets your laptop get online using the Treo as a wireless antenna. You can use a wireless headset, but the phone works only with some Bluetooth-equipped cars; the Toyota Prius, for example, isn't on the list. (If history is any guide, these features will be available from other carriers when they get the Treo 700w later this year.)
In other news:
* CES 2006: Gadget glitz in Vegas (Complete show coverage)
* Capitol cookie caper
* iPod rivals ready for prime time at last?
There are certainly bright spots in the 700w. It's brisk and responsive, it feels great in your hand and it does a lot of stuff. (In fact, the only modern cell phone feature missing is Wi-Fi wireless networking, which you can add with Palm's $100 SD Wi-Fi card.)
But considering that Palm's designers once worshipped at the altar of interface excellence, it's a shame that Microsoft's convoluted software has produced such an awkward marriage with the hardware. Longtime Treo fans, in particular, will be absolutely baffled by the new software layout.
Then again, the 700w wasn't built for longtime Treo fans (who, in any case, can still buy the older 650 model). It was built for corporate buyers, whose top priorities may not include providing the most pleasurable experience possible for the worker bees.
By David Pogue
http://news.com.com/Treo+700w+A+marriage+not+made+in+heaven/2100-1041_3-6023310.html
Story last modified Sun Jan 08 06:00:00 PST 2006
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You thought the apocalypse was upon us when Apple Computer switched to processor chips from Intel, which Mac fans had considered the Dark Side for more than 20 years?
Well, try this on for size: Palm's new Treo 700w cell phone-organizer runs on software from Microsoft. Yes, that Microsoft, whose palmtop software was mocked by Palm employees for years as bloated and inefficient.
What's next--a new radio show with Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken as co-hosts?
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The first question, in Palm's case, is: why? The answer is: corporate sales.
For years, Palm has stood by, gnashing its teeth and losing market share, as corporate tech buyers lived and breathed the credo, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." So maybe, thought Palm, it could join that party by offering its much-admired Treo phone with Microsoft inside.
The second question is: how?
From the beginning, Palm's and Microsoft's design philosophies were miles apart. Microsoft lived for long lists of features and 65 different ways to get at them, while Palm strove for simplicity and directness. (At one point, Palm actually employed a tap counter--a guy whose job it was to make sure no task required more than three taps on the PalmPilot's touch screen.) How on earth can these two approaches be reconciled?
Click here to Play
Video: A look at the new Treo
Palm's Treo 700w comes with Windows OS
As it turns out, not very easily. The Treo 700w ($400 with a two-year Verizon commitment) is a Frankensteinian mishmash. Some of its features are so inspired and well executed, you can't help grinning, while others are so clumsy, you smack your forehead.
In the first category, you'll find a cluttered but fantastically useful new Today screen, your starting point and home base. It offers speed-dial buttons for your most frequently called contacts, displayed either as names or, cleverly, as photos.
The Today screen's Search box summons names from your address book as you type on the excellent micro-keyboard. In fine Treo tradition, you can generally pluck one name out of a thousand in your address book just by typing the person's initials. One more button press places the call or sends a message. You can also set up the Treo's alphabet keys as speed-dial buttons--B for Big Boss, for example.
The Today screen also lists your appointments and the number of unread e-mail messages. All of this information is synched effortlessly from Outlook on your Windows PC, either via a USB cable or (if your corporation uses Microsoft Exchange Server) wirelessly, over the air. Added-cost Macintosh compatibility is in the works from MarkSpace.
Finally, the Today screen includes a Google search box that takes you directly to the Web. (Google? Does Microsoft know about this?)
Those are only some of the ways in which Palm has improved on the standard Windows Mobile operating system. You can tap VCR-like buttons (Play, Skip, Delete and so on) when checking your voice mail so you don't have to memorize keystrokes.
Conference calling is practically effortless on the Treo, compared with the standard Windows Mobile method (which involves shuttling between the Contacts and Phone programs). Palm has gone well beyond Microsoft's limited use of sound cues, too. For example, you can use MIDI files, MP3 files or even video clips as ringers for individual callers, as alert sounds or even as alarms to wake you in the morning.
All of this comes in the sleekest Treo yet, a gleaming slab whose glowing, domed keys and buttons are a delight to the fingertips. (Palm says that it has ironed out the hardware glitches that drew complaints on earlier models.) The usual Treo hardware goodies are here: a switch that instantly silences all sounds, a camera (with improved resolution--1.3 megapixels), speakerphone, a beefy battery (4.5 hours of talk time), a slot for an SD memory card (to hold music, photos and videos), and a five-way rocker switch that lets you operate most functions with one hand and no stylus.
The Treo has always been a great little Internet machine, but the 700w takes a leap forward in speed. Because it can use Verizon Wireless's high-speed Internet network--called EV-DO by geeks and Broadband Access by Verizon--the 700w gets you online at nearly the speed of a cable modem, at least in major cities. (Verizon Wireless offers bundles like $80 a month for 450 minutes of calls, or $110 for 1,350 minutes, with unlimited EV-DO Internet use.)
Alas, even after all that plastic surgery, you can't escape the fact that you're basically running Windows.
For instance, you open programs from a tiny Start menu, which you activate by pressing a dedicated Windows-logo key. Fine, except that the Start menu has room to list only seven programs. For access to anything else, you must open the Programs folder. But even here, only nine icons fit on each screen, and no list view is available. So you have to do a lot of scrolling.
Alas, even after all that plastic surgery, you can't escape the fact that you're basically running Windows.
Like it or not, Windows Mobile also teaches you about memory management. Every time you open a program, it stays open in the background, even if you close its window. Sooner or later, you'll run into the "Program Memory Low" error message, requiring you to shut down programs manually in a special list box.
The 700w's beefed-up memory (60MB free) makes this situation less frequent. Still, the whole ritual should be unnecessary. Doesn't anyone at Microsoft realize how silly it sounds to say, "Just a minute--I have to quit some programs on my phone"?
That's not the only hit to efficiency. Microsoft must believe that all its customers bill by the hour. Just rotating a photo requires four steps. The Treo 700w no longer has buttons for Calendar and Address Book, either; those functions are now buried in menus that require more steps to reach. Buttons for Mute and Speakerphone used to appear right on the Treo screen during calls. These, too, are now in menus. What once required one step now requires two--if you even know where to look for them.
Here's another example: On older Treos, you could write a new appointment directly onto, say, the 3:30 p.m. line of the calendar's Day view. Microsoft's version offers no such instant gratification. Instead, creating a new appointment requires choosing starting and ending times from pop-up menus inside a dialogue box. Only half-hour increments are available; let's hope you never have a 4:45 train to catch.
Palm didn't help matters by adding a prominent OK key, which actually means just the opposite. That is, instead of Yes, Go or Forward, it means Cancel, Back or Stop. You use it, for example, to cancel out of a dialogue box or window, to backtrack to a previous screen, or to close a menu without making a choice. It must have been designed by the same person who, in the full-blown Windows, put the Shut Down command in the Start menu.
Speaking of steps backward, Treonauts should note that the 700w's screen resolution is only 240 by 240 pixels, far coarser than the previous model's. (Palm maintains that this restriction is imposed by Microsoft's software.)
Verizon Wireless is the first carrier of this Treo--a surprising development since it was the last major cellular company to offer the previous Treo model.
Yet Verizon Wireless is partly responsible for the 700w's crippled Bluetooth (short-range wireless) features. For example, Verizon has turned off the feature that lets your laptop get online using the Treo as a wireless antenna. You can use a wireless headset, but the phone works only with some Bluetooth-equipped cars; the Toyota Prius, for example, isn't on the list. (If history is any guide, these features will be available from other carriers when they get the Treo 700w later this year.)
In other news:
* CES 2006: Gadget glitz in Vegas (Complete show coverage)
* Capitol cookie caper
* iPod rivals ready for prime time at last?
There are certainly bright spots in the 700w. It's brisk and responsive, it feels great in your hand and it does a lot of stuff. (In fact, the only modern cell phone feature missing is Wi-Fi wireless networking, which you can add with Palm's $100 SD Wi-Fi card.)
But considering that Palm's designers once worshipped at the altar of interface excellence, it's a shame that Microsoft's convoluted software has produced such an awkward marriage with the hardware. Longtime Treo fans, in particular, will be absolutely baffled by the new software layout.
Then again, the 700w wasn't built for longtime Treo fans (who, in any case, can still buy the older 650 model). It was built for corporate buyers, whose top priorities may not include providing the most pleasurable experience possible for the worker bees.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
FT.com / World / Asia-Pacific - Taiwan's president fails to get his priorities right
FT.com / World / Asia-Pacific - Taiwan's president fails to get his priorities rightTaiwan's president fails to get his priorities right
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei
Published: December 28 2005 02:00 | Last updated: December 28 2005 02:00
In just five years President Chen Shui-bian has fallen from being Taiwan's hero of democracy to become its most reviled politician.
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In 2000, Mr Chen swept away a ruling party that had held power for more than 50 years, carried by a wave of hope for political and judicial reform and clean government that was backed by 70 per cent of the population.
Now, according to a recent opinion poll, he is left with 10 per cent of the vote. After a crushing defeat in local elections this month, even his Democratic Progressive party is turning against him.
"We desperately need to reform and the key problem is the president," says Shen Fu-hsiung, an outspoken veteran DPP politician.
Mr Chen appears to be at a loss as to what happened. His staff have contacted scholars asking for advice about what he is doing wrong. Just about everything, is the answer. "The lethal blow has been the growing impression over the past year that this government is corrupt," says Emile Sheng, a professor at Soochow University in Taipei.
The Kuomintang, Taiwan's former ruling party, had long been viewed as corrupt. This year a string of scandals involving DPP-appointed officials has dragged the party into the same trouble.
The financial regulator's chief investigator was found to been in close social contact with suspects in an insider trading scandal. Then, irregularities were uncovered in a public transport project in the southern city of Kaohsiung, and now a long-time associate of Mr Chen is one of the prime suspects in bid rigging and corruption.
The deterioration of the DPP's ethical standards has been the last straw. Critics say the president has lost people's trust because of his erratic leadership style and his failure to formulate and execute reforms.
"I don't believe that clean government is the most important issue on our reform agenda," says Lin Cho-shui, a veteran DPP lawmaker. "A much bigger problem is that Chen Shui-bian's mysterious leadership style and his short-term opportunistic decision-making don't work any more."
Mr Chen's government has frequently changed policy direction, most obviously in relations with China. After pledging more economic exchanges across the Strait early in his first term, he later turned to aggressive anti-China rhetoric and last year played to pro-independence sentiment in a re-election campaign that provoked the mainland.
The president made his about-turns without consulting his cabinet or going through government channels. Mr Chen has changed premiers four times and the administration has become inefficient. The government's erratic course has also exacerbated its problems with the opposition, which controls parliament.
"We are left without proper communication between the party and the president, and relations between the president and his cabinet, as well as between the executive and the legislative, are in disarray," complains Kuan Bi-ling, a DPP lawmaker close to Frank Hsieh, the premier.
Mr Lin adds that the president's authoritarian style has prevented a debate on the party's stance on national identity and relations with China, which should have taken place long ago.
Presidential aides defend Mr Chen. "He needs to respond to different groups in a society which is deeply split in its view towards national identity and its relations with the mainland," says one of his staff.
But with little more than two years until the next presidential election and big city mayoral polls, and legislative elections coming up next year and in 2007, the DPP no longer accepts these arguments.
"We have been in power for almost six years and it's been a complete failure," says Lee Chun-yee, a DPP lawmaker.
Lee Wen-chung, another heavyweight in the DPP's legislative caucus, blames Mr Chen for the DPP government's weak policy record. "Our party's platform says we want economic liberalisation but at the same time we demand fairness and social security. Since the president has failed to set priorities, nothing gets done at all."
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei
Published: December 28 2005 02:00 | Last updated: December 28 2005 02:00
In just five years President Chen Shui-bian has fallen from being Taiwan's hero of democracy to become its most reviled politician.
<A TARGET="_blank" HREF="http://ads.ft.com/event.ng/Type=click&FlightID=41153&AdID=57330&TargetID=20511&Segments=3099,6198,6235,9122,9179,9630,10158,11059,11353,11471,11693,13043,13212,13522,14316,15245,15536,15545,16157,18316,18348,18489,18876,18952,18962,19119,19313,19724&Targets=3099,15407,7972,6224,20519,18699,16107,20511&Values=30,51,63,77,83,94,102,150,165,239,249,253,494,547,559,575,600,639,664,931,1583,3614,4431,4548,4570,4646,4704,5633,6186,6215,6380,6391,6396,6617,8072,8177,8179,8427,8454&RawValues=&Redirect=http://www.ft.com/screensaver"><IMG SRC="http://www.image.ft.com/adimages/banner/marketingscreensavermpu.gif" WIDTH=300 HEIGHT=250 BORDER=0></A>
In 2000, Mr Chen swept away a ruling party that had held power for more than 50 years, carried by a wave of hope for political and judicial reform and clean government that was backed by 70 per cent of the population.
Now, according to a recent opinion poll, he is left with 10 per cent of the vote. After a crushing defeat in local elections this month, even his Democratic Progressive party is turning against him.
"We desperately need to reform and the key problem is the president," says Shen Fu-hsiung, an outspoken veteran DPP politician.
Mr Chen appears to be at a loss as to what happened. His staff have contacted scholars asking for advice about what he is doing wrong. Just about everything, is the answer. "The lethal blow has been the growing impression over the past year that this government is corrupt," says Emile Sheng, a professor at Soochow University in Taipei.
The Kuomintang, Taiwan's former ruling party, had long been viewed as corrupt. This year a string of scandals involving DPP-appointed officials has dragged the party into the same trouble.
The financial regulator's chief investigator was found to been in close social contact with suspects in an insider trading scandal. Then, irregularities were uncovered in a public transport project in the southern city of Kaohsiung, and now a long-time associate of Mr Chen is one of the prime suspects in bid rigging and corruption.
The deterioration of the DPP's ethical standards has been the last straw. Critics say the president has lost people's trust because of his erratic leadership style and his failure to formulate and execute reforms.
"I don't believe that clean government is the most important issue on our reform agenda," says Lin Cho-shui, a veteran DPP lawmaker. "A much bigger problem is that Chen Shui-bian's mysterious leadership style and his short-term opportunistic decision-making don't work any more."
Mr Chen's government has frequently changed policy direction, most obviously in relations with China. After pledging more economic exchanges across the Strait early in his first term, he later turned to aggressive anti-China rhetoric and last year played to pro-independence sentiment in a re-election campaign that provoked the mainland.
The president made his about-turns without consulting his cabinet or going through government channels. Mr Chen has changed premiers four times and the administration has become inefficient. The government's erratic course has also exacerbated its problems with the opposition, which controls parliament.
"We are left without proper communication between the party and the president, and relations between the president and his cabinet, as well as between the executive and the legislative, are in disarray," complains Kuan Bi-ling, a DPP lawmaker close to Frank Hsieh, the premier.
Mr Lin adds that the president's authoritarian style has prevented a debate on the party's stance on national identity and relations with China, which should have taken place long ago.
Presidential aides defend Mr Chen. "He needs to respond to different groups in a society which is deeply split in its view towards national identity and its relations with the mainland," says one of his staff.
But with little more than two years until the next presidential election and big city mayoral polls, and legislative elections coming up next year and in 2007, the DPP no longer accepts these arguments.
"We have been in power for almost six years and it's been a complete failure," says Lee Chun-yee, a DPP lawmaker.
Lee Wen-chung, another heavyweight in the DPP's legislative caucus, blames Mr Chen for the DPP government's weak policy record. "Our party's platform says we want economic liberalisation but at the same time we demand fairness and social security. Since the president has failed to set priorities, nothing gets done at all."
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora - New York Times
Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora - New York TimesDecember 27, 2005
Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora
By LYDIA POLGREEN
CAPE COAST, Ghana - For centuries, Africans walked through the infamous "door of no return" at Cape Coast castle directly into slave ships, never to set foot in their homelands again. These days, the portal of this massive fort so central to one of history's greatest crimes has a new name, hung on a sign leading back in from the roaring Atlantic Ocean: "The door of return."
Ghana, through whose ports millions of Africans passed on their way to plantations in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, wants its descendants to come back.
Taking Israel as its model, Ghana hopes to persuade the descendants of enslaved Africans to think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire here.
"We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home," J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the tourism minister, said on a recent day. "We hope we can help bring the African family back together again."
In many ways it is a quixotic goal. Ghana is doing well by West African standards - with steady economic growth, a stable, democratic government and broad support from the West, making it a favored place for wealthy countries to give aid.
But it remains a very poor, struggling country where a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, life expectancy tops out at 59 and basic services like electricity and water are sometimes scarce.
Nevertheless, thousands of African-Americans already live here at least part of the year, said Valerie Papaya Mann, president of the African American Association of Ghana.
To encourage still more to come, or at least visit, Ghana plans to offer a special lifetime visa for members of the diaspora and will relax citizenship requirements so that descendants of slaves can receive Ghanaian passports. The government is also starting an advertising campaign to persuade Ghanaians to treat African-Americans more like long-lost relatives than as rich tourists. That is harder than it sounds.
Many African-Americans who visit Africa are unsettled to find that Africans treat them - even refer to them - the same way as white tourists. The term "obruni," or "white foreigner," is applied regardless of skin color.
To African-Americans who come here seeking their roots, the term is a sign of the chasm between Africans and African-Americans. Though they share a legacy, they experience it entirely differently.
"It is a shock for any black person to be called white," said Ms. Mann, who moved here two years ago. "But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa."
The advertising campaign urges Ghanaians to drop "obruni" in favor of "akwaaba anyemi," a slightly awkward phrase fashioned from two tribal languages meaning "welcome, sister or brother." As part of the effort to reconnect with the diaspora, Ghana plans to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. DuBois and others it calls modern-day Josephs, after the biblical figure who rose from slavery to save his people.
The government plans to hold a huge event in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the end of the trans-Atlantic trade by Britain and the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence. The ceremonies will include traditional African burial rituals for the millions who died as a result of slavery.
Estimates of the trade vary widely. The most reliable suggest that between 12 million and 25 million people living in the vast lands between present-day Senegal and Angola were caught up, and as many as half died en route to the Americas.
Some perished on the long march from the inland villages where they were captured to seaports. Others died in the dungeons of slave castles and forts, where they were sometimes kept for months, until enough were gathered to pack the hold of a ship. Still others died in the middle passage, the longest leg of the triangular journey between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Of the estimated 11 million who crossed the sea, most went to South America and the Caribbean. About 500,000 are believed to have ended up in the United States.
The mass deportations and the divisions the slave trade wrought are wounds from which Africa still struggles to recover.
Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to shake off its colonial rulers, winning its independence from Britain in 1957. Its founding father, Kwame Nkrumah, attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, and saw in African-Americans a key to developing the new nation.
"Nkrumah saw the American Negro as the vanguard of the African people," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard, who first traveled to Ghana when he was 20 and fresh out of Harvard, afire with Nkrumah's spirit. "He wanted to be able to utilize the services and skills of African-Americans as Ghana made the transition from colonialism to independence."
Many African-Americans, from Maya Angelou to Malcolm X, visited Ghana in the 1950's and 60's, and a handful stayed. To Nkrumah, the struggle for civil rights in the diaspora and the struggles for independence from colonial rule in Africa were inextricably linked, both being expressions of the desire of black people everywhere to regain their freedom.
But Nkrumah was ousted in a coup in 1966, and by then Pan-Africanism had already given way to nationalism and cold war politics, sending much of the continent down a trail of autocracy, civil war and heartbreak.
Still, African-Americans are drawn to Ghana's rich culture, and the history of slavery.
Ghana still has dozens of slave forts, each a chilling reminder of the brutality of the trade. At Elmina Castle, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and taken over by the Dutch 150 years later, visitors are guided through a Christian chapel built adjacent to the hall where slaves were auctioned, and the balcony over the women's dungeons from which the fort's governor would choose a concubine from the chattel below.
The room through which slaves passed into waiting ships is the emotional climax of the tour, a suffocating dungeon dimly lit by sunlight pouring through a narrow portal leading to the churning sea.
"You feel our history here," said Dianne Mark, an administrator at Central Michigan University who visited Elmina Castle, six miles from Cape Coast castle, in early December, tears welling in her eyes as she gazed across the massive, buttressed walls to the ocean. "This is where our people are from. That is a deep, deep experience. I look at everyone and wonder, 'Could he have been my cousin? Could she have been my aunt?' "
Like any family reunion, this one is layered with joy and tears. For African-Americans and others in the African diaspora, there is lingering hostility and confusion about the role Africans played in the slave trade.
"The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them," Mr. Gates said. "But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans."
Many Africans, meanwhile, often fail to see any connection at all between them and African-Americans, or feel African-Americans are better off for having been taken to the United States. Many Africans strive to emigrate; for the past 15 years, the number of Africans moving to the United States has surpassed estimates of the number forced there during any of the peak years of the slave trade. The number of immigrants from Ghana in the United States is larger than that of any other African country except Nigeria, according to the 2000 census.
"So many Africans want to go to America, so they can't understand why Americans would want to come here," said Philip Amoa-Mensah, a guide at Elmina Castle. "Maybe Ghanaians think they are lucky to be from America, even though their ancestors went through so much pain."
The relationship is clearly a work in progress. Ghanaians are still learning of their ancestors' pivotal roles in the slave trade, and slave forts on the coast, long used to thousands of foreign visitors, have in recent years become sites for school field trips.
When the United States and the United Nations gave Ghana money to rehabilitate and restore Cape Coast castle, the government agency responsible for the castle repainted it white. Residents of Cape Coast were thrilled to see the moisture-blackened castle spruced up, but African-Americans living in Ghana were horrified, feeling that the history of their ancestors was being, quite literally, whitewashed.
"It didn't go over too well," said Kohain Nathanyah Halevi, an African-American who lives near Cape Coast.
A recent African-American visitor to Cape Coast castle took the emotionally charged step through the door of no return, only to be greeted by a pair of toddlers playing in a fishing boat on the other side, pointing and shouting, "obruni, obruni!"
William Kwaku Moses, 71, a retired security guard who sells shells to tourists on the other side of the door of no return, shushed the children.
"We are trying," he said, with a shrug.
Ghana's Uneasy Embrace of Slavery's Diaspora
By LYDIA POLGREEN
CAPE COAST, Ghana - For centuries, Africans walked through the infamous "door of no return" at Cape Coast castle directly into slave ships, never to set foot in their homelands again. These days, the portal of this massive fort so central to one of history's greatest crimes has a new name, hung on a sign leading back in from the roaring Atlantic Ocean: "The door of return."
Ghana, through whose ports millions of Africans passed on their way to plantations in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, wants its descendants to come back.
Taking Israel as its model, Ghana hopes to persuade the descendants of enslaved Africans to think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire here.
"We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home," J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the tourism minister, said on a recent day. "We hope we can help bring the African family back together again."
In many ways it is a quixotic goal. Ghana is doing well by West African standards - with steady economic growth, a stable, democratic government and broad support from the West, making it a favored place for wealthy countries to give aid.
But it remains a very poor, struggling country where a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, life expectancy tops out at 59 and basic services like electricity and water are sometimes scarce.
Nevertheless, thousands of African-Americans already live here at least part of the year, said Valerie Papaya Mann, president of the African American Association of Ghana.
To encourage still more to come, or at least visit, Ghana plans to offer a special lifetime visa for members of the diaspora and will relax citizenship requirements so that descendants of slaves can receive Ghanaian passports. The government is also starting an advertising campaign to persuade Ghanaians to treat African-Americans more like long-lost relatives than as rich tourists. That is harder than it sounds.
Many African-Americans who visit Africa are unsettled to find that Africans treat them - even refer to them - the same way as white tourists. The term "obruni," or "white foreigner," is applied regardless of skin color.
To African-Americans who come here seeking their roots, the term is a sign of the chasm between Africans and African-Americans. Though they share a legacy, they experience it entirely differently.
"It is a shock for any black person to be called white," said Ms. Mann, who moved here two years ago. "But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa."
The advertising campaign urges Ghanaians to drop "obruni" in favor of "akwaaba anyemi," a slightly awkward phrase fashioned from two tribal languages meaning "welcome, sister or brother." As part of the effort to reconnect with the diaspora, Ghana plans to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. DuBois and others it calls modern-day Josephs, after the biblical figure who rose from slavery to save his people.
The government plans to hold a huge event in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the end of the trans-Atlantic trade by Britain and the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence. The ceremonies will include traditional African burial rituals for the millions who died as a result of slavery.
Estimates of the trade vary widely. The most reliable suggest that between 12 million and 25 million people living in the vast lands between present-day Senegal and Angola were caught up, and as many as half died en route to the Americas.
Some perished on the long march from the inland villages where they were captured to seaports. Others died in the dungeons of slave castles and forts, where they were sometimes kept for months, until enough were gathered to pack the hold of a ship. Still others died in the middle passage, the longest leg of the triangular journey between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Of the estimated 11 million who crossed the sea, most went to South America and the Caribbean. About 500,000 are believed to have ended up in the United States.
The mass deportations and the divisions the slave trade wrought are wounds from which Africa still struggles to recover.
Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to shake off its colonial rulers, winning its independence from Britain in 1957. Its founding father, Kwame Nkrumah, attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, and saw in African-Americans a key to developing the new nation.
"Nkrumah saw the American Negro as the vanguard of the African people," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard, who first traveled to Ghana when he was 20 and fresh out of Harvard, afire with Nkrumah's spirit. "He wanted to be able to utilize the services and skills of African-Americans as Ghana made the transition from colonialism to independence."
Many African-Americans, from Maya Angelou to Malcolm X, visited Ghana in the 1950's and 60's, and a handful stayed. To Nkrumah, the struggle for civil rights in the diaspora and the struggles for independence from colonial rule in Africa were inextricably linked, both being expressions of the desire of black people everywhere to regain their freedom.
But Nkrumah was ousted in a coup in 1966, and by then Pan-Africanism had already given way to nationalism and cold war politics, sending much of the continent down a trail of autocracy, civil war and heartbreak.
Still, African-Americans are drawn to Ghana's rich culture, and the history of slavery.
Ghana still has dozens of slave forts, each a chilling reminder of the brutality of the trade. At Elmina Castle, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and taken over by the Dutch 150 years later, visitors are guided through a Christian chapel built adjacent to the hall where slaves were auctioned, and the balcony over the women's dungeons from which the fort's governor would choose a concubine from the chattel below.
The room through which slaves passed into waiting ships is the emotional climax of the tour, a suffocating dungeon dimly lit by sunlight pouring through a narrow portal leading to the churning sea.
"You feel our history here," said Dianne Mark, an administrator at Central Michigan University who visited Elmina Castle, six miles from Cape Coast castle, in early December, tears welling in her eyes as she gazed across the massive, buttressed walls to the ocean. "This is where our people are from. That is a deep, deep experience. I look at everyone and wonder, 'Could he have been my cousin? Could she have been my aunt?' "
Like any family reunion, this one is layered with joy and tears. For African-Americans and others in the African diaspora, there is lingering hostility and confusion about the role Africans played in the slave trade.
"The myth was our African ancestors were out on a walk one day and some bad white dude threw a net over them," Mr. Gates said. "But that wasn't the way it happened. It wouldn't have been possible without the help of Africans."
Many Africans, meanwhile, often fail to see any connection at all between them and African-Americans, or feel African-Americans are better off for having been taken to the United States. Many Africans strive to emigrate; for the past 15 years, the number of Africans moving to the United States has surpassed estimates of the number forced there during any of the peak years of the slave trade. The number of immigrants from Ghana in the United States is larger than that of any other African country except Nigeria, according to the 2000 census.
"So many Africans want to go to America, so they can't understand why Americans would want to come here," said Philip Amoa-Mensah, a guide at Elmina Castle. "Maybe Ghanaians think they are lucky to be from America, even though their ancestors went through so much pain."
The relationship is clearly a work in progress. Ghanaians are still learning of their ancestors' pivotal roles in the slave trade, and slave forts on the coast, long used to thousands of foreign visitors, have in recent years become sites for school field trips.
When the United States and the United Nations gave Ghana money to rehabilitate and restore Cape Coast castle, the government agency responsible for the castle repainted it white. Residents of Cape Coast were thrilled to see the moisture-blackened castle spruced up, but African-Americans living in Ghana were horrified, feeling that the history of their ancestors was being, quite literally, whitewashed.
"It didn't go over too well," said Kohain Nathanyah Halevi, an African-American who lives near Cape Coast.
A recent African-American visitor to Cape Coast castle took the emotionally charged step through the door of no return, only to be greeted by a pair of toddlers playing in a fishing boat on the other side, pointing and shouting, "obruni, obruni!"
William Kwaku Moses, 71, a retired security guard who sells shells to tourists on the other side of the door of no return, shushed the children.
"We are trying," he said, with a shrug.
New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Workers confuse civil service with civil rights
New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Workers confuse civil service with civil rightsWorkers confuse civil
service with civil rights
New Yorkers always seem to find themselves caught between big money and the visible permanent government of thousands of workers who make it possible for the millions of our citizens to move safely through this maze of a city.
These workers drive the buses and trains, they clean the streets, they pick up the garbage, they enforce the law, they fight the fires, they educate our children, they drive the ambulances, they care for the infirm and they provide every other service necessary to keep the motor of this metropolis running smoothly, cleanly and honestly.
For the second time in 25 years, we learned once again how important the transit workers are to reducing distances with efficiency and smoothness. But we also experienced something as unsettling as the frustrations that came with trying to figure out how one was going to get to work and get home.
I found Transport Workers Union President Roger Toussaint's reference to Rosa Parks - in an attempt to give a salary and benefit dispute the patina of civil rights - an irresponsible distortion of the matter. I also found the Rev. Al Sharpton's comparing our mayor to white segregationist Bull Connor an even more absurd instance of overstatement, especially since Michael Bloomberg has done nothing close to hosing down nonviolent protesters or setting dogs on them.
To the contrary, Bloomberg has done a worthwhile job in overhauling our city's education system, which is comprised of nearly 85% minority students.
