Dragged Out of the Shire

 

Mad Dog, like any Hobbit, is content in his happy home, in his lovely shire, but he is occasionally compelled by obligations to travel outside it. And like the Hobbits shepherding the ring, he finds that travel beyond his shire is an adventure, if not sought, at least possibly edifying.

Sedona, Arizona

The ocean at the end of his street, the town with all its amenities just a short walk away, the woods and ponds and birds are enough for contentment, but there is some value in seeing the larger world.

Hampton, New Hampshire 

Sedona, Arizona provided enough edification to make him think over how Hampton might be improved. 

Town Clerk, City Hall, City Manager Sedona

Take the public buildings, for example: In Hampton, our town building with its clerk's office is a converted bank, and its soviet style block brutalist architecture cannot be improved by the recent attempts at new siding, but in Sedona, every effort is made to make the building reflect and complement the natural colors and lines of the mountains and soil of the surroundings.

Blending In

Even the police station is subdued and not allowed to disrupt the karma. 

Of course, you have to be very determined to find the police station in Sedona, which has no signs visible from the road, and is ensconced in a courtyard. If you were a distressed citizen, hoping to find help from the police, you'd need a Google Maps to find it. Mad Dog, walking down the main drag, Rte 89A, saw a sign "Police" with an arrow, but walking down Roadrunner Drive, as directed, even on foot, Mad Dog could not espy the place, because the station has no door on Roadrunner drive, only a camouflaged back wall, and you have to make your way down a service road and walk into a courtyard to find the police station, and even then, it's not easy. 

Stealth Police Station

There are no electric wires on poles, and anything which is unsightly seems buried.

There are two urgent care/ emergency medical facilities in Sedona, but neither is open on Wednesday and any medical emergency would have to be medivac'd to somewhere else and it's not clear where.

Even national chains are melded into the color scheme: Mad Dog drove past the McDonalds four times before he recognized it.

There is a lot of talk around Sedona about spirituality, and karma and spiritual vortexes and things you might see after inhaling mushrooms, which you do not hear about in Hampton. Mad Dog never quite got an explanation of what a spiritual vortex might be, but whatever it is, they have it in Sedona, apparently. It may be connected to the Indians who once had Sedona to themselves, but to Mad Dog, that sort of spirituality derives from a pre scientific culture which sought to imagine explanations for observed phenomenon rather than investigate anything with experiment and deduction. 

Doughty New Englanders will drive you crazy when you are on line at the post office, trying to send your package off while the lady at the counter banters on with the postal clerk, who wants to hear about all the grandchildren. Same thing at the dry cleaners and the bank, but if you're in a hurry, why are you living in Hampton?

View From Plaice Cove Obadiah Youngblood

This sort of connectivity in Hampton has its charms: Mad Dog picked up his laundry at the dry cleaners, and the owner, who is the son of Korean immigrants, asked him about Mad Dog's grand daughter in California, who just turned one and in the Chinese tradition, had a ceremony which involved the baby being presented with a display of objects and whichever object the baby chooses is supposed to predict the path in life that baby may follow--a sort of Chinese ground hog day ritual, predicting the future by signs. 

Covered Bridge Obadiah Youngblood

The dry cleaner man remembered about Mad Dog's grand daughter because the Koreans have something similar, and he had chatted with Mad Dog's wife about it. But the point is, this dry cleaner store owner remembered and he made the connection and he took some joy in it.

Hampton Barn

Rte 1A Hampton

Most of the people Mad Dog encountered in Sedona seemed to be from somewhere else, having wound up in Sedona much as flies wind up on flypaper. In Hampton, you are apt to meet people who grew up in town, graduated from Winnacunnet High School and either never left, or returned after a time outside the sect.

Rte 27 Hampton

At the end of the tale, the Hobbits have returned safely home to their shire, and they watch the fireworks from their front yards as everyone celebrates the joy of living in the shire--and that is how Mad Dog felt, returning from the 6000 feet above sea level to the Ocean at the end of the street.

Pink House, Drinkwater Road

Explaining Democracy

 

Mad Dog is riding in the far back of a Chrysler Pacifica, with his son and his son's wife, young mother,  up front, and two granddaughters, 5 years old and 3 y.o., in the middle row and the two aged ones behind them. 

They are on holiday in Arizona, where President Biden just managed to squeak out a victory last election. Democracy survived.

Young mother is struggling to answer a question from the 5 year old about what democracy is. 

Young mother  begins by explaining that democracy is a form of government which was designed to replace monarchy, or autocracy, in which one man ruled and made all the decisions and all the people had to simply obey his commands. 

"So, how does he get to be king?"

"Well, that post is usually hereditary, and gets passed down to the child of the king, usually a male child, but sometimes a girl."

"But what if the king has twins?"

  (The 5 year old has friends who are twins.) 

"Well, that might be a problem--perhaps the twin who was born first got to be king."

"But what if they were conjoined twins?" 5 year old persists.

Now we have spun off into George Carlin land and young mother is left speechless. 

"Where did she ever hear about conjoined twins?" Mad Dog demands from the rear seat.

Five year old ignores that query.

"We no longer ask," young mother replies.

"I can see why they replaced monarchy," five year old says.

"But where did you hear about conjoined twins?" 

Mad dog is insistent. Five year old ignores him. Her mind is spinning so far ahead of him, as the red vistas fly by her window. She is coming up with a new question.

Mad Dog understands why monarchy was doomed. 

Conjoined twins. His 5 year old granddaughter got that. But she is not done. 

"But what if a pair of conjoined twins ran for President," 5 year old asks,  "And one was Republican and one was Democrat? And they won!"

Mad Dog now understands why Democracy must fail.

We are all doomed. 

 

Empty Suits: ACLU and Americans United

 

What is the meaning of the phrase, "Empty Suit?"

Generally, it is reserved to describe a person who may look potent, important or consequential, who is really effete, ineffective or simply cowardly.

For me, the classic use of the expression came when Jimmy McNulty ("The Wire") meets with federal officials from the FBI and the (Republican) Department of Justice, trying to enlist their help in bringing to heel the powerful, efficient and lethal drug mob he and his Baltimore Police Department have been struggling to contain. The federals are indifferent to a mob which simply pushes heroin, murders local citizens and controls the corners of a minor American city. What the feds want is to trap some corrupt (Democratic) elected officials and to prosecute them.

McNulty finally jumps to his feet in frustration and exclaims, "And here I thought you were real police! But no, just putting away an organization which has been destroying half of a city with murders, drugs and extortion isn't of interest to you. All you want is a few political pelts. You're not real police at all, just a bunch of empty suits!"

That contains all the meanings and nuances: the phony aspect of sworn officers who don't actually care about crime; the pretense of potency; the showy exterior covering a hollow interior. A suit of armor, with no knight inside it.

$250,000 

And that is what Mad Dog has found when he looked for help from the American Civil Liberties Union (New Hampshire) and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The CEO of Americans United gets over $250,000 a year to fight for the principle of church/state separation, and the CEO of the New Hampshire ACLU gets about $100,000 to fight for the First Amendment.

$100,000 looking for a rock to hide under

But neither was interested in fighting the good fight in Hampton, when the Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal church pushed through it's annual stipend/slush fund using the corrupt warrant article process in town.

What happens in Hampton is unique in America, as far as Mad Dog can tell. It is not like the case in Everson, where the courts found a town which says it wants to offer a service to all the town's children, namely busing them to school, then that town cannot refuse to bus children simply because they want to be bused to a Catholic school. It is not like Carson, where children who have been guaranteed by the state of Maine a free public education, are denied funds for the only school in their remote part of the state, a school which is a Christian Bible school. It is not like Espinosa, where Montana made voucher funds, underwritten by the taxpayer, available to church schools. In all these cases the state was offering to make funds available to all members of the public; in Hampton special funds are designated to a special group of children--those attending a Catholic church school.

In the case of Hampton, the parish congregation puts its request for $50,000 on a "warrant ballot" and uses its parishioners on the School Board and Budget Committee to vote to endorse this ballot initiative, endorsements which appear on the ballot, and almost assure passage in the voting, and they create a slush fund from which the SAU treasurer (a government employee) writes checks from the town account to cover invoices for computers and who knows what (?crucifixes molded of clay?) for the church school, a slush fund available only to those children who attend the church school, over and above what other town children have available to them.

This is straightforward establishment of a state church (i.e. funding a church with public funds) as clearly as has ever occurred for the Anglican church in England, or the German system of designating 3% of income tax from each member of any congregation.

The CEO of the New Hampshire ACLU reportedly has said, off the record, that those who have objected to this slush fund, to this violation of the First Amendment's guarantee against establishment of state religion are entirely correct, but it is simply not worth fighting this battle "given the current Supreme Court and the environment we have now."

Which is to say, we think we cannot slay this dragon, so we will simply cut and run.

The CEO of Americans United is even worse: she simply refuses to respond but she sends out weekly announcements about all the good work she does and asks for contributions. 

So we have not got warriors fighting the good fight. The days when the ACLU signed on to defend the right of Nazis to march in Skokie are long gone. That took real guts. The ACLU risked alienating its donor base. But it said, "If we are not going to defend the First Amendment for everyone, why do we defend it at all, for anyone?"

Jon Stewart Undone by Kathleen Hicks: When Our Heroes Crash and Burn

 

When Mad Dog scrolls through youtube from his basement treadmill, he often stops on anything with Jon Stewart, who Mad Dog has learned is a source of great satisfaction and sanity.

But today, he stumbled upon a disturbing interview Stewart attempted with a lady who is capable of rigorous thinking and drawing important distinctions, and Stewart, realizing he was been demolished in his own element, resorted to reaching for applause lines and pitching his remarks to safe shibboleths of popular indignation, like the mistreatment of the average soldier and veteran. Stewart was trying to do was to establish himself as a crusading journalist, intent on exposing corruption in a self satisfied bureaucracy, which wields enormous power and a staggering budget. 

He was doing this in an interview with an under secretary of Defense, Kathleen Holland Hicks, apparently on the heels of a story about the Department of Defense being unable to pass an audit about the spending of a billion dollars.

This audit, Stewart insisted must reveal "waste, fraud and abuse."

The problem was, he did not really understand what an audit is or how it's used in the same deep way Hicks does, and she was able to unmask his superficial misapprehension by simply turning the tables and asking him the questions, each of which sequentially unhinged him, and left him more and more untethered. 

So Stewart resorts to poster slogan: "I'm may not understand the ins and outs, but I live on Earth, and I can't understand how an organization can get $850 billion dollars, and its people, its soldiers, still have to be on food stamps. To me, that's corruption. I'm sorry."

So, what he was really saying, is the same sort of things Trumpies say: I may not have command of the details or the facts, but I know what I believe!

He gets the applause he was looking for to rescue him, but it did not rescue him.

Hicks kept trying to unpack Stewart's complaints, which he was directing at her department, the Department of Defense:

They came down to these:

1/ Soldiers' families on food stamps:

For all the increased spending on defense, so little of it filters down to the working stiffs, the soldiers, sailors and airmen, their families are on food stamps 

On my treadmill, puffing along, I could plainly see that soldiers on food stamps has nothing to do with failure of an audit, or that our soldiers are impoverished. In fact, Hicks responds with figures supporting the idea military pay has gone up twice in the past few years, no matter what you say about food stamps.

I remember when rich medical students in my own medical school class somehow managed to get food stamps for their meals. Being on food stamps does not mean the military is corrupt. 

Hicks replied, okay, if we are done with waste, fraud and abuse, which plays no part in food insecurity for soldiers, let's talk about what "food insecurity"  really means in the military:  it has to do with whether there is a good meal awaiting the servicemen when they get off the boat and back to their home base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50MusF365U0

2/ After the war in Afghanistan ended Stewart expected the budget for the Defense Department, the defense budget would decrease, but instead it increased by some billions of dollars:

But, of course, increase in the Defense Department budget does not mean officials in the Defense Department are committing fraud or abuse.

Defense spending increases for reasons not entirely in the control of the Defense Department. Congressmen, wanting to keep dollars flowing to their districts, keep appropriating funds for things Defense does not even want. Jim Jordan keeps sending money to build tanks in his district. Tanks!  The Ukrainians may need tanks, but does the US military really need more tanks? That is likely real waste, but not the fault of Ms. Hicks and her Department. 

3/ The spending by the Department of Defense went to a trillion dollar program for new aircraft and these aircraft do not even work.

Hicks, of course cannot defend a trillion dollar plane (she may not have even wanted) which cannot fly, but this is not an example of fraud, although it may be wasteful and an abuse by some Congressmen who want that airplane built in their districts. But it's not the fault of the Defense Department, which is all she can talk about. She is undersecretary of Defense, not the chairman of the House Committee on defense appropriations.  

"Audits cannot reveal waste, fraud and abuse," Hicks says. "It tells you if what was paid for gets delivered."

"Oh," Stewart says, "That's all just institutional speak."

In their entry on Hicks, Wikipedia says Hicks came off looking "defensive" which is the classic remark when someone responds effectively to a half baked argument by blowing it out of the water. Of course, she is being defensive. Yes, she is defensive like those missiles which blow incoming rockets out of the air. And she is doing her job, which is to defend the Defense Department.

It is a sad thing to watch Stewart disintegrate, as the great muckraker looks, rather plainly, like someone intent on posing as the high priest of investigative journalism, as he starts meandering into accusations that trillion dollar airplanes don't work and that the defense budget actually got increased after the end of the war in Afghanistan, as if there is only one reason why the defense budget could increase ("waste/fraud/abuse) rather than the politics of Congressmen who want dollars flowing to their districts, or increased costs of high tech missiles, or a myriad of other possible reasons--while his foil undoes him by asking him questions, which unmask his own ignorance of the system she knows so much better than he does.

To Be "Hur'ed" As in Slurred: The Arrogance of Small Minds

 

So, he went to Harvard School, a private secondary school in LA, not to be confused with Harvard College, where he eventually matriculated and then Harvard Law with the requisite stint at Cambridge, England,  just to buff his resume further. 

And he's the son of immigrants.

And what did all of that mean to the man in question? 

Let me hazard a guess:

"I am so superior, and of such intellectual power, I can judge, not only questions of law, but also things like the stages of dementia, or perhaps the microvascular degeneration of cerebral vasculature, and whether or not there might be some amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in an elderly man of diminishing capacities. Why not? Am I not brilliant? Am I not a genius?" 

When Mad Dog first heard Joe Biden speak in a small space in New Hampshire, he was struck by Biden's meandering, his failure to answer the question--if he even remembered the question--and how he would start to speak about an issue of tariffs, but wound up speaking about a new war on cancer. 

But, despite all of that, the man, as President, has shown, if anything, maybe some level of dementia is no impediment, perhaps even an asset, to being an effective President--he saved us from the next  Great Depression, got the Ukrainians the help they needed (at least until the Republicans seized control of the House.) Biden e actually got an infrastructure law passed, and he spent money when he had to, when it did the most good to keep people out of poverty (without adding more to the deficit than Trump's tax giveaways to the rich did.) Biden guided us through COVID by actually respecting Dr. Fauci and the scientists, and generally made every call correctly. In general, his instincts have been right and the economy is now so good that Trump is trying to take credit for it, claiming the only reason things are going so well is everyone is anticipating he'll be re-elected. (You've got to marvel at Trump's chutzpah, which is defined by the man who murders both his parents, then pleads for leniency because he is now an orphan.)

Now we have the special counsel, Mr. Hur, a 50 something with all-the-Harvard-one-can-get, but who isn't smart enough to know that what you might think the President is, or how he might come across to a jury, is not relevant to a report on whether or not he's a felon. 

Ye gads! Don't they teach these young hot shots anything at Harvard? 

Mad Dog is not even a lawyer, but he can read and think (on good days) and that swipe at the President seemed to come out of nowhere.

This has got to be the Oxford Book of English Idiomatic Expressions entry for, "What was he thinking?" 

Or, maybe not from nowhere. Maybe it's one of those: If Trump wins, he might remember me for that open seat on the Supreme Court. After all he appointed me U.S. Attorney for Maryland once; so we are already tight.

After seven years at Harvard, was Mr. Hur not capable of imagining that his descriptions of Mr. Biden as a, "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," who is a man of "diminished faculties in advancing age," would not find their way into the national news coverage?

Or maybe, that was the point. Where's my MAGA hat?

But you would think this Harvard guy would be smart enough not to stick this slur into an official state document. He could have held that back for the FOX microphone at the inevitable press conference after the report was released. 

If that SCOTUS seat is unavailable, at the very least, there's got to be a spot a for Mr. Hur at FOXNEWS.  

Rising to the Moment: Missing the Perfect Riposte

 

Haven't we all had an argument and later thought, "Oh, why didn't I say that? That's what I really should have said!"

Following the Deliberative Session about the Hampton warrant article granting public funds to a religious school, Mad Dog upbraided himself for what he failed to say.

In his defense, he had been so conditioned by the "three minute rule" that he was trying to limit the time he spoke, only to be told by the session moderator (after the session)  that no such limit applies during Deliberative Sessions. 

Here is the youtube of the Deliberative Session. The real business begins at 8 minutes in and continues for an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CClNXNeYBIw&t=23s

But that's what blogs are for--even blogs which are nearly invisible and read by only three people on a regular basis. (Actually, the blog gets a thousand hits weekly, but most of those are from Asia and Europe.)

So here's how Mad Dog would have ended his oration, had he been quick of mind and prepared for his opportunity at the Deliberative Session.

"And finally, tonight, I would like to point out that neither the principal nor the chairperson have used those five words, 'Separation of Church and State' in a sentence, even tonight when they've been directly challenged to do so. We can draw our own conclusions about why that is.

In fact, the only person, aside from me, to use those words was the lawyer, and she did so to say that this warrant article does not violate Church/State because of a court advisory from 1969, which she claims locks into settled law the practice of granting public funds to religious schools, when, in fact, when you look at it, that 1969 advisory said just the opposite. 

So the settled law she claims is no such thing.  

And she cited "Everson," a case she also claimed makes this article permissible, which, again, is wrong. Everson said if you are going to provide a service to all the kids in town, like busing them to school, you cannot say, "well you get a bus to school, unless you go to the Catholic school." A service to all kids must be to all kids, and you cannot deny that service because a kid goes to a religious school.

But, of course, this is not what is happening in Hampton, where we are not talking about providing a simple service to all kids in town, but we are providing a special slush fund, to a special group of kids at one religious school.

There is one aspect of Everson which might apply to Hampton: The town wants to provide for a school nurse for every Hampton child and it funds that nurse using the slush fund of the warrant article. But last year, when a group tried to amend the article to say that nurse's position was the only thing to be funded, that was defeated.

 The attorney did not mention that in the decision was the famous dissent by Justice Robert Jackson, (who represented America at the Nuremberg Trials) who noted you cannot separate a church school from the church, because without the school, the church goes extinct and so they are inseparable, inextricably linked. Jackson noted the Church would give up everything, anything, before it would ever give up its school, because without the school, the church disappears within a generation. Nobody has ever denied that.

And that is why opponents of the article have no problem with state funds for Catholic charities like soup kitchens, because those activities are not inherently religious, whereas a church school has an inherently religious feature, no matter how many non sectarian roles it may fill. 

The attorney did not mention the case in Maine, where the US Supreme Court said if there were no public school in a remote area of a state, the state could fund a religious school--an execrable decision which will surely be reversed once the composition of today's SCOTUS changes.  

But even that case is not as extreme as what we do every year in Hampton. There is no town in America which simply establishes its own town church, in defiance of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. 

Not even in Utah, the one state in the union dominated by a single church: even in Utah, the kids file out of the public schools at lunch, and go next do to the church school, where they do church things before going back to the public school for their secular education.

How do you establish a church for a state? Either you state as much: "The Anglican Church is the church of England," or you simply fund a church. That is route Hampton has taken.

No other town in America, at least of which I am aware, simply sets up a slush fund for a church and writes checks to cover its expenses. 

Hampton is unique.

And yet, those people who have made a living defending the First Amendment and Separation of church and state have refused to join this fight for  church/state separation: The American Civil Liberties Union and the Americans for Separation of Church and State have cowered and wailed: "It's all a losing cause." They have shown themselves to be empty suits. As Martin Luther King once said, "In the end, it is not the voices and arguments of those who oppose you you will remember, but the silence of your friends."

Dudley Dudley Kept Fighting

Mad Dog began by saying he would convince nobody at the meeting, and he was right. Those who came to vote for the article would do so against all argument; had the skies parted and twelve angels with horns arrived, the parishioners would still have done what they came to do, vote for the article.

As Upton Sinclair observed so long ago: 'It is difficult to bring a man to understanding when his income depends on his not understanding.'"

One thing Mad Dog did not say, one thing he edited out, and he is glad he did: When Mad Dog was in college  Martin Luther King delivered a speech on campus, which he likely had given in front of a hundred audiences, and his theme was that it is possible to gain the world and yet lose your soul. He elaborated on all the wealth America had gained, but how despite all these wonderful accomplishments, it might yet lose its soul because it turned a blind eye to injustices within its own lands and injustices it wrought abroad. And Mad Dog thought: This article is about $52,000 and this parish is in the same danger Martin Luther King warned about. 

PS:

Watching the youtube, Mad Dog notes the blonde woman, sitting in the audience, behind  the speakers, who came to support the opposition to the warrant article, and he is reminded even if they are few in number, there are still people who stand up against the prevailing crowd and are counted. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WewRMOImNH4&t=1839s

The Authoritarian Cudgel In the Live Free or Die State

 

February 5th, 2024 is the day where small town democracy is scheduled to be on display in Hampton, New Hampshire. 

The town, now grown to a population of 20,000 no longer holds the old "town hall meetings"--the numbers simply would not permit it--and these have been replaced by two "Deliberative Sessions," held in public school buildings in town, where "warrant articles" are presented and discussed. 

These warrant articles range from whether or not Mrs. Jones can plant her petunias on that strip of grass which belongs not to Mrs. Jones but to the town, on the far side of the sidewalk crossing her front yard, to questions of whether or not to spend money on repaving High Street or whether or not to use taxpayer funds to pay for computers, office supplies or, possibly, crucifixes at the town's Catholic church school, Sacred Heart (SHS).

These warrant article ballots run to 20 pages and each runs from a single paragraph to several paragraphs and most, if not all, are followed by two boxes below the article and directly above the boxes where you check off "Yes" or "No." In the box is a statement: "Recommended (or not recommended) by the School Board" and in the box below that, "Recommended (or not)" by the Budget Committee." 

Last year's Ballot looked like this:

4. Shall the School District vote to raise and appropriate funds in the amount of $57,503 to provide child benefit services, in accordance with RSA 189:49, for students who are residents of the Hampton School District and attend Sacred Heart School located in Hampton, New Hampshire? 

BY PETITION. (Majority vote required.) 

Recommended by the School Board 4-1-0. 

Recommended by the Municipal Budget Committee 8-0-1. 

YES                   NO

Voting on these articles is preceded by meetings of the relevant committees--in the case of the SHS by a meeting of the School Board and another of the Budget Committee.

One might ask what Americans would say if they saw a ballot for the election of President Putin with a "Recommended by the Politbureau and Recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff," just over the voting space. Well, comrades, you know so little, just follow the recommendations of those officials who have really studied the choices and who are wiser and more intelligent than you.

It's All About 

We are told, these "Recommendations" must be provided and printed on the ballots because of "state law" and the reasons the state requires these may have to do with the sheer volume of warrant articles and the practical reality that most voters may have little idea about the impact of these proposals on their taxes or other factors. So the voters are told, virtually, "You don't know about this, but trust just us, just vote 'yes.'"

The Kids

This, of course, raises the whole issue of whether as a society we should be encouraging people who have not followed relevant issues to show up and vote for stuff they really know nothing about, as a sort of sham participation in a sham democracy.

When you are told you can vote on something, but here is the recommended way to vote, does anyone not think you are being manipulated?

It's All About the Kids

But the other feature of the nuts and bolts of "democracy" in Hampton is what happens at the meetings of the committees which make these recommendations.

The rules there are no citizen, "member of the public" (proletarian) may speak for more than 3 minutes, even if there are only 3 or 4 speakers, and no citizen may question any elected official on the stage or attempt a "back and forth" (i.e. a question and answer or a dialogue) with said officials, who are seated on the state above the audience. "Any back and forth should happen at the Deliberative Sessions," we are told. Of course, by the time the Deliberative Sessions occur, it's all over but the shouting as the committees have already voted their recommendations.

It's All About the Kids

Even during the School Board meeting this year, speakers with whom the chairperson of the school board disagreed were not allowed to speak freely: she cut off any detractor with a booming, "Okay, wind it up, now!"  

This happened just after one speaker had pointed out a fact  embarrassing to the chairperson, namely that the chairperson had voted in favor of granting $52,000 to the SHS on the grounds that this money supported town children, Hampton residents, who chose to attend the Catholic school) but only 25% of the children in the school receiving these public funds reside in Hampton--the vast majority coming from surrounding towns. And what made it particularly embarrassing to the chairperson was she had never mentioned that demographic fact. It was "all about the kids." 

Note also, NB: the way the warrant article is worded it sounds as if the town funds are only given to the children at the school who come from Hampton, but, of course, if the computer is set up in the classroom to show the Christmas mass from St. Patrick's cathedral, all the kids in the school (75% of whom do not live in Hampton) are benefited from the town's largesse, the town's purchase for the entire school that computer. So there's a lot of winking and nodding going on here.

It's All About the Kids

Others who spoke against the article were similarly cut off and shouted down from the stage by the chairperson. 

We have all heard about the "bully pulpit" but this was the bully from the pulpit.

On February 5, there will be a "moderator" putatively in charge to be sure speakers remain civil and do not talk too long--presumably the 3 minute rule will be in place again. The School Board Chairperson will, once again, be on the stage, her glowering presence and her microphone looming large.

Always done it that way...

Oddly, at the school board meeting, because speakers were cut short at 3 minutes, the full 30 minutes for discussion--which the superintendent of the SAU schools noted is required by state law--had never been met. There was 15 minutes left for "discussion." Somebody had to talk. 

So the speaker who the chairperson of the school board had cut off was asked if he had anything more to add. He stood at the microphone and asked: "I don't understand. First, I am cut off during my remarks, presumably for speaking too long. Now, I am asked to speak longer. How much time am I going to be allowed now?"

Three minutes, he was told.

"Will that fulfill the 30 minute requirement?"

"If there are other speakers, maybe."

But then a member of the School Board asked the speaker a question and so his question, which took some time to ask, put the session well toward the goal of the sacred 30 minutes. 

"Why, after all these years, during which we have always voted Sacred Heart this money, are you only now objecting? When did you move here anyway? And what's the problem. We have always done it this way and nobody's ever objected before."

The speaker replied, "Well, as I said before, there is a principle which has apparently been ignored or thought to be unimportant: Separation of church and state, but perhaps that sounded too abstract to you. Maybe you could not really believe I would rise on principle when there is $50,000 at stake. 

But, to your next point, I grew up in the South, and when I caught my bus to school, waiting across the street from me was a Black boy, about my age, maybe 7 or 8, and he waited for another bus to come to take him to the Black school, while I went off to the White school. I asked why he went to a different school and I was told, 'We've always done it that way. Nobody's ever objected.' And so, I think, sometimes we have to think anew. 

Did I take more than three minutes?"