Month: September 2016

UNDECIDED MILLENNIAL VOTERS AND THE FOG OF BOOMER MEMORIES

There is a lot of handwringing in the Hillary Clinton camp over a sizeable contingent of recalcitrant millennials whose electoral preferences right now are either a third party candidate or none of the above. I’ve also noticed a few angry Facebook jabs at the younger set from fellow baby boomers wondering what is wrong with kids today? I was all set to the hit the like button on one of the them, but was interrupted by a 1968 flashback, my room covered with Eugene McCarthy banners and my father yelling at me: “What the hell is wrong with you kids today?”

Like it or not, we boomers are handing the demographic baton to our millennial progeny on Nov. 8. This will be the first election where those born between the early 1980s and 2000 outnumber us. According to recent polling, this generation prefers Clinton over Trump by 50% to 18%, leaving a whopping 32% of the country’s largest voting bloc up for grabs. It’s a tough nut to crack for both major party candidates because, frankly, one third of these young voters think the whole system sucks.

Take Jo Tongue. She’s 31, a Fort Collins, Colorado mother of two with another on the way. She told the Washington Post that she can’t make herself vote for either Clinton or Trump and feels “bummed that we’re at a place where it all feels like a joke.”

Then there is Nathan Mowery. He’s 26 and lives in Gainesville, Virginia. He told the New York Times this week that, as a Muslim, he would not vote for Trump, but finds Clinton to be uninspiring. He plans to vote for a third party candidate and, according to the Times, was unapologetic about his decision. “I’m casting a protest vote because it makes it visible to major parties that there are people who are motivated to vote but are unwilling to vote for either of them,” he said. “I hope that whoever runs in 2020 will get their act together and one of the parties will put somebody up that younger voters can align themselves with.”

To the progressive boomer crowd, this is heartbreaking. We lie awake at night, shuddering at the thought of a Trump Dystopia, a toxic cornucopia of everything we have spent our lives fighting – racism, misogyny, xenophobia, autocracy. This is a close election and these votes are desperately needed, not just to stop Trump but to elect as president, for the first time, a superbly qualified woman. Why can’t those kids see that?

The answer is in my 1968 flashback. To me, back then, the major party candidates in that election, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, symbolized everything that was wrong with this country – a horribly immoral war in Vietnam, rampant racism and an entrenched old-white-guy establishment that refused to share power. If I had been old enough to vote then, I would have rejected them both and written in “Clean Gene” McCarthy, the lefty peace and love candidate who lost the Democratic nomination to Humphrey. Through the wisdom of hindsight, of course, that was a bad call. Humphrey, the Father of Liberalism, helped deliver the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and the Test Ban Treaty. If he had gotten a few more votes in ‘68, we would never have had Richard Nixon and Watergate to kick around.

Yet, in that 1960s moment, while our friends were dying in an endless war, many of us young boomers yearned to reject the entire political system that created that cancer. We had no desire to be either realistic or pragmatic. We wanted to start over with something new. That was our vision, our dream. Youth is a time for dreaming, even when it produces bad choices.

I say let’s cut the millennials some slack. First of all, half of them are already supporting Clinton, mirroring the population at large. A far smaller group, 18%, is backing Trump, who according to most polls is over 50% with baby boomers. As far as the progressive cause is concerned, our young friends are doing better than us geezers. That leaves the pox-on-both-your-houses crowd, a third of this gigantic youth demographic. Within the next few weeks, some of them will undoubtedly discover that the House of Trump is far more dangerous than the other one. But let’s respect their process. They aren’t exactly inheriting a perfect world from us. Let them dream, let them learn, let them grow. Even if it means making mistakes. Like we did.

COLLEGES CALL IN THE DOGS TO SAVE THE STUDENTS

Just in case you haven’t visited a college campus recently, these are not exactly the easy, lazy, hazy days of higher education. Student anxiety and depression are off the charts. Suicide prevention is a major concern. The long and winding road to pomp and circumstance is paved with stress and tension. And for good reason. A gloomy and uncertain job future has mortgaged-out parents pushing their kids away from liberal arts to science, technology or engineering, regardless of their offspring’s aptitude or interest. As a result, 2016 graduates left campus with an average debt of $37,172, many with a major foisted upon them, and no immediate job prospects.

Relief, however, is in sight. The chieftains of academia put their heads together, probably in multiple conference rooms lined with white boards and coffee urns, to take up the urgent matter of student stress. What to do? What to do? With $1.3 trillion in student debt and climbing, helicopter parents buzzing overhead and a student body stressed to the max, these administrators brainstormed this dilemma with their collective PhD wisdom and came up with a solution: animals.

That’s right. America’s universities and colleges are going to the dogs – and cats, snakes, chinchillas, pigs and small horses – but in a good way. Rather than fix the underlying causes of student stress, like tuition cost and the job market – administrators turned to the animal kingdom as a source of relief. Pet therapy programs, long used by hospitals and nursing homes, have a solid track record in reducing blood pressure, anxiety and depression. And compared with drugs, major medical interventions or eliminating the source of the angst, animals come pretty cheap. That’s how they quickly rose to the top of the white boards.

Yale Law students can check out Monty, a border terrier mix, from the school library for 30 minutes a crack. The University of Connecticut brings cats and dogs in for stress reduction during finals week and to help students cope with their classmates’ suicides. Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia has “puppy rooms” staffed by trained therapy dogs to help stressed out students relax. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York allows students to have their own therapy animals live with them on campus. That makes a variety of dog breeds, along with a menagerie of ponies, snakes and chinchillas, etc. permanent fixtures on the RPI campus.

The trend began with a small number of pets brought in occasionally by nonprofit groups to help with campus stress. It quickly morphed into the RPI approach of allowing students to bring their own pets. As a result of litigation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Federal Housing Authority regulations, schools receiving federal funds cannot stop students from bringing their therapy animals with them for the entire college ride. These “service animals” do not necessarily need certification, but schools may request a doctor’s letter drawing a nexus between a specific physical or emotional condition and the pet selected to mitigate it.

The University of California at Berkley, birthplace of the 1960s’ free speech movement, has evolved into a virtual Noah’s Ark, with residence halls filled with rabbits, kangaroo rats, pot-bellied pigs, cockatiels, ferrets, ball pythons, Cuban rock iguanas and Chilean rose hair tarantulas, all appropriately leashed, caged and/or vaccinated. Administrators there say they err on the side of letting animals in as a way of helping students cope and keeping litigation costs at a minimum.

All of this is, in a way, kind of sweet and refreshing. Who can object to letting overanxious college kids get some moments of peace and calm from the pet of their choice? Besides PETA, that is. I suspect it is only a matter of time before we hear from the animal rights activists about subjecting dogs, cats, pigs, et al, to the ravages of undergraduate dorm life. Still, in a more perfect world, we would find a way to reduce or eliminate student costs and the helicoptering parents they produce. That way students could enjoy learning on their own with minimum tension, and the animals could return to their own stress-free habitat. Unfortunately, we aren’t there yet. So cue the therapy iguana. Midterms are coming.

NO RELIGIOUS LIBERTY FOR A HUNGRY CHILD

There was an amazing piece of news out of western Pennsylvania this week. You may have missed it because it happened the same day Angelina and Brad told us it was over; we process grief at different speeds. To fill you in: a school cafeteria worker quit her job when she had to deny a young boy a hot lunch because of a balance due on his account.

As reported by the Washington Post, Stacy Koltiska said she was working the cafeteria register at Wylandville Elementary School in the unincorporated town of Eighty Four, about 25 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. She said she will never forget the little boy’s eyes as he stood there with a tray of hot food. Due to a new school policy, the lunchroom staff is prohibited from giving hot lunches to anyone whose parents owed $25 of more for past meals. Because of the balance owed, Koltiska was duty bound by her work rules to deny him the hot lunch.

Under the policy, the parents will be charged $2.05 for their son’s meal, the one that Koltiska had to dump into the garbage. In lieu of hot food, the debtors’ child was handed a cold sandwich consisting of two slices of wheat bread and a single piece of what Koltiska called “government cheese.” So she quit, right then and there. She told the Post that her religious faith does not allow her to deny a hot meal to a hungry child. “As a Christian, I have an issue with this,” she explained. “It’s sinful and shameful is what it is.” She said she resigned out of a moral obligation. “God is love, and we should love one another and be kind,” Koltiska said. “There’s enough wealth in this world that no child should go hungry, especially in school. To me this is just wrong.”

Shockingly, there has been radio silence over Koltiska’s plight on the part of the evangelical right and its “religious liberty movement”. I fully expected Kim Davis to show up with a picket sign. She’s the clerk of court in Rowan County Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because her religious beliefs outranked the law, or so she said. Davis did a few days in jail while relishing the martyr role and the army of Republican politicians who scrambled to her side for a photo op. This was the seminal event in a nation-wide push for legislation establishing the right to discriminate against the LGBT community on the basis of religious belief.

The argument is that people who sincerely hold religious convictions should get a pass whenever there is a conflict between the law and their faith. This has resulted in the passage of legislation in some states allowing florists, caterers and others to refuse to provide services for a gay wedding based on a religious opposition to same sex marriage. It also produced the Supreme Court decision in “Hobby Lobby”, where the justices said a business owner with a theological objection to birth control is free to remove contraception coverage from the company medical plan.

So why aren’t the religious liberty zealots expressing outrage over the school lunch dilemma? Granted, taking hot food away from a hungry child has nothing to do with birth control or the anti-gay agenda, but the religious principle could not be more directly applicable. Kim Davis became an overnight folk hero in some quarters when, as an elected official, she refused to issue gay couples the marriage licenses they were legally entitled to. Poor Stacy Koltiska, following a school board rule she abhorred, dumped the little boy’s lunch into the garbage, handed him a pathetic cheese sandwich and quit her job. Two women; the same God; two different conflicts between their faith and the law. One of them followed the law she disagreed with and then walked away, never to deny another child a hot meal. The other never followed the law, kept her job and went on a speaking tour with a hostile rant about “religious liberty”. Which of them went to a better place is unknown to all but God. But it’s a pretty easy guess.

DECISION 2016: ALL WE ARE SAYING IS GIVE VERBAL ABUSE A CHANCE

This presidential campaign is quickly emerging as one of our country’s darkest hours. Public policy discourse has taken a back seat to brutal name calling. Poetic rhetoric has been replaced by angry noise. Civility is out. Personal attack is in. The worst part is that this venomous angst is seeping through the pores of the body politic, infecting all of us – our relationships and our families. Roughly one third of people polled recently

A House No Longer Divided
A House No Longer Divided

said they have been attacked, insulted, or called names on the basis of their political opinions. One in four of those surveyed said a recent political discussion permanently damaged a relationship.

Facebook executives recently told the Associated Press that U.S. users sent out four billion political messages during the first seven months of the year. Although the network claims not to track unfriending metrics, a spokesperson told AP that such communication cutoffs are on the rise. That includes people who left FB in disgust over political posts, as well as those who stayed but selectively weeded friends based on partisan rants. The news service quoted Scott Talan, an American University communication instructor who tracks social media and politics as saying he has seen some fairly hostile Facebook exchanges recently. “They range from pretty harsh, graphically laced, attacks upon people. . .to statements of ‘if you support this person, you can no longer be my friend.’”

My 90-year-old uncle, Jenner Nelson of St. Cloud, Minnesota, encountered an analog version of this Facebook estrangement and adroitly moved to rectify it. He’d been lobbied for months by the Trump and Clinton factions within our family and decided to let us all know where he stood by posting both candidates’ signs on his lawn, as pictured above, but only after covering their names with large X’s of red duct tape. “To heck with them both,” he said. Although the gesture didn’t dampen any of our partisan passions, it helped, at least momentarily, put a political campaign in perspective.

A couple of factors brought us to this point. But first, these words from our two major party candidates for president: “racist”, “bigot”,  “crooked”, “totally unqualified”, “dangerous”, “dishonest”, “incompetent”, “fraudulent”, “basket of deplorables”, “lose cannon”, “stupid”, “unfit”, “weak”, “total disgrace, and “pathetic”. And those are just for starters. The word cloud emerging from this campaign is horrendously strident. Put that together with the political intransigence that has paralyzed Congress for the last several terms and we are left with . . .well, a lot of people yelling at each other. One recent survey indicated that the incivility of political discourse is so bad that 40 percent of classroom instructors are hesitant to teach about the election for fear of adding to what is already a serious bullying problem in their schools.

Yet, there is something else going on here. Families, friends and coworkers have always differed on political choices, usually without creating an interpersonal crisis. My parents used to joke about canceling each other’s vote on election day. Nobody is laughing now. The difference with this election is that it goes to deeply held values, the kind of stuff that is part of our core, that defines who we are. We can have friendly disagreements over health insurance or NATO funding without a lot of existential angst. It’s a whole different situation when you are talking about keeping Muslims out of the country, deporting undocumented immigrants, building a wall around Mexico and issues of equity and justice for African Americans and the LGBT community.

This is visceral, heart and soul stuff. We are in different places because we’ve had different experiences that have contributed to our conflicted wiring. My 1960s childhood turned me into a passionate human rights advocate. That means I’m against the wall, the Muslim ban and for amnesty-based immigration reform. That also means I see Donald Trump as a pariah, someone whose world view is totally contrary to my values. On the other hand, there are good, decent folks out there who see jobs disappearing and their communities filling up with people from other countries and cultures. They long for the days when America was a different kind of place. They want to recapture what’s been lost. To them, Clinton is the pariah and Trump is the one with a map to their promised land.

Our vision for the future could not be more different. Yet, they are both so clearly valid to us that, particularly among people who share a connection, it is painful to talk about politics right now because it is a conversation that, by necessity, challenges and threatens our deeply held conflicting views of the world. This interpersonal quagmire could be mitigated by national leaders who would engage us with a vocabulary of civility and accommodation instead of name calling and polarization. Sadly, those cards are not on the table. All we can do right now is follow the road that is right for us and respect those we care about who take another path.

THE JOE PATERNO STORY: DON’T LET FACTS MAR THE LEGEND IN OUR MIND

Joe Paterno, depending on your perspective, was either God’s gift to college football or a pathetic pedophile enabler. The continuum between those two extremes runs the length of a football field. And there is nobody at the 50-yard line; you either revere JoePa or you despise him. Although he has been dead for nearly five years, when it comes to a posthumous life, this guy has been more active than Elvis.

This past Saturday, for example, there was a celebration in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Paterno’s first game as Penn State University’s head football coach. During that time span, he won a gazillion games and became a beloved legend and prolific rainmaker for the Big Ten school in State College, Pennsylvania. Then, in 2011, his halo took on a sudden tarnish when his longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky turned out to be a serial child molester. Many of the sexual assaults occurred in the university’s athletic facilities. Although Paterno denied any knowledge of his assistant’s crimes, an investigation by former FBI director Louis French found that he had likely known about the pedophilia and did not report it. Just a few weeks ago, according to the Washington Post, a judge unsealed documents in a civil suit showing that one of Sandusky’s victims told Paterno about his molestation in 1976, and that the head coach told him he didn’t “want to hear about any of that kind of stuff” because there was a football season to worry about. Sandusky was convicted and is serving 30-60 years in prison. Paterno was fired by Penn State in late 2011 and then died from lung cancer in early 2012.

It was against that backdrop that Penn State rolled out “Joe Paterno Day” at the football stadium Saturday afternoon. And everyone went to their corners of outrage. “Why don’t they call it Protect a Pedophile Day?,” messaged one camp. “Paterno is innocent;” said another, “he is vilified only by those who know nothing.” Some placards said, “We Love You Joe!” Others asked “What About The Victims?”

Lauren Davis, a journalism major and opinion editor for the Daily Collegian, Penn State’s student-run newspaper, incurred brutal alumni wrath with her understated editorial suggesting that, under the circumstances, a Paterno tribute was in bad taste. Emails, according to the New York Times, immediately poured into the school newspaper calling Davis a “clueless, treacherous traitor,” an “idiot” and several other names the Times said it could not print. They were from graduates from the 1970s and earlier, all unloading their venom on a journalism student. The message from one man was, “I hope God can forgive you for your actions, I sure as hell can’t.”

So much anger, so much hate, so much divisiveness. We’ve grown accustomed to it in our political campaigns, now we can’t avoid it at a football game. That’s what happens when we chose to live in a black and white world of heroes and villains. The truth is that Joe Paterno is neither. All of our lives are compendiums of choices, good, bad and in between. If JoePa knew about the molestation and said nothing, he made a terrible choice, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t make other choices that were good, that helped develop and shape his student athletes. It does mean, however, as Lauren Davis, the student editor, wrote, that Penn State should not be honoring this guy, treating him like a saint, particularly with the brutal testimony of the victims still haunting the community. The past is over. Sandusky is in prison. Paterno is dead. Let it be. This is not the time for a party.

Speaking of bad choices, those geezer graduates, who verbally abused a journalism student for spouting wisdom that escaped all of them, have hopefully exhausted their quota for the year. But probably not. Psychologist Eric Simons says his research shows that a sports team is an expression of a fan’s sense of self. He says self-esteem rides on the “outcome of the game and the image of the franchise.” That might explain why a bunch of Nittany Lion alumni in their 60s and 70s are insisting that a dead football coach is blameless. If JoePa covered for a pedophile, it’s a personal wound to them. And we thought football was just a game.

A COLLECTIVE NUMBNESS TO TRUMP ATROCITIES

The most perplexing mystery of our time, other than Duck Dynasty and the Kardashians, has been how Donald Trump can say so many stupid things and continue to be a viable presidential candidate. Let me crack that cold case with one word: volume. He says so many stupid things that they evolve into an anesthetic blur. Under the power of that anesthesia, well over 40 percent of likely voters are ready to extend their middle finger to the political establishment and send this clown to the White House.

Take the past 24 hours as an example. Trump came clean about his fabricated conspiracy over President Obama’s birthplace, falsely accused Hillary Clinton of creating the issue, and then suggested that her Secret Service agents disarm and see if anyone tries to kill her. And Al Gore paid a price because he claimed to have invented the internet. But don’t you see? That’s the point. We remember Gore’s internet gaffe because it was one of the very few stupid things he said. He spent the rest of time talking about boring stuff, like carbon footprints and Social Security lock boxes.

If Trump had been intently focused on well thought out policy issues for the last 10 months and then, in a weak moment, advocated the assassination of his opponent, it would have been curtains on his campaign. It’s all people would have talked about from now until the election. Instead, in a matter of hours, he will have pushed that thought from our minds and replaced it with another outrage. The human brain is not equipped to simultaneously concentrate on multiple atrocities.

Broadcaster Keith Obermann took a stab at it this week, much to the delight of the progressive community. In a well scripted and delivered 17-minute rant, Obermann listed 176 truly outrageous things Trump has said or done. He included the attack on the Pope and the Gold Star parents, his history of not renting to black people, his claim that Obama invented ISIS, his suggestion that Russia hack Clinton’s emails, his insistence that his buddy, Valdimir Putin, would never go into Ukraine, which he invaded two years ago, and 170 other equally bizarre comments and actions. Yet, days later, when I started to write this paragraph, I had to download a transcript of Obermann’s rant because I couldn’t remember the laundry list. It’s like laughing your head off at a comedy club but being unable, the next day, to remember more than one or two of the jokes.

This is why it seems like the media is hounding Clinton on the email and foundation stuff while not holding Trump to his foibles. In one instance you have two issues with long shelf lives. In the other, you have serial defects, each succumbing to its successor. In the history of dumb political stuff, nobody holds a candle to Trump’s volume. That’s why it is easy to recall those other non-Trump blunders. Remember how John Kerry “voted for the bill before I voted against it”? Or, Howard Dean’s scream? Or Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato? Or Rick Perry’s “Oops”? Or a helmeted Michael Dukakis ridding in an armored tank? Or Gerald Ford promising no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe when such domination was already well in place? Or Sarah Palin’s foreign policy bonafides based on the proximity of her back yard to Russia?

Donald Trump outdoes all of them combined, before breakfast. On a rational level, it is eminently sensible to suggest that the American people would be embarrassed to have as their leader someone so thoroughly entrenched in ignorance and buffoonery. For a sizeable portion of the electorate, however, this campaign is not about rationality. It is about their utter disgust for our government. It’s not so much that Donald Trump is their savior. He’s their middle finger, their protest vote against a changing world they’ve come to hate. They are united in anger and there is no revelation, no October surprise, that will deter them from trying to foist their candidate of rage onto the source of their scorn. Instead, the only path to hope in this election rests with those who, despite all that is wrong with this country, care enough to change it rather than blow it up with a middle finger.

ARMS AND THE TEACHER: READING, WRITING & MARKSMANSHIP

(Caution! Trigger Warning: This post is about firearms in schools. Some passages may seriously agitate, irritate, exasperate or infuriate, particularly If you have the Second Amendment tattooed on your shooting arm, or routinely strap on a Smith and Wesson when stepping out to water the plants. In the interest of your health and my safety, you should probably leave now.)

The Washington Post reported today that Beth Dixon, a 63-year-old teacher at Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley Christian School, accidentally left her holstered pistol in a school bathroom, fully loaded and resting on the top of the toilet tank. The facility in question, police told the Post, was a single-unit, unisex restroom, the kind set aside in Virginia and North Carolina for transgender patrons, with or without guns. At Cumberland Christian, this bathroom is also used by elementary school students between the ages of 6 and 8. One of those kids spotted the teacher’s piece on the tank and alerted school authorities. Ms. Dixon quickly reclaimed her weapon and quit her job.

The incident, however, got the school thinking about what kind of a policy it should have on guns in the classroom (and bathroom). It might have been the last school in America without such a policy. The Associated Press reported that Cumberland Christian now wants to ban guns except for those specifically authorized by the administration. All things considered, that’s a pretty progressive gun standard.

The federal Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, theoretically banned guns from school property, but contained a gaping loophole that was quickly filled by a slew of loopy state legislatures. In effect, if a state lets people carry guns in public, they can carry them right into the schoolhouse. The Washington Post reported two years ago that 20 states have laws expressly permitting licensed adults to bring guns into schools.

In Claude, Texas, there is a sign on the schoolhouse lawn boasting that the faculty is armed. Despite a growing concern over the quality of our schools and lack of sufficient funding, many districts are requiring teachers to take in-service training at shooting ranges. Johnny might not be able to read, but his teacher can hit the bullseye at 50 yards. Sadly, this rush to arm the faculty did not pause for reflection after an Idaho State University instructor accidentally shot himself in the foot during chemistry lab.

On the other side of the bullet, many schools are proudly enforcing a zero tolerance standard when it comes to students and guns. Forget that the teachers are armed to the hilt; these kids have to learn that guns are bad. A seven-year-old boy who brought a water pistol and a Nerf gun to school in Portsmouth, Virginia was suspended for 10 days and is now facing expulsion. A five-year-old girl was suspended from Kindergarten in Brighton, Colorado after she carried her pink Princess Bubble Gun into her classroom. While Texas teachers are packing heat, a seventh grader in suburban Houston was disciplined for wearing a “Star Wars – The Force Awakens” shirt because it depicted a Stormtrooper holding a weapon.” If the Stormtrooper had been a certified teacher, it might have been okay.

This all becomes even crazier at the college level. The carrying of concealed handguns is now legal in Texas higher education classrooms. However, it is a violation of Texas law for a student to possess a dildo or similar sex toy. That duplicity earned the University of Texas in Austin major agitation by returning students this month. Their irresistible campaign theme: “Cocks Not Glocks”. Not quite as poetic as “Make Love, Not War”, but the point is well taken.

This continually escalating domestic arms race is beyond baffling. Guns,, once an instrument of war, crime fighting and food gathering, have evolved into an angry political symbol. All the mass shootings, which now occur with the regularity of a sunrise, bring new calls to arm the populace. If it happens in a school, arm the teachers; if it’s a bar, arm the drinkers, a workplace, arm the workers. It’s like a bizarre science fiction movie. And you just know there won’t be a happy ending.

WELLS FARGO CEO: THE MINIONS DID IT

Anyone who really hates banks has got to love Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. The guy went public today for the first time since his company was accused of major shenanigans. He made Old Man Potter, the villain banker from “It’s a Wonderful Life” look like a good Samaritan. Wells Fargo was fined $185 million last week after it was caught creating more than 2 million bogus accounts without customer consent.

After several days of silence, the bank’s boss told the Wall Street Journal that neither the company’s culture or values were to blame. No, not at all. The dirty rotten scoundrels were the miscreant employees who dared to sully the Wells Fargo brand by their corrupt actions. He wants the world to know that the bad apples were immediately fired. All 5,300 of them. That’s right: thousands of low level employees somehow simultaneously created more than 2 million fake accounts, presumably in the dark of night without anyone at an executive level being any the wiser.

With a straight face, Stumpf broke all corporate records for throwing the most employees under the bus at one time. Additional busses had to be summoned. “I wish it would be zero,” the CEO told the Journal, “but if they’re not going to do the thing that we ask them to do – put customers first, honor our vision and values – I don’t want them here. I really don’t.”

And just what, pray tell, would the Wells Fargo vision and values entail? According to a lawsuit filed by the City of Los Angeles, the bank imposed a goal on its employees of selling at least eight financial products to each customer, calling it the “Gr-eight Initiative.” The suit says district managers monitored employee progress toward the goal so closely that they reviewed their performance with them four times a day, at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. “The sales pressure from management was unbearable”, a former employee told CNN. Jobs were on the line.

The lofty sounding term, “goal” is a euphemism in most sales environments, meaning that those who don’t meet the goal are fired. To keep their jobs, 5,300 employees created phony credit card and other accounts for customers who never authorized them or knew they existed. This cross-sell campaign was so successful for Wells Fargo that its executive vice president for sales, Carrie Tolstedt, made $9 million in total pay last year, a reward, according to CNN, for “continued growth in primary checking customers” and other metrics. She is scheduled to retire at the end of the year with a $124 million package. The fact that Tolstedt’s performance came, at least in part, on the backs of the 5,300 discharged minions who phonied up all those accounts apparently squares just fine with Wells Fargo’s “vision and values”.

The company paid the regulatory fine without admitting or denying guilt. Even banks, of course, are entitled to mount a defense while maintaining the presumption of innocence. On the other hand, if I were a juror, and applying common sense to these facts, there is no way I could find that 5,300 employees independently came up with the same scam at the same time, allowing a totally innocent corporate management to benefit, right up until they were caught. There is but one guilty party in this caper and that is the Wells Fargo vision and values that pushed employees to reach a goal at any cost.

BODY SHAMING THE NEWS

America may be on the verge of electing its first woman president, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that rampant sexism has left the building. That point was just pounded home in a very personal way. A child kidnapping case that gripped the hearts of Minnesotans for 27 years was solved last week. The man who snatched, sexually assaulted and murdered 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in 1989 confessed and led authorities to the child’s body. I lived in Minnesota when Jacob was kidnapped and know only too well how visceral that crime was – and is – to Minnesotans. News that his remains had been found quickly sucked the air out of the entire state. It was all anyone talked about.

Well, almost. That, and the couture of a young female television reporter. The diversion came from a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist who noted that Jana Shortal wore jeans on TV while reporting Jacob’s story and didn’t look good in them. Cheryl Johnson, whose column is called simply “CJ”, wrote that somebody at the local NBC affiliate “didn’t do Jana Shortal any favors with that wide camera shot. . .She looked great from the waist up in a polka-dot shirt and cool blazer, but the skinny jeans did not work. I was among a number of media types who found them inappropriate and, given the gravity of the day’s subject, downright jarring.”

So much for Minnesota Nice. So much for Jana’s bold and daring efforts to abandon what she calls the “lady uniform” as a prerequisite for delivering the news, a lingering legacy of the Roger Ailes school for women in broadcast journalism. Jana, who has been doing a daily breaking news show for the past year, goes on camera in her own clothes because the emphasis is on what she is reporting, not on how she looks. That should not be, but unfortunately is, a revolutionary move for television news in 2016. There was, to say the least, a major firestorm over the C.J. column, which the newspaper promptly pulled from its website and replaced with a full-throated apology.

It is so sad that there are still forces measuring the worth of a woman by how she looks, and a man by what he does. I wrote a research paper on this subject in 1983. It described and quantified a societal tyranny in which women had to either conform to the way a male-dominated culture insisted they look, or pay the price. Mostly, they paid the price. The currency was life threatening eating disorders, chronic stress and/or repeated rejections for the better jobs as a result of not looking the part. The phenomena back then was called “lookism,” and it painfully enforced this toxic double standard. Today, the term is “body shaming” and, as the newspaper columnist demonstrated, it is every bit as insidious.

I gathered the studies more than 30 years ago, all of them showing how companies made hiring, pay and promotional decisions on the basis of how women looked and on what men could do. The empirical evidence was staggering, but not surprising. I was a morbidly obese man when my journalism career took off in the 1970s. Despite being between 200 and 300 pounds overweight, I had the choice of beats on my newspaper and won countless awards and accolades. Women just as capable, if not more, were held back if they were carrying an extra 25 pounds or just didn’t have the “right look”.

Nearly two generations later, not much has changed. Jana Shortal is critiqued not on the quality of her reporting, but on the cut of her jeans. We have a Republican presidential candidate who insults men based on their behavior, but reserves adjectives like fat, ugly and disgusting for the women he wants to diminish.

I cringed when I read Jana’s Facebook reply to the CJ column. Although eloquent and poignant, it was painfully obvious that the columnist’s words hit her hard. A short snippet from her post: “I wore my clothes. The clothes it took me a very long time to feel comfortable in no thanks to the bullies like you who tried to shame me out of them.”


Here was this bright, strong, young woman, anchoring her own news show in a major regional market, and doing it her way, making it about the journalism instead of about herself. And right smack in the middle of reporting the biggest local story of the year, she is attacked by a veteran columnist for not looking good in skinny jeans. It stung something fierce because, far below the intellectual surface of gender equality, complete with its admonishment of body shaming, lurks this ancient notion that women, no matter what else they do, must “look good” doing it. It’s a notion that needs to die. Now.

CLOWNS: AN UNMEASURED DEMOGRAPHIC

As if this crazy season of identity politics wasn’t screwed up enough, somebody in the Carolinas decided to send in the clowns. You may have missed the New York Times’ exceptional coverage of this alarming clown crisis. After all, it’s barely been 24 hours since Apple revealed its decision to omit the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. A person can take on only so much emotional trauma at one time. So here’s a recap:

It started two weeks ago in Greenville County, S.C. with multiple sightings of “creepy clowns”. Depending on the report, the clowns either offered children money to go into the woods with them or simply stood under a late-night streetlight and waved. Once, the Times reported, a clown jumped out of nowhere and stared at a woman as she left a laundromat. Then the action moved to North Carolina where Winston-Salem police responded to a number of calls complaining of clowns offering treats to children. No arrests have been made, and the Times described the situation in both states as one of “panic.” It noted local news reports from Greensboro, N.C. of a man with a machete who chased a clown into the woods but did not catch him.

(As an aside, the male pronoun is being used here because eye witnesses described the clowns as men wearing white overalls, white gloves, large red shoes with a white face, bushy red hair with a matching red nose. With that disguise, however, there is enough gender ambiguity that these clowns need to be very careful in choosing a public restroom in North Carolina. It is a crime there to enter a loo not designated for your birth sex. A wise clown would do well to tape a birth certificate to his seltzer bottle; an even wiser clown would stay the hell out of North Carolina.)

It took less than 36 hours for this bozo calamity to evolve into a political issue. Enter one Michael Becvar, with the clown name of Sir Toony Van Dukes. He runs the website Just For Clowns and he told the Times that his people are being unfairly profiled and persecuted. He wondered aloud to a Times reporter what would have happened “if instead of clowns, people were dressing up as aliens, witches, zombies or doctors? What if they were wearing hospital scrubs, lab coats and a stethoscope around their neck? Would the news report that doctors were hiding in the woods trying to lure kids with candy?” Mark my words: Sir Toony will have a “Clown Lives Matter” sign on his clown car before the end of the week.

This must be driving the pollsters crazy. North Carolina is a swing state where Clinton and Trump are running neck and neck, but nobody has been measuring the clown/anti-clown vote. Given the white face description of the suspects, along with the speculation that they are men, it would be easy to assume that the clown vote will break for Trump, particularly if they never graduated from clown college. Then again, we have no way of knowing what is under that disguise. Peel off the white face paint and you might find a female Latino with an advanced degree in theology. But it is highly unlikely.

Of course, this election is not just about identity politics. It’s also about fear. The demographic of people who are afraid of the Great Other – anyone who doesn’t look, talk or act like them – is breaking big for Trump. He might just tap into that constituency by promising, within 30 days of taking office, to round up all the clowns and send them back to wherever they came from. “Make America Clown Free Again!” would fit well on a red baseball cap. In other words, Trump could end up with both the clown and anti-clown vote. Where does that leave Hillary? Right back on Saturday Night Live, singing the chorus from that old Stealers Wheel tune:

“There’s clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am
Stuck in the Middle with you.”