Toussaint's rhetoric in leading the overwhelmingly minority union is just part of what has become a norm in our society, where any heated situation involving people who are not white is suddenly thrown into the arena of civil rights or the rights of an ethnic culture. For example, black basketball players cried foul when a dress code was enforced, told by the NBA that its fans do not want to see them looking like hip hop buffoons at league functions.
At the worst end, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Sharpton joined Snoop Dogg and other celebrities with brains no larger than mustard seeds in mourning at the funeral of executed murderer and Crips founder Stanley (Tookie) Williams.
Given the rhetoric and the crocodile tears, one would have thought Williams was one of the four little girls blown to bits in 1963 at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.
Since Sharpton, along with Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, diminished the meaning of the word "racism" in an attempt to defend the Tawana Brawley fraud against criticism, this is not an innocent blunder for our local rabble-rouser.
But from Toussaint, who has the honor of an important union to uphold, we should expect and get much more. As Duke Ellington once said, certain situations are not about the haves and the have-nots, they are about the haves and the want-mores. Toussaint represents people in the second category, not an oppressed ethnic minority. He, better than anyone else, should know that.
You can e-mail the Daily News editors at voicers@edit.nydailynews.com. Please include your full name, address and phone number. The Daily News reserves the right to edit letters. The shorter the letter, the better the chance it will be used.
Originally published on December 25, 2005
service with civil rights
New Yorkers always seem to find themselves caught between big money and the visible permanent government of thousands of workers who make it possible for the millions of our citizens to move safely through this maze of a city.
These workers drive the buses and trains, they clean the streets, they pick up the garbage, they enforce the law, they fight the fires, they educate our children, they drive the ambulances, they care for the infirm and they provide every other service necessary to keep the motor of this metropolis running smoothly, cleanly and honestly.
For the second time in 25 years, we learned once again how important the transit workers are to reducing distances with efficiency and smoothness. But we also experienced something as unsettling as the frustrations that came with trying to figure out how one was going to get to work and get home.
I found Transport Workers Union President Roger Toussaint's reference to Rosa Parks - in an attempt to give a salary and benefit dispute the patina of civil rights - an irresponsible distortion of the matter. I also found the Rev. Al Sharpton's comparing our mayor to white segregationist Bull Connor an even more absurd instance of overstatement, especially since Michael Bloomberg has done nothing close to hosing down nonviolent protesters or setting dogs on them.
To the contrary, Bloomberg has done a worthwhile job in overhauling our city's education system, which is comprised of nearly 85% minority students.
Toussaint's rhetoric in leading the overwhelmingly minority union is just part of what has become a norm in our society, where any heated situation involving people who are not white is suddenly thrown into the arena of civil rights or the rights of an ethnic culture. For example, black basketball players cried foul when a dress code was enforced, told by the NBA that its fans do not want to see them looking like hip hop buffoons at league functions.
At the worst end, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Sharpton joined Snoop Dogg and other celebrities with brains no larger than mustard seeds in mourning at the funeral of executed murderer and Crips founder Stanley (Tookie) Williams.
Given the rhetoric and the crocodile tears, one would have thought Williams was one of the four little girls blown to bits in 1963 at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.
Since Sharpton, along with Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, diminished the meaning of the word "racism" in an attempt to defend the Tawana Brawley fraud against criticism, this is not an innocent blunder for our local rabble-rouser.
But from Toussaint, who has the honor of an important union to uphold, we should expect and get much more. As Duke Ellington once said, certain situations are not about the haves and the have-nots, they are about the haves and the want-mores. Toussaint represents people in the second category, not an oppressed ethnic minority. He, better than anyone else, should know that.
You can e-mail the Daily News editors at voicers@edit.nydailynews.com. Please include your full name, address and phone number. The Daily News reserves the right to edit letters. The shorter the letter, the better the chance it will be used.
Originally published on December 25, 2005
Monday, December 26, 2005
A New Civil Rights Movement - New York Times
A New Civil Rights Movement - New York TimesOp-Ed Columnist
A New Civil Rights Movement
By BOB HERBERT
One of the cruelest aspects of slavery was the way it wrenched apart black families, separating husbands from wives and children from their parents.
It is ironic, to say the least, that now, nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, much of the most devastating damage to black families, and especially black children, is self-inflicted.
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that some of the most serious problems facing blacks in the United States - from poverty to incarceration rates to death at an early age - are linked in varying degrees to behavioral issues and the corrosion of black family life, especially the absence of fathers.
Another devastating aspect of slavery was the numbing ignorance that often resulted from the prohibition against the education of slaves. It was against the law in most instances for slaves to even learn to read. Now, with education widely (though imperfectly) available, we have entire legions of black youngsters turning their backs on school, choosing instead to wallow in a self-imposed ignorance that in the long run is as destructive as a bullet to the brain.
I remember interviewing a 17-year-old dropout in Brooklyn who had already fathered two children by two different girls. He wasn't working and he wasn't helping to support either child. I asked if he had considered going back to school. He looked at me, puzzled. "For what?" he said.
Most black people are not poor. Most are not criminals. Most are leading productive lives. The black middle class is larger and more successful than ever. But there are millions who are still out in the cold, caught in a cycle of poverty, ignorance, illness and violence that is taking a horrendous toll.
Nearly a third of black men in their 20's have criminal records, and 8 percent of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars.
