I reported for duty this morning. I paid attention to the instructions on the notice and arrived about fifteen minutes early. I did not wear jeans or sweatpants or a T-shirt with an offensive message. My hair was combed and my beard was trimmed. I was trying to look as juror-like as possible. I sat down next to a man wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that made reference to women and potato chips. When the court employee pressed play on the twenty year old instructional video I paid attention–enough so in fact to notice that the seventy-five year old bailiff in the video was the same guy working today. After the video, I sat quietly reading the reading material the instructions on the notice informed me I was allowed to bring with me (The Best Buddhist Writing, 2010). Finally, the bailiff from the video shuffled in and began mumbling unintelligibly the juror numbers for those who were to line up and proceed to the nearest courtroom. Halfway through the list, the bailiff turned and left the room, continuing to read the numbers to himself as he wandered down the hall. A few minutes later, a court clerk came in looking for the twenty-four jurors that were supposed to have followed the bailiff into the courtroom. After she had led us to the courtroom, she went in search of the bailiff.

Once in the courtroom, the “voi dere”–a process consisting of a series of questions intended to determine if any potential jurors might be unfit in some way to sit on the jury–began. In response to any juror’s affirmative answer to a question, the judge would repeat the same follow-up question: “Do you believe you can ignore those experiences and training and render a verdict based solely on the evidence presented in this case?” Every prospective juror faced with that question answered “yes.” This actually bothered me a lot.

One of the voi dere questions was whether or not any of the prospective jurors were doctors or nurses or had any formal medical training. Several said yes, but then agreed they could ignore their training and experience and render a verdict based solely on the evidence presented in the case. But what if some of the evidence presented was medically unsound? Say the prosecution presented what appeared to be a damning piece of medical evidence that could convict the accused, and say the defense did not adequately discredit that piece of evidence. Should a doctor on the jury, whose experience and training allows him to know the piece of medical evidence is unsound, base his judgment solely on the prosecution’s successful use of the evidence? After all, that is what he claimed under oath he could do during the voi dere.

After the voi dere was over, the attorneys from each side approached the bench and spoke for a few minutes with the judge. They called two prospective jurors to the bench and asked additional questions. After they had finished, they handed the court clerk a list of juror numbers acceptable to both sides to be seated for the trial. I was not one of them. As I was leaving the courtroom, though, I did notice the guy in the T-shirt and sweatpants was taking his place in the jury box. I think he was a doctor.

Recently, I’ve taken on the task of really cleaning up/out my home. This is less a spring cleaning than it is a mid-life cleansing. I’m not saying everything must go, but my daughter has had to twice walk back to the house after I carried the chair she was sitting in to the curb on trash day. Each time I’ve had the urge to carry her back to the curb. While the process of such a cleaning can be difficult for all the typical reasons—sentimental value attached to objects, the idea something may come in handy again someday, the fear an unidentifiable object is a vital piece to something else—I also have to deal with my tangential approach to life. Here is a typical sequence of digressions: I awake on a Saturday morning and put my damn shoes on (topic for another post) and decide on a large project. Today I am going to clear out that corner in the living room where I have been piling miscellaneous objects for which I can’t seem to find a proper home. As I’m sorting through the various objects I find both my toolbox and the file box where I keep recent bills, pay statements, etc. They are both covered in dust, so I decide to carry them to the kitchen and wipe them off. Now that they are clean I figure I should sort through the bills on my desk and file them in the now clean file box. While I’m at it, I can round up the various screwdrivers and wrenches that are scattered around the house and toss them in the toolbox. As I’m working on my desk and organizing the bills I plan to file in the box I wiped off after finding it in the corner of the room I started to clean, I realize I’ve got five or six books cluttering up the desk. So I decide to put the books on my bookshelf in my bedroom. My bookshelf is a mess. As I’m working on my bookshelf to make room for the books I found on my desk where I was organizing the bills I plan to file in the box I wiped off after finding it in the corner of the room I started to clean, I find a stack of CDs I never returned to the CD rack . The CD rack is disorganized. As I start to organize the CD rack so I can put away the CDs I found on the bookshelf where I plan to put the books I found on my desk where I planned to file my bills in the box I wiped off after finding it in the corner of the room I started to clean, I discover a coffee mug and a wine glass. I decide to carry those down to the kitchen. There I find my toolbox and remember I wanted to collect the various screwdrivers and wrenches that are scattered around the house. . .

Here I am left to die.
A lonely soldier am I.
The battle done,
The war lost or won,
But still the question why.

*

Bring to me tomorrow’s dreams
With each day of summer.
With the soft cool breeze
And the bright green leaves
Fill my heart with desire.
As the sun’s bright rays touch the earth
May I be filled with hope’s rebirth,
And may the fires burn within me
Throughout all the days of summer.
But eternal life does summer lack
As do tomorrow’s dreams.
Until, with a saddened cry,
As summers die,
My dreams blow in the breeze.
As do the fallen autumn leaves.

*

Foolish men are always waiting
For their ship that’s coming in.
And as the sun is slowly setting,
They know they’ll have to wait again.

Wise men are always sailing
Their ships so strong and straight,
Never going near the harbor
Where the foolish men all wait.

And there’s more that I still remember, but I won’t burden you (or me) with them. A few thoughts on these poems, though, both on what works—albeit barely—and what doesn’t work: All of my subjects were always large or grand or in some way didactic. I was always tackling the big topics: war, love, hopes and dreams. And I was always addressing them in the most distant, non-specific ways possible. