American government

Quest For Info: In State, Across States and Home

It’s a John Lennon sort of day today. Everyone searching for some truth.

You’ll notice when you enter the front page of my website, the following statement appears: “(This page does not officially represent Georgia State University or any of the Georgia State University Student Media divisions).” I should add to that “or the University System of Georgia”.

Especially since the students that cross my path on a regular basis occasionally cross the path of the Board of Regents.

One such student is David Schick. Schick contributed a bit to The Signal this year during his transfer year from Georgia Perimeter College to GSU. His work ethic stood out such that USA Today selected him to be their GSU correspondent. However, it’s his time at GPC that remains as pertinent to the present as anything because of an unresolved Open Records Request.

Before transferring to GSU, Schick (then EIC of The Collegian) made a request for 15 budget related documents. As of now, he doesn’t have seven of them. GPC had laid off 282 employees and reports alleged that the school had “overspending for years” thus causing the shortfall precipitating the layoffs (Collegian adviser David Simpson was among the casualties). Schick’s request reflected his journalistic curiosity as to whether or not this allegation was true and if so, how could it have gone on undetected for so long.

That was in July 2012. Today, Schick filed suit against the USG Board of Regents because he still doesn’t have all of the documents he requested.

Open Record Requests are not supposed to simply be a resource for professional journalists: anyone can request them. However, oftentimes, the costs given to requestors can be quite exorbitant. I’ve advised students who have placed ORRs that have resulted in four-figure quotes and that is more likely of a possiblity the more redactions are deemed necessary due to various legal concerns. The original quoted cost of Schick’s ORR began the delays and the new quote remains a sticking point.


David Schick

The lawsuit is instructive on a few levels:

1) American college journalists shouldn’t just pay attention to what their university administration is doing, they should also be mindful of the systems under which the administrations operate. The one thing I find myself suggesting to my students during teardowns more often than not is “you should call the students at (Somewhere Else in Georgia) University and see if the same thing’s happening there.” And where the public universities are concerned, the USG is the first place to look for why things work the way they work.

2) Open government is messy, whether the facts of the case dictate that it has to be or not (and being 100% fair, I’ve yet to hear USG’s response to the suit). Launching an ORR isn’t activity exclusively reserved for journalists but non-exclusivity doesn’t necessarily dicate ease. Rights to privacy often clash with rights to public information and even after that, debates will arise has to whether or not public officials leverage the perception rights to privacy are in play when they aren’t. (An ongoing controversy in campus journalism is how much FERPA is used and misused in ORRs).

3) This is yet another case that proves that students do have the most important story ideas sometimes. This is not the AJC* or a network affiliate (or even Creative Loafing, though David’s worked there as well) causing such a ruckus, just one journalist on behalf of one student newspaper. That he doesn’t even edit or write for anymore. Students are affected by a lot of things and think that their problems exist on their island, but that island can be exposed to a wider audience if you ask a question or two.

* = One person commenting on an AJC column about the affair writes “I guess that I’m kind of curious as to why a lone student journalist is carrying the spear here. Why has the larger media complex not been all over this like ugly on an ape ?” Eek.

It will be interesting to see how far the case proceeds. There’s interest is in the verdict, yes, but also in the discussion will be on reasonable cost projections on citizen requests and the level of awareness it will create for student journalists on covering their campus budget beats.

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Whenever there’s someone saying that we’re not getting enough information, however, there’s someone that thinks we have too much. Nationally, that’s the case with the Edward Snowden case. Snowden’s recent online interview detailing his whistleblowing on the National Security Agency has attracted a lot of buzz. The future doesn’t seem promising for the whistleblower. Snowden must believe as much as his plans essentially involve never setting foot on American soil again. At the time of this entry, he’s fallen off of the planet.


America’s Most Wanted

Two takeaways from this?

1) The furor over the PRISM leak seems to reveal that we’re not as “post-post 9/11“*** we think we are. Specifically, it’s interesting that the lines of inappropriateness have been drawn domestically. William Binney worked with the NSA for 28 years but only quit when he felt the surveillance of domestic data got to be too much. Obviously legally, this makes sense: the privacy issue is framed as a constitutional one and the constitution only applies to American citizens. However, no one has asked yet if PRISM’s reach has affected private citizens of other parts of the world whose connections to terrorism would be specious at best. There does seem to be an invisible “othering” in play.