H.I.V. and AIDS have literally become the black plague. Although blacks are just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for more than half of all new H.I.V. infections. Black women account for an astonishing 72 percent of all new cases among women.
This is frightening.
Black children routinely get a rough start in life. Two-thirds of them are born out of wedlock, and nearly half of all black children brought up in a single-parent household are poor. Those kids are much more likely to drop out of school, struggle economically, be initiators or victims of violence, and endure a variety of serious health problems.
We can pretend that these terrible things are not happening, but they are. There's a crisis in the black community, and it won't do to place all of the blame on society and government.
I've spent years writing about unfairness and appalling injustices. Society is unfair and racism is still a rampant evil. But much of the suffering in black America could be alleviated by changes in behavior. What's more, those behavioral changes would empower the community in ways that would make it easier to successfully confront opponents in government and push the society in a more equitable direction.
The problems facing black people today are comparable in magnitude to those of the Jim Crow era of the 20th century. There were leaders in those days who were equal to the challenge.
I believe that nothing short of a new movement, comparable in scope and dedication to that of the civil rights era, is required to bring about the changes in values and behavior needed to halt the self-destruction that is consuming so many black lives. The crucial question is whether the leadership exists to mount such an effort.
A good first step would be a summit meeting of wise and dedicated men and women willing to think about creative new ways to approach such problems as crime and violence, out-of-wedlock births, drug and alcohol abuse, irresponsible sexual behavior, misogyny, and so on.
Addressing issues of values and behavior within the black community should not in any way imply a lessening of the pressure on the broader society to meet its legal and ethical obligations. It should be seen as an essential counterpoint to that pressure.
Most important, it should be seen as a crucial component of the obligation that black adults have to create a broadly nurturing environment in which succeeding generations of black children can survive and thrive.
Despite the sometimes valiant efforts of individuals and organizations across the country, we are not meeting that obligation now. And that's because there's a vacuum where our leadership should be.
A New Civil Rights Movement
By BOB HERBERT
One of the cruelest aspects of slavery was the way it wrenched apart black families, separating husbands from wives and children from their parents.
It is ironic, to say the least, that now, nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, much of the most devastating damage to black families, and especially black children, is self-inflicted.
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that some of the most serious problems facing blacks in the United States - from poverty to incarceration rates to death at an early age - are linked in varying degrees to behavioral issues and the corrosion of black family life, especially the absence of fathers.
Another devastating aspect of slavery was the numbing ignorance that often resulted from the prohibition against the education of slaves. It was against the law in most instances for slaves to even learn to read. Now, with education widely (though imperfectly) available, we have entire legions of black youngsters turning their backs on school, choosing instead to wallow in a self-imposed ignorance that in the long run is as destructive as a bullet to the brain.
I remember interviewing a 17-year-old dropout in Brooklyn who had already fathered two children by two different girls. He wasn't working and he wasn't helping to support either child. I asked if he had considered going back to school. He looked at me, puzzled. "For what?" he said.
Most black people are not poor. Most are not criminals. Most are leading productive lives. The black middle class is larger and more successful than ever. But there are millions who are still out in the cold, caught in a cycle of poverty, ignorance, illness and violence that is taking a horrendous toll.
Nearly a third of black men in their 20's have criminal records, and 8 percent of all black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are behind bars.
H.I.V. and AIDS have literally become the black plague. Although blacks are just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for more than half of all new H.I.V. infections. Black women account for an astonishing 72 percent of all new cases among women.
This is frightening.
Black children routinely get a rough start in life. Two-thirds of them are born out of wedlock, and nearly half of all black children brought up in a single-parent household are poor. Those kids are much more likely to drop out of school, struggle economically, be initiators or victims of violence, and endure a variety of serious health problems.
We can pretend that these terrible things are not happening, but they are. There's a crisis in the black community, and it won't do to place all of the blame on society and government.
I've spent years writing about unfairness and appalling injustices. Society is unfair and racism is still a rampant evil. But much of the suffering in black America could be alleviated by changes in behavior. What's more, those behavioral changes would empower the community in ways that would make it easier to successfully confront opponents in government and push the society in a more equitable direction.
The problems facing black people today are comparable in magnitude to those of the Jim Crow era of the 20th century. There were leaders in those days who were equal to the challenge.
I believe that nothing short of a new movement, comparable in scope and dedication to that of the civil rights era, is required to bring about the changes in values and behavior needed to halt the self-destruction that is consuming so many black lives. The crucial question is whether the leadership exists to mount such an effort.
A good first step would be a summit meeting of wise and dedicated men and women willing to think about creative new ways to approach such problems as crime and violence, out-of-wedlock births, drug and alcohol abuse, irresponsible sexual behavior, misogyny, and so on.
Addressing issues of values and behavior within the black community should not in any way imply a lessening of the pressure on the broader society to meet its legal and ethical obligations. It should be seen as an essential counterpoint to that pressure.
Most important, it should be seen as a crucial component of the obligation that black adults have to create a broadly nurturing environment in which succeeding generations of black children can survive and thrive.
Despite the sometimes valiant efforts of individuals and organizations across the country, we are not meeting that obligation now. And that's because there's a vacuum where our leadership should be.
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