A Brief, Polite Throat-Clearing (Ahem) on the Subject of the Recently Departed Charlie Wilson

We liked Charlie Wilson as much as the next Texan, probably for most of the same reasons. It’s unlikely that a rough-hewn sort such as Wilson, who would have had difficulty finding himself a sponsor for a deaconship in the First Baptist Church, could get elected to high public office in Texas these days, although Wilson, once in, was the sort of Democrat who could have been re-elected in perpetuity, health permitting. Wilson did a lot for veterans but the greatest thing he did was helping to create the Big Thicket National Preserve (a project, of course, that required, and requires, many other hands). There was no Tom Hanks movie on that effort, nor will there be.

There is, however, one item on Wilson’s CV that gives us pause, and that is the matter for which he will be best-remembered, thanks to the Hanks movie and the George Crile book on which it was based. For some reason, a congressman’s engineering of a covert CIA-backed war with taxpayer dollars and without public sanction is considered a grand, praiseworthy endeavor, blindly celebrated, or so it would seem, in most of the obituaries we saw in the Texas media. (Here’s an otherwise very good and highly literate one from Channel 13’s Ted Oberg, in which the “charm” of Houston socialite Joanne Herring and Wilson’s ability “to secretly appropriate $500 million in U.S. tax dollars” are credited with having helped the Afghan rebels send the Soviets packing. The New York Times story on Wilson’s passing set the figure for U.S. support at “$750 million a year” throughout the 1980s.) This is the sort of notion that offends the proud isolationist in us and makes the little William Jennings Bryan inside (you’ve got one, too, although maybe you haven’t gotten in touch with him) want to roll up his sleeves, take to a lectern and began declaiming in an overwrought, Frederic March-like lather. True, this particular intervention did not require the expenditure of American blood, only tax dollars, and we suppose upending the Soviets to inadvertently pave the way for the Taliban might have seemed like the right thing to do, at least for a while, even though things didn’t work out so well for us taxpayers on down the road.

We did not read the well-regarded book on which the movie was based, but the film, if we remember correctly, did take note of the unintended consequences of Charlie Wilson’s War, which we won’t bother to enumerate here, aside from mention of Bush’s Obama’s continuing war in Afghanistan. One local station, Channel 11, also referenced the aftermath of that secret war, even hauling out Herring––who appears to have supplied her own creamy-dreamy backdrop for her interviews with both 11 and 13––to provide this shrugging acknowledgement of the vagaries of history: “You can’t predict future wars.”

As William Jennings Bryan could have told her.*

*If he hadn’t died four years before her birth (!?!).

Hunger Artists

No matter what the calendar says, summer is here, and with it arrives a whole host of vexations—plagues of mosquitoes, ticks and fleas, brain-frying and lawn-toasting mid-afternoon heat, astronomical electric bills, the start of another hurricane season. And oh yeah: this is usually about the time we totally lose interest in the Astros, unless they put together eight or nine straight before the break. Even then, we might not pay attention again until they’re a lock for the playoffs.

Then there’s another small annoyance, one of which you may only be faintly aware but which nonetheless arrives each year roundabout this time: a news story or editorial or op-ed piece suggesting that there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of HUNGRY CHILDREN in Houston, apparently malnourished to the brink of starvation. Summer appears to be a particularly acute time for "hunger," according to the monolithic social services-media infrastructure, because so many kids aren’t going over to their neighborhood schools to grab the two free meals the government makes available each weekday. You read it and maybe start to feel bad, then you walk or ride down almost any street in town and never see a kid who looks anywhere near emaciated; in fact, about every third kid (rough estimate) you run across looks to be ranging somewhere between grossly and morbidly obese (big, big problemo amongst your Hispanic—’scuse me, Latino—youth [check it out]). You yell at the kid to go run some laps or do some push-ups—men push-ups—but of course he can’t hear you ‘cause he’s zoned in on his MP3 player. Come to think of it, you never really hear about any actual “hungry” or “malnourished” child, with a real face and real name, unless he or she is the victim of severe parental abuse.

And you go hmm ...

Most of the media hand-wringings in Houston over the “hungry child” emanate, in some fashion, from an outfit with the ominous-sounding name Children at Risk, whose stock-in-trade appears to be ensuring that Houston is thought of—by Houstonians and outsiders alike—as a veritable hellhole for God’s innocents. Its solution to almost any “problem” it supposedly uncovers or spotlights is more, more, more expenditures of taxpayer funds. We don’t believe Children at Risk has ever cited “bad parenting” as at least an itsy-bitsy reason why some children may be “at risk” (although thousands and thousands and thousands of resilient Houston children actually survive that particular risk, daily).

Children at Risk is a non-profit think tank and advocacy group that’s been around since 1989 and has some fairly influential child health-and-welfare types on its board (its Web site also lists a couple of fairly influential media outlets as “collaborators”—check it out!). What we know about Children at Risk we’ve cobbled together from a few things we’ve heard over the years—nothing bad—and from the organization’s Web site. We don’t believe we’ve ever heard or seen any sort of an explanation in the local media of what Children at Risk is about and who funds it, beyond a description of the outfit as a “non-profit that focuses on children’s issues” or something equally as vague and meaningless. And this is the identifier that usually accompanies some extravagant claim or another that Children at Risk is making regarding the quality of the schools or all those “hungry children.” We figure the media take note of the name—Children at Risk—and automatically toss out their critical and evaluative faculties (which are not in large supply to begin with) and go with the flow. After all, how can you even question something that’s supposedly good for the children? Somebody might call you a Nazi or something, make you feel bad for being an actual journalist instead of a publicist masquerading as a journalist.

The latest eyebrow-raising epistle from Children at Risk appeared on the opinion page of Sunday’s Houston Chronicle in a somewhat disjointed piece authored by Robert Sanborn, the organization’s president and CEO, and headlined “Feed the hungry children right in our midst; Up to half of young here don’t get enough to eat.” Sanborn’s commentary does not reflect the second assertion of the headline—pretty much par for the course these days at the city’s leading daily newspaper—because nowhere in it does he actually make that statement. What he does say is this:

Contrary to popular belief and maybe a surprise to those of us wearing social blinders, poverty and hunger are far-reaching and widespread problems within the United States. This is especially true in the greater Houston area. Approximately 48 percent of Harris County children live in families with an income of $22,050 or less for a family of four. What is even more difficult to fathom is that here in Houston we are leaving dollars on the table by not fully taking advantage of federal money available to us to feed our hungry children. I, for one, want to see my tax dollars being fully utilized, especially if they were approved to help hungry children.

So it appears that Sanborn isn't connecting the dots on the imaginary grid by actually claiming that all these children in $22,050 households “don’t get enough to eat” or are “hungry.” Which is a good thing, because that would be patently, blatantly untrue (if difficult to quantify). What he is doing is unclear, except for reminding readers (and donors) that Children at Risk is on the case. Most of the rest of Sanborn’s piece is given over to recounting, in numbing detail, all the public and private resources devoted to providing free grub to Houston youngsters, except that they’re not enough and we need to get more, more, more kids to participate.

We’ll let you read the rest yourself, if you’re so inclined. In the meantime, we know you’re busy--possibly hungry for a salty snack--so we won’t draw down much more of your valuable but limited attention bandwidth. But before we go we’d like to make a couple of more points, in appropriately disjointed fashion, before somebody calls us a Nazi (but we voted for Obama, man!):

1. THERE ARE HUNGRY CHILDREN IN HOUSTON. This is a fact of which we are aware. But there aren't anywhere near the number the hunger artists would have you believe, and more often than not this is a temporary (but not good, of course) situation caused by poor parenting, or, more likely, by parental drug abuse or mental illness (the second cause growing from the first). And some parents just can’t get off their behinds or arrange to get their kids up to the school to get their free breakfasts and lunches in the summer—these meals usually provide ample daily caloric intake, although they generally are neither “tasty” nor “nutritious”—and instead turn the kids loose with giant sodas and a big bag of X-treme HOT CHIPS, the crap that just contributes to the further addling of young addled minds. (We’ll refrain from going off on the parents who drive the new Expeditions and F-250s to drop their kids off at school to procure their government-subsidized victuals—happens more than you’d think, mi amigo.) We definitely don’t believe the sins of the parents should fall on the children, especially the young ones, but we wonder what exactly Children at Risk proposes: Perhaps that each “at risk” child be assigned his or her own personal social worker to chauffeur them to and from school during the summertime so he or she can avail himself or herself of the free meals? HISD is offering the free food at 200 locations—seems like one might even be with in walking distance for most children. And lots of 'em could stand the exercise.

2. SINCE WHEN DID SOCIETY BEGIN DEFINING DOWN “HUNGER” AS “MISSING BREAKFAST”? Yes, we know, it’s best to eat a balanced breakfast, especially for young children, for all the reasons that Sanborn lists in his commentary, but does going without breakfast actually equate to “going hungry,” or, as Sanborn puts it in cutting-edge social-service jargon, “food insecurity?” Isn’t such a loose construction a real affront to people who fight against actual, documented “hunger” in Africa, Asia and parts of Latin America? Who’s to say that children who are eligible but aren’t partaking of the government-funded breakfast aren’t being fed? Maybe—and this is had to fathom, we know—their parents are feeding them (even hot chips-and-soda is something, although not as good for firing up the brain cells as the black coffee-and-a-cigarette breakfasts on which we subsisted for years). Diligent, attentive parents in a family of four making $22,050 annually can provide for their or her or his kids and do fulfill the first responsibility of parenting, which is to make sure their kids are fed and secure (and pass the TAKS!). And so:

3. HUNGER AMONG CHILDREN IS NOT “WIDESPREAD” IN HOUSTON. It’s just not, period. And when you cry wolf for so long, people tend to ignore or discount what you say and will continue to do so if you ever stumble across a real "problem."

Go ahead and call us a Nazi, if you wish, but now we must reattach our blinders and rest.

When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Appears

From "Freeing a Mentor from His Mythology," on the relationship between still-breathing Steve Earle and long-gone Townes Van Zandt, by Anthony DeCurtis, in the Sunday New York Times:

To all but a handful of his closest friends Van Zandt was a remote, elusive figure, apt to disappear and turn up with equal unpredictability. As mentor to Mr. Earle he was hardly a steady, guiding hand, and he was much too stoic to dispense sage advice about songwriting or anything else. The premise of their relationship was something like, if I didn’t think you were good enough to do it yourself, you wouldn’t be here. He did, however, recommend that Mr. Earle always put the top back on the bottle so that the alcohol wouldn’t spill when it inevitably got kicked over and, when injecting drugs, to use clean needles every time.

He also instructed Mr. Earle to read “War and Peace,” though Van Zandt had not read the book himself, as Mr. Earle discovered to his surprise when he dutifully returned with questions about it. “I just thought you should,” Van Zandt idly told him.

Bullshit-Sniffing Media Hounds Finally Bark (Make That Hound, Singular)

The Chronicle’s Lisa Gray had a good---dare we say hard-hitting---follow-up Sunday on the arrest of the 59-year-old art teacher at Roberts Elementary last month after a drug-sniffing dog deployed by the Houston school district purportedly got a whiff of contraband in the woman’s car (a column that presumably led to this news story in Wednesday’s newspaper). A subsequent tossing of the teacher’s vehicle allegedly turned up two entire tablets of Xanax, and she could not produce a prescription for their use. (These pills---what us knowledgeable on-the-street types refer to as “bars”---are about as long as a thumbnail and maybe a fifth as wide.) This major victory in the War on Drugs was attended by a clutch of police patrol cars and at least one helicopter from a local TV news outfit---y’know, the whole Rice University-area neighborhood around Roberts was hoppin’, like the SWAT team had cornered an armed murder suspect in a backyard.

As Gray reported, the woman is a dedicated educator loved by students and parents, and the Roberts community has rallied behind her. From what we understand the teacher in no way appeared impaired in the classroom when the dope hound allegedly sniffed out the non-prescribed pharmaceuticals in her vehicle (while its human handlers up and down the line, from the superintendent and trustees to the cop who held the leash, figuratively relieved themselves all over the 4^th Amendment*) and initially was so unperturbed she was willing just to hand over her keys because she was reluctant to leave the class she was conducting.

Her arrest came as the school district continued its superintendent-ordered “sweep” of unattended vehicles in its campus parking lots, an overwrought reaction to the hysteria over a supposed widespread drug problem among school district employees that was vigorously fanned by the local media (we noticed that Channel 11, our default television news provider, had posted on its Web site an action-packed “raw feed” of the teacher’s departure from the courtroom after her first appearance before a judge last month.) The numbers say otherwise: according to the Chronicle’s count, 15 district employees had been arrested this school year prior to the sweep, and we believe that maybe three have been snagged since. Almost 30,000 people work for the district, more than 12,000 of them teachers. We’re way too high to do the arithmetic, and we never passed a TAKS exam, but we’d wager that the minuscule percentage of employees arrested (never mind actually convicted) is much lower than what would result if, say, one of the local TV stations turned a dope-sniffing dog loose in its employee parking lot.

It’s not like the drug-sniffing dog racket is an infallible science, either. We’d be interested in knowing how many “false positives” the district has notched---that is, when the pooch zeroes in on a vehicle and the owner consents to a search that turns up nothing. We were told of one school where the dog lit on four vehicles. A small amount of marijuana was turned up in one belonging to a staff employee, but nothing was found in the other three. Yet the owners of those vehicles were summoned out of their classes and subjected to unnecessary humiliation, not to mention a few moments of bowel-loosening dread.

Something worse than temporary humiliation hangs over the Roberts teacher, but in most respects she’s luckier than the average district employee who’s been pinched. She’s white (no doubt much to the relief of district higher-ups---no racial profiling by the drug-sniffing dog!) and has a top-notch defense lawyer and the support of an affluent and influential group of parents. In other words, she has the wherewithal to get her story out in the media, and that can't hurt. We’re pretty sure most of these advantages are not available to the kitchen worker at school district headquarters arrested on the first day of the sweep.


*Happens everyday, so who cares, right?

A Few Questions (and Sundry Points) about the Bellaire Police Shooting of Robert Tolan

These come from a sidebar to a comprehensive story headlined “Bellaire police under fire after shooting” by Charlotte Aguilar in the Jan. 7 edition of the weekly Bellaire Examiner. We’ve annotated them a bit and shuffled their order:

1. What was the origin of the stolen vehicle report that led police to Tolan? As we’ve noted, the Examiner’s competitor, the weekly Village News, reported this week that a Bellaire officer “mistyped one numeral” when entering into his laptop the license plate of the Nissan Xtera in which Tolan and a companion were riding. This miscue, according to the Village News, resulted in a “return” showing that the plate was for “a black Nissan that was stolen.” The newspaper offered no attribution for this explanation and characterized the officer’s mistake as “defying the law of probability,” although we believe it just meant to say that the odds against such a coincidence---alleged coincidence---would be extremely high.

2. What was the substantiation procedure for vehicle ownership? It took the Examiner 48 seconds to run the plate and determine it was the Tolans’ SUV on an online data search that requires a log-in and password. See No. 1.

3. Had Tolan and his companion been searched? Did all officers know they were unarmed? Perhaps the most important question of all, if the explanation offered for No. 1 by the Village News turns out to be true and the sequence that led to Tolan and his cousin lying face-down under police gun in the Tolan family driveway actually was triggered by a bizarre 1-in-1000 (or whatever) miscue. It leads to the following question:

4. Why was deadly force used instead of a Taser, which is standard Bellaire police issue? (Maybe they’re a little gun-shy about pulling the Taser because off all the bad publicity, but a Tasering and subsequent hectoring of the cops by Quanell X certainly would have been preferable to the bullet in the liver that Robert Tolan received.)

5. Were police following procedure in how they allegedly handled Mrs. Tolan’s protest about the ownership of the vehicle? To break it down further, why did Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton, who according to police was responding as backup to a call on a stolen vehicle, push Marian Tolan against the family’s garage door after she tried to tell the officers that the residence was the family’s home and the Nissan indeed belonged to her son? We haven’t seen any report of exactly what Mrs. Tolan said or did but wasn’t it apparent to the cops that the woman had emerged from the house, belonged there, and might have had some important information about what was happening in her front yard? (Cotton’s handling of Mrs. Tolan caused Robert Tolan to attempt to rise up from the driveway, leading the officer to fire his gun at least three times, striking Tolan once. In its public statement the Bellaire Police Department described this sequence like this: “An altercation ensued as officers attempted to detain and question these suspects [Tolan and his cousin]."

6. What was the content of the call for backup, and how many officers were at the scene at the time of the shooting?

We have a couple of questions we'd like to add:

7. Were Bellaire police under pressure because of a perceived holiday crime wave in the general area? Both weekly papers carry stories on local crime (as community papers should) and routinely identify suspects by race, a practice that we favor (journalisticaly speaking). In fact, the play story in the Examiner’s Dec. 24 issue was headlined “Be merry but wary: crime on the increase.” The paper reported that “Bellaire recorded three armed robberies last week alone” (it did not identify the suspects in these crimes by race) and quoted Bellaire police community relations officer Joe Quimby saying “crime is definitely up.” Which in a roundabout way brings us to the final question:

8. Was Tolan a victim of racial profiling, as his family and its lawyers claim? More precisely, why, as the Village News reported, did officer J.W. Edwards see fit to employ “a tactic used frequently by police,” that is, checking the plate of Tolan’s vehicle, after he spotted the 23 year old and his cousin leaving a Jack-in-the-box near the Tolan’s family home? From out here in the grandstand it looks bad for Bellaire, but whatever the answer isn’t it likely that a benign form of racial profiling might have worked to the advantage of all concerned? If we may: According to the 2000 Census, there were 131 black residents of Bellaire, or 0.8 percent of the 15,600 or so population (the number probably hasn’t changed much since the Census). We’ll buy you a six-pack if there are more than 25 African-American homeowners in the 90-percent-white city-within-a-city. The Tolans have lived in their house since 1994. Sneer at community policing if you must, but wouldn’t a longtime cop who had patrolled the streets for years and knew the community at least have it in the back of his mind that---oh yeah---a black family lives on this block, and might have taken Mrs. Tolan more seriously (or respectfully)?

Just asking. We await the answers that should be provided by an unbiased entity with subpoena power.

"Floating in a Most Peculiar Way ... "

Just for the hell of it, the other day we imagined that because of too much of whatever we had fallen into a deep coma back in, say, 1978, and had recently awakened, not so tanned but well rested, to find that not only had the United States elected a black man---OK, a half-black man---to the presidency but that most of the once-luxuriant hair on top of our noggin had disappeared and what remained on the sides had turned a ghastly shade of brownish grey (Whoa! How'd that happen?) We figured, though, that we'd be able to incorporate these developments into our new waking reality without much trouble. We could even handle the news that the universe is actually expanding at an accelerated rate because of something called dark energy. But other developments ... well, we probably couldn't get our mind all the way around them, and we'd wind up thinking we'd really missed something:

1. The big three automakers---manufacturers of the Fords our parents drove throughout the 1950s before "moving up" to Chevrolets in the '60s and '70s and finally arriving at the Oldsmobiles of the '80s and '90s---are on the verge of collapse!

2. Al Franken, whom we last saw as a comedian on Saturday Night Live, has an outside shot of being elected to the U.S. Senate in a bitterly contested Minnesota election. Stranger yet, Austrian muscleman Arnold Schwarzeneggar is not only the governor of the nation's most populous state but is supposedly being seriously considered for a post in the half-black president's Cabinet.

3. Strangest of all, that twee song of David Bowie's from the early '70s, Space Oddity, which we always assumed was about, y'know, trippin' (in the dated sense of the term), is being used in a commercial for a Ford Motor Co. automotive product called a Lincoln MKS (as sung, apparently, by that kinda-creepy, sorta-attractive Cat Power chick).

We always figured we'd like to drop acid one more time* before we call it a day, maybe after we're firmly secured in the federally chartered Old Folks Compound in Navasota (projected grand opening: 2022), but we're thinking now that with things proceeding as they are, why bother?

*But only for medical science, of course, and under a doctor's supervision.