*** = “Post-post-9/11” should be considered a scale rather than an absolute. Just as scholars reminds us that Obama’s 2008 election shouldn’t be treated as a pass/fail inscription of the notion of a “post-racial” society.” There are other elements upon which we can assess 9/11’s effect on social perception and policy beyond suspicion and personal privacy.

2) I wonder if this case is going to make people think twice about how much they voluntarily disclose online. Never mind the companies that try to facilitate our unwitting divulging of information, the social mediation we currently experience leaves a lot of people thinking it doesn’t matter whether people know everything about everyone anyway. So much so that I regularly now see panels at national media conventions where professionals essentially try to shame 18-24 year olds to keep to them damn selves when Twittering and Facebooking. They shame them with “you won’t get hired!” Are we going to transform this into “the government can take everything you did 30 years ago and ruin you?” or will the new generation reply “if anything, I’ve learned I can’t do anything private on the Internet anyways so YaskY?”

Danah Boyd argues that you can’t take refuge in the idea that “I’ve done nothing illegal” because PRISM takes us in a direction that “presumes entire classes and networks of people as suspect” (particularly apt here is her analogy on how we all freak out after doing our taxes and imagining feeling that way all the time). “Nothing to hide” does indeed often fail as logic and it seems like we’re a culture that’s hiding less and less. However, recent scholarship suggests that the more we get into our social media, the more we seek privacy out. If that research is indicative of our behaviour, you can expect us to be outraged about PRISM for a long, long time.

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Speaking of hiding, I wonder where Manning is these days.

No, not Bradley Manning (though that’s very directly relevant). Preston Manning.

Remember Preston Manning? The squeaky voiced idealist who emerged from the Canadian Praries in the late-80s with a message of populism, more provincial equality, less wasteful spending and what not? The man who was vocal in an anti-establishment charge against the Charlottetown Accord that taught Canadians you could beat all the major parties in one referendum?***** And the man who took the Reform Party from the fringes to the opposition benches, which led the way to a merger with the Tories that left the Liberal Party in shambles?

***** = I struggle to imagine the U.S. voting populace being given a chance to smack both the Republicans and Democrats in the face as mightily as Canada smacked the three major parties in the face in 1992.


And no one was happier than Preston

I lie when I paint a portrait of Manning literally hiding. He was seen only weeks ago denying that his non-profit organization is fronting a movement to undermine the current mayor of Calgary. And he’s still beating a familar drum from 20 years past, reforming the Canadian Senate.

However, I still feel like the old Preston is hiding when I see the latest news about Conservative tumult. The Reform Party was never very popular east of Manitoba and social progressives absolutely bristled at the thought of their taking charge. However, there seemed to be a general consensus that one upside to Manning’s movement succeeding would be an increase in accountability and information. The Liberals had turned off even many of its own voters with its image of an arrogant, power-entitled group oblivious to its own scandals and Jean Chretien was frequently criticized for centralizing too much of the power to the office of the Prime Minister.

Now Stephen Harper is arguably the most power-centralized Prime Minister in Canada’s history and it’s starting to take its toll on the party. Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber departed in a huff and reports indicate that the grumblings of Defence Minister Peter MacKay are getting louder. The Senate remains unchanged, unabolished and the accounting of a Conservative senator’s expenses is now an issue. The Office of the Auditor General– an office designed to corral overspending which was the biggest Reform pet peeve of all– is constantly in disagreement with the CPC. It’s a far cry from what the Reform Party projected on a mount of Western alienation in a not-too-distant past. Which is puzzling since some people were quick to trumpet the 2011 election out as a realization of Manning’s work– not the least of which Manning himself.

The press is positioning this as a populist vs. moderate fight and that seems half-right. How “moderate” Rathgeber or MacKay or anyone else is or isn’t on social issues hasn’t publicly frothed to the surface as a source of discontent yet. However, there is one very simple strain of populism clashing with moderate politics. Moderate politics dictates that what is electorally successful is too some degree justified. However, many within the conservative movement are concerned because, majority or not, as one blogger puts it, “Surely Conservatives deserve a party that is bigger than one man—i.e., Stephen Harper”.


Manning’s Idealistic Stephen Harper

When these “new” Conservatives came to town, there’d be more accountability and the Prime Minister, even if you disagreed with his policies, wouldn’t be so power mad. You could ask questions in the House of Commons with less fear of blowback within your own party if you didn’t tow the line. The CPC that voters encounter now is certainly a far cry from the Liberals on economic issues and some social issues (though they’ve yet to touch gay marriage despite the worst fears of progressive voters). However, it has done nothing substantial to tackle the Senate issue and it’s created an image that only the Prime Minister is in a position to comment on anything.

It hasn’t taken on the level of the mid-2000s Liberals yet and some columnists argue that all of this hubbub can only strengthen Harper’s resolve for 2015. Still, regular deficits, quibbles with the Auditor General and Mike Duffy overspending? I can only imagine if there still is a 1992 Preston Manning hiding somewhere, clutching a Social Credit pamphlet and shrieking in horror.

All I can say, is that it’s enough to make this whole “transparency” thing catch fire.

“The Devil You Don’t” Never Wins / Stifled Electoral Conversation / Best of Show

“We can’t afford four more years!” “Anything to get him out of office!” “It’s about defeating the president!”

I’m talking about the Republican outcry this year, right? Actually, I’m not, I’m talking about the Democratic outcry in 2004. In case you didn’t notice, both times, these outcries led to electoral defeat in the race for President.

By 2010, I felt pretty strongly that Mitt Romney’s ascendance to the Republican presidential nomination was a fait accompli. By 2011, this feeling was supported as such potential front-runners as Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie and, yes, even Sarah Palin gradually withdrew interest in the job. And right there and then, I told politico friends of mine that Obama would likely be re-elected in 2012. When asked why, I answered the same way every time: “Romney will win the Republican primary and there will be no enthusiasm for him going forward, only enthusiasm to find the ‘safe’ candidate to defeat the incumbent. And that’s not going to work.” Lo and behold, it didn’t.

Primary voters do sometimes fall for this logic. Romney certainly didn’t have a shortage of Republican opponents with enthusiastic bases while commentators generally noted the “enthusiasm gap” that he possessed. Such was the news of this that The Daily Show even did a skit from which 90% of the humor derivation was the principle that it wasn’t odd to imagine someone campaigning for Romney, but it was completely alien to imagine anyone being enthusiastic about it.


Excitement!

“Fringe” candidates such as Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum had (and have) cores of supporters that were (and are) greatly devoted to them but it didn’t (and doesn’t) translate to the primary ballot box. Obviously, there are numerous reasons for this besides the “safe” factor, but there’s no denying the groundswell of “we have to defeat the president” that underwrote some of the Romney primary vote. Somewhere along the way, “let’s find a candidate we support regardless of opponent” got lost.

For a quick exercise of this practice, go to your social media network of choice and visit the statuses/tweets/posts from your Republican friends. Find one person whose primary expression is that of disappointment over what they believe America lost by not having Romney as president without once mentioning Obama. Then send it to me because I haven’t seen it.

It reminds me of sitting in a house with my American friends in 2004 watching the Presidential election and hearing the lamentations of “four more years” with Bush. I silently waited for someone to say “it’s a shame that John Kerry won’t get to be President.” When it never came, it occurred to me that it was easy to understand why the Democrats didn’t persuade enough swing voters to come over to their side. The expression “the devil you know over the devil you don’t” didn’t happen by accident: elections are about more than about convincing people the other side is the devil. America’s Democrats found out the hard way in 2004. The Republicans are mulling that lesson today.

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Lost in the usual presidential headlines is the vote total of third party candidates, which remains a far cry from the Ross Perot salad days.

In 1992, Perot alone marshalled nearly 20 million votes and the overall third-party vote dwindled to nearly 10 million in ’96. Then came Ralph Nader. America hasn’t cracked two million votes for third party candidates since.


Not then, and not now

I’ve been reading Jonathan Sterne’s MP: Meaning of a Format (more on that in my next blog entry) and in it, he cites a very powerful quotation from Warren Weaver’s introduction to The Mathematical Theory of Communication: “Information is a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message.” In the strictest information theory terms, this has rather banal mathematical implications (1 and 2 has three exponential possibilities amongst them, 1, 2 and 3 has six, etc.). However, it’s also led me to consider that information theory is perhaps the best lens with which to understand how the electoral system can (and usually does) limit the scope of conversational possibility in politics.

Supporters of third-party candidates usually rail on the unfairness of ballot access, debate access, the tendency to reduce voting to a “lesser of two evils” practice, but stepping outside of that, does one necessarily have to disagree with Obama’s potential policies to see the loss here? What really matters it that the exponential possiblities of discussion remains incredibly rigid.

And voters have lashed out at this in other ways: three states supported regulatory measures to legalize marijuana. Two others voted to approve same-sex marriage. Of course, many suspect that most Democrats favour these things and Obama has come out and said as much for the latter. However, issues such as drug regulation and marriage rights were noticably dimmed during the actual election; swapped out for small talk over whether Obama used the word “terrorism” properly or other such technicalities.

By framing the discontent with two-party focus as an information theory problem, rather than as a fair access problem, I think we gain a greater understanding of what is lost. I don’t want to get too mathematical about it, but there needs to be a reframing of the electoral process as a chance to discuss issues robustly, especially in America, where the process is long and cumbersome. State-run ballots miss the point: they establish a groundswell of attention but fail to establish a long-standing conversation about issues that third-party candidates are much more often willing to address, only to receive little to no audience.

The first possible solution is election reform. It’s already clear that the “lesser of two evils” approach doesn’t lead parties to select their best candidates, so why not use that as a premise to open up discussion on various forms of runoff voting, reforming the primary system or fixing debate moderation and access. Will such discussions put a third party into power? Maybe not, but is that the larger point at stake?

It doesn’t interest me because I’m upset at any one given election result. It interests me because of how little we talked about along the way.

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I like my job a lot. My students do good things and have taken their organizations a long way from where they were when I started. I got more reaffirmation of that recently.

My GSTV students notched two CBI Award nominations this year as well as a Pinnacle Award nomination for its website. Following up on that, The Signal launched a new website and celebrated this by winning a “Best of Show” award (and an additional category placement) in its category for the first time. Not too shabby for a stolen issue.

In the end, the best reason to go to CBI and CMA/ACP is share with and learn from the students. Oh, and all these papers…:


Not a dead medium on campuses across America

Staying up to watch an election is fun, but I’ll take staying up in my pajamas and critiquing papers until three in the morning every day and twice on Sunday if there was a logistical way to make that fit my career. Probably isn’t, but such is life.

NINE-SEVEN-NINE! / Knockout!

I was quite thrilled when ESPN decided to renew its 30 For 30 series.* The first installment offered a lot of illumination on some oftentimes told and other times not-as-often told stories from the world of sports folklore. The second film in the second series is a particularly salient one for me as a sports fan.

*Although I’m bit puzzled at how one keeps the name when the 30th anniversary of ESPN is long gone and we’re past 30 films…why not just call it “The ESPN Films Series?” Also the whole ”what if I told you” ad campaign strikes me as a bit inane as the question always seems to pose as a grand philosophical query yet usually precedes something of faux profoundness.

9.79* revisits the most famous 100 metre dash in history– possibly one of the five most famous events ever in Olympic history– that occurred at the 1988 Olympics.

Atlanta remains un-united

This is salient because it was the first Summer Olympics I ever watched. Thus I watched the Ben Johnson scandal through the eyes of a naïve Canadian fanboy, for lack of a better way of putting it. 24+ years later, the ever-developing nuances of the story fascinate me far more than the original 10 seconds of drama ever could have. One race encapuslated debates on race, social class, masculinity, our concepts of “fair play” and how to reconcile them with the ethic of “doing whatever it takes.” Some of these issues are explored and other not even touched on in the film, even though as a whole it just reminds me of all of it all over again.

One of my big takeaways was how the scandal introduced me to an ugly form of Canadian racism that I was even able to spot as that naïve 11 year old who stayed up past midnight to watch the race. The media seemed keen to celebrate Johnson’s “Canadian-ness” as a gold medal winner yet played up his Jamaican roots much more once he was caught (do a pre-88 and post-88 “Jamaican born Ben Johnson” LexisNexis search and see what I mean). The culture of racing is, of course, extremely important in Jamaica and the movie notes that Johnson wasn’t even the only island-born Canadian at the line that day and how Canada represented a journey to a better life to facilitate racing success, not ultimately hinder it.

The issue of ”othering” is fascinating as its rationalization process is so often incredibly contradictory. Barack Obama encounters this even to this day with some people stubbornly clinging to the theory that he was not born in America, even though if such allegations were true, it would shed far more light on something wrong with America’s inability to find it out if he got away with it for so long. Just the same, the documentary reveals how Johnson and a host of other black athletes were part of a doping system that was supervised and overseen by middle-class white coaches. The most notable being Charlie Francis, to whom the furor of disappointment never reached nearly the same level as it did Johnson.**

**And even despite publicly claiming that he didn’t believe one could win on an Olympic level without resorting to drugs, Francis still managed to carve an assocation with American sprinters such as former “30″ subject Marion Jones, who later also was found to have doped with the spotlight firmly tilted away from Francis or any of her other coaches.

It seems like Johnson being an exotic “other” was convenient when it shed negative light on Canada, just as Obama being a foreign “other” was/is convenient to those who disagreed with his politics. This is also particularly relevant at a time when Lance Armstrong has decided to recede from his fight against numerous doping allegations. Lance is not only not an “other,” he’s a sympathetic “non-other” as a cancer survivor. Hence it seems the vitirol one might expect towards him hasn’t surfaced.

9.79* does take a pass on other issues raised by the furor. Such as the ongoing debate on why Carl Lewis was never an incredibly popular man. The doc reminds us of Lewis rubbing his fellow competitors the wrong way and gives quite enough of him to indicate why that might be (anyone who claims to go to college to “get a degree in Carl Lewis” is probably possessed of an unhealthy amount of hubris***). As a young kid, I thought that hating Carl Lewis was something that a Canadian sports fan did since he was the archrival of our hero and Canada always naturally takes to any athletic rivalry with America (far more naturally than the States’ sports fans take to it, frankly). Of course, I didn’t have as much access to the media then to know that Lewis wasn’t exactly universally loved at home either.

Was it solely his expression of confidence (or arrogance) or was it something more? As early as the mid-80s, rumors of homosexuality followed Lewis around and it’s entirely possible that some of the dislike for Carl stemmed from the fact that he dared to be one of the greatest athletes of all time without looking or acting like a “real man” should. Some of Lewis’ responses– ”I’m no homosexual”– were as troublesome as the rumors. Not because Lewis failed to out himself or because he is indeed straight, but rather that he didn’t instead use the opportunity to open a dialogue as to why it would be so threatening if he was in the first place.

*** It’s worth noting that Calvin Smith, free of any shadowy drug history, seemed to fade in public consciousness despite presenting a far more humble image than Lewis. Yet if you watch the film, you’ll notice that he also comes across as somewhat effeminate, perhaps lending credence to the “gotta be macho” theory.

The most important reason to watch the film is to peek into the continued rationale and/or denial of athletes surrounding drug use as it raises the all-important question ”why do certain actions constitute cheating but others do not?” Six of the eight athletes in the race failed a drug point at least once in their careers, but some tests are deemed to be less significant than others. Johnson is positioned as a “truth will set you free” character free to rationalize his drug use rather than deny it because he’s already been caught (or possibly not: Johnson maintains that what he actually tested positive for was something he didn’t use, and the movie explores the espionage accusations behind that as well). The movie opens with the anonymous quote that echoes Johnson’s logic, “if you don’t take it, you won’t make it.”

It’s a riveting story and shows promise for the 30 series after a somewhat underwhelming re-debut (the very important but scattershot ”Broke”) and a potentially self-indulgent followup.

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It’s fascinating to compare a municipal debate to a national one and, for me at least, a Canadian one to an American one.

In my hometown, there’s a race for the mayor’s office. Several media outlets collaborated to host a debate between most of the candidates. Listening to the candidates answer debate questions, occasionally making small-town humour and taking a little extra time to properly phrase an answer to a question, makes me think “wow, these people would be eviscerated on a national stage.”

That’s not a dismissal of them. Quite the contrary. It’s a dismissal of decades of national debates being turned into a quest to find out when people stammer or when a “knockout moment” happens.

After a strong post-debate tilt in the polls for U.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, his VP candidate Paul Ryan is apparently ”prepping for a big knockout moment” tonight in his debate with Joe Biden. Whenever I read headlines like this, I’m inclined to cringe. Not because I’m anti-debate but rather because the purpose of debates continues to be twisted into a quest for a “knockout” or a “gaffe” rather than advancing any serious discussion on an issue.

There are two particularly discouraging things about this. The most discouraging is that scribes usually proclaim or discern “knockout moments” out of items not nearly possessed of the substance that they seem to be, especially in American politics. Usually, a “knockout moment,” for me, is where policy debate goes to die. For example, when Ronald Reagan dismissed Jimmy Carter’s medicare concerns with the pithy ”there you go again,” it received more focus than any substantive response to Carter’s response that Reagan offered. Logically speaking, “there you go again” made Carter look like a nag, but it didn’t really answer his question either. Just the same, when Lloyd Bentsen chastised Dan Quayle for being ”no Jack Kennedy,” it resonated as a great putdown, but generated more attention than any purported substance within the criticism.

The search for the ever-occurring gaffe can equally inane. Michael Dukasis’ expressed opposition to the death penalty was criticized for its lack of passion, as though the specifics of the opinion (that he felt such a penalty wouldn’t act as a deterrent) were irrelevant. Hence, it qualified as a “gaffe.” A more recent example is Rick Perry’s failure to remember the name of the Department of Energy in a Republican primary debate. It elicited great laughter, but it left any potential discussion about his plans to eliminate three departments completely in the dust.

The second reason why the “knockout quest” is so frustrating is that it’s debatable how far these moments really sway things in American elections. Take Romney’s current post-debate push: was there any one defining moment that sealed it? Likely not, it’s generally conceded Obama performed poorly in the debate overall rather than failing in any key moment. Looking at the some of the aforementioned examples, Reagan won the 1980 election by a landslide, Bush’s win over Dukasis was a fairly comfortable one; it’s hard to take away from either of those elections that one should look for such moments.

Atlanta remains un-united
Everyone remembers Bentsen’s putdown, but it ultimately didn’t help Dukasis

Yet that’s all we hear presidential candidates do: meet with their debate coaches (a good thing) and come armed to the tee with the right catchphrases to have their moment (not as good). If 1/4 of the enery was expended on how to produce a productive discussion on issues that there is expended on the knockout quest, Americans could be treated to something of major importance. It’s alarming how much less combative and more illuminating a third-party presidential debate is yet it attracts so little of the audience.

The “knockout” is perhaps a little more relevant in Canadian politics where the margin of victory actually counts for something, unlike a presidential debate. You can win by one electoral vote or by 200 electoral votes: at the end of the day, you’re still president. In a parliamentary system, the “knockout moment” could be the difference between a majority or minority government or opposition vs. backbench. ”You had an option” isn’t such an incredibly riveting moment because it won the Conservatives an election all by itself. It’s riveting because it turned a potential minority government or small majority into 211 seats. Everyone knew last year that Stephen Harper would still be Prime Minister after the election, but Jack Layton’s stern riposte of Michael Ignatieff and Ignatieff’s arrogance in the face of Layton’s criticisms is what likely helped tip it into majority terrority (as the NDP played spoiler to any fading Liberal hopes in Ontario) and place the opposition mantle firmly in the NDP’s hands for the first time.

However, regardless of whether the knockout works or not, I’d love to see a “postgame” report that focused on the feasibility of ideas presented, alternatives not considered and less focus on “how did Candidate X do?” I won’t hold my breath.

The loss of Phil Tarr / #MMC2012 / Of Teachers and Referees

Nothing else I write about this week has the gravity of the loss of a young artist’s life. The Cape Breton music scene was stunned this weekend when Philip Tarr passed away at his Sydney home at the age of 25:

Phil’s online obituary

The death is a tremendous loss to the community and its locally residing members could speak to it far more poignantly than I ever could, as they were present for his contributions and are thus most hurt by his absence. Tarr coordinated the Mess Folk outfit that put out a slew of MP3s and vinyl recordings in the past three years.

On a personal level, it was a reflection on my dissertation and personal transformation. My fieldwork was conducted in 2006 and Tarr and his brother James were but teenagers at the time, and not necessarily popular ones within the scene. They were agent provocateurs, if you would, rattling against the emo/screamcore trend of the day. Some of the posts on the CBLocals messageboard were under scrutiny for homophobia (the emo movement certainly bucked the masculine norms rock n’ roll sometimes presents) and disrupting the “signal-to-noise” ratio. Furthermore, the Tarrs were grindcore practitioners– or perhaps satirists of the amelodic genre– via James’ Canker project. They also formed a band titled The Abusive Stepdads.

Mess Folk steered more towards melody but it wasn’t necessarily greeted with open arms right away either. Philip famously called my hometown “a suitable hole to die in” in a Vice interview and MF’s content was occasionally inciteful on its face in the Stepdads vein (with song titles like I Beat My Woman Sometimes (And She Likes It)” and “Suicide Song”). The general arc of Mess Folk was exceptionally dark on its face but one reviewer noted, there was “a lot of snoot-cocking” in the band’s work. Tarr once told us through an online status that he feared ever living in the Brave New World; his music indeed reflected a lot of terrible misanthropic ugliness in the world.

Over time, however, Philip transformed into a scene notable. He likely won over several friends through work ethic alone (and his musical evolution to a 60s garage/punk throwback), but he also became a congenial peer and treasured friend to many. Only a few weeks before his death, he recorded an off-the-cuff track that is eerily autobiographical. It’s eerie to hear the line “I just want to be a musician” because it sounds like that was more of a struggle for someone who explored such dark subject matter while “just wanting to have some fun.”

It was a privilege for those who didn’t move away to get to know Philip on a level beyond his (alleged or not) “angry teenage troublemaker” days. If there were any demons haunting him in his life, I hope he had a chance to make peace on the way out.

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On a far less sobering note, here on the southern side of the border, reality hit me today that I needed to get my notes together for the GSU Modern Media Conference, which finally descends upon the school on Friday and Saturday. My students at The Signal dedicated an entire insert to the conference program in today’s issue. It’s an impressive lineup of presenters, to say the least.

My hats are off to the students doing all of the work to help put this together. A localized media conference is not an original idea of the current students; the Student Media department used to have “Media Day” back in the 1990s. It was an idea that was bandied about at meetings for years by several students and myself, but finally current Signal EIC Sabastian Wee said “hey, let’s do it!” And do it, we shall.

I’m flattered to be among those presenters…those notes I need because I will be conducting a panel on review writing. My students even did a spiffy write up on me in the insert…nice:

What a guy! :-p

If you’re a journalism/media student in Atlanta, we’ll see you this weekend, I’m sure that with the group of great professionals we have visiting, you won’t be disappointed!

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Fitting that it would be Wisconsin.

You might recall that Wisconsin is the state where the public employees protested a bill that would drastically affect teachers’ benefits (among other employees). Despite throngs of protestors descending upon the captial, public opinion polls indicated that there wasn’t a terrible wave of sympathy for the teachers. Several conservative critics framed them as nine-and-a-half monthers, cruising on blissful summer vacations and not working the full nine-to-five schedule. Others declared Walker’s eventual success pushing legislation through as a triumphant transfer of power from unions to elected officials.

Lo and behold, Wisconsin football fans- liberal, moderate, conservative and all points in between- were up in arms today as their pop culture darlings, the community-owned (imagine that) Green Bay Packers that were on the short end of an incredibly controversial ruling in Seattle last night on Monday Night Football. A controversial ruling that may never have happened if there wasn’t a lockout of the regular officials– normally the target of scorn, now suddenly the darlings of the sports fan set. It’s as if the karmic gods of organized labour decided to strike out at Governor Scott Walker’s biggest fan interests to spite him.

Suddenly Gov. Walker doesn’t seem to mind collective bargaining rights so much, something that one of his political opponents was all too keen to mention: “People end up thinking you can get good work for cheap, you can always find a cheaper way and it’s going to be just as good a result,” Larson said. “I would hope that Scott Walker is just as outraged about decreased quality of teachers that we’re going to get as he is with replacement refs in the NFL.” Of course, Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan decided to steer it in the other direction, correlating throwing the “failed” replacement officials out to throwing out incumbents.

That football could become a political…football in this way is a pretty fitting commentary on political discourse. More than one Grantland reader wrote in that Romney or Obama could seal the election by bringing the NFL’s officials back and there doesn’t seem to be a hint of irony in what they’re saying. Wisconsin teachers– you know, the people who have stand in front of dozens of heckling adolescents every day in the hopes of shaping their future– could apparently disappear tomorrow and not garner as much sympathy as a crew of people who measure ball distances at sporting events for a group of million-dollar athletes.

It’s unusual because sports fans, many fiscal conservatives among them, seem to be judging the current officiating fiasco by the standards of community interest rather than by the cold, hard bottom line that they judged the Wisconsin situation. While the NFL is a non-profit, its shutting out of the officials is at the behest of 97% privately owned teams that rake in hundreds of millions of dollars who provide a service that directly affects a fraction of the lives that teachers directly affect.

One would assume the community logic would apply to the public employees, not the wealthy businessmen. No one’s arguing that teachers and firefighters’ worth are measured by how many beer commercials a school can sell. The NFL , however, conducts business for the private owner’s profits and isn’t one logical tenet of late capitalist logic that you’re worth what the market says you’re worth? That being the case, the locked out referees aren’t worth that much: ratings are as high as ever.

The locked out officials can make somewhere between $25-70,000 but without benefits, something they want so they can drop their other jobs. This is for significantly less than nine and a half months of “official” work. Yet when teachers walked out to attend a protest, it wasn’t spun by fiscally conservative critics as the government’s fault that the quality of education might suffer, it was the teachers’ fault. They had to think about the economy, not the community. Whereas in 2012, it’s not the referee’s fault that their absence is hurting the quality of play, it’s the NFL’s…even though the NFL has no economic impetus whatsoever to change their stance. Apparently, the quality of NFL officiating is a community, not a capitalistic, concern.

And here we are, with Wisconsin at the center of the discontent. A strange, but not-so-strange, world indeed.

TPLOST: Atlanta’s Traffic Drama Continues

I moved to Atlanta in August 2003 and like many wide-eyed small-town folk who first move to a big city, the first thing I did after grabbing my luggage was take the train. Perhaps even more telling, though, was that I took the train for about 50 minutes just to get to a friend who drove me to his apartment which the train couldn’t get to. My love-hate relationship with Atlanta public transit started right then and there: I, a non-motoring graduate student trying to live within his means. Atlanta, an area where the incorporated city’s population constitutes roughly 8% of its metro census population, but with a transit system with far less branches than that of Boston, New York, or Chicago.

Fast forward to tomorrow, the state of Georgia will cast its vote on the T-SPLOST initiative, a one-cent sales tax proposal for which the funds would be dedicated to a variety of transit initatives. Early numbers don’t bode well that the tax will be approved by metro Atlanta voters. And indeed, while the entire state will be affected by results regardless, for me, it’s really just another chapter in a troubled history of transit development in the city of Atlanta.

Fellow GSU doctoral alum Miriam Konrad navigated this turbulent history in her dissertation-turned-book Transporting Atlanta: The Mode of Mobility under Construction, which divides the historical discourse on Atlanta transit into three areas: growth, green and equity. I find it pretty telling that the green element is largely being downplayed in the public arena. It’s as though the TPLOST supporters merely accepted that this subject is wasted on detractors who presumably don’t care about the environment. But moreover, it’s perhaps taken for granted that potential supporters will simply accept that this would improve the environment on its face. Indeed, the city’s most visible advocates for public transit, CFPT, are all over the new map angle but their website is presently downplaying the “green” talk.

Most interesting of all, however, is how the other two arenas of discourse, growth and equity, seem to constantly run against each other during Atlanta’s entire history.

I view Atlanta as a microcosm for a schism in American circles between a socially conservative bent towards quiet rural life and the repeated result of the pursuit of neoliberal ends: the growth of the city. After all, isn’t it somewhat inevitable that corporate growth leads eventually to, well, a city? And in order for cities to run reasonably well, you can’t have EVERYONE on the road or else it takes forever to get to work.

This is also why not all of the opposition to T-SPLOST is conservative: the Sierra Club, for example, doesn’t share CFPT’s outlook and opposes this initative on the grounds that it’s weighted towards more roads instead of more buses and rails. The liberal critique of the current Atlanta commuter culture is that most people want a quicker ride to work, but not enough people are taking into consideration that less people ought to be driving to work to begin with.

An entirely separate issue surrounding T-SPLOST is the Atlanta’s racially charged history. It’s no secret that northern metro areas of Atlanta continually resist the expansion of MARTA, and this issue is continually charged by racial politics. Supporters of light rail transit allege that resistance to rail initatives are merely extensions of “white flight” designed to turn the city “too busy to hate” into the city “too busy moving to hate.” That would take an entirely different analysis in and of itself.

But what seems fait accompli is the mode of mobility, as discussed by Konrad. If you take Sierra’s opinion, it really doesn’t matter in the long-term whether or not T-SPLOST succeeds, that mode was, is and is destined to be the car (or at the very least, the road). I guess Atlanta’s future graduate students will still have that long tour of bloated traffic to look forward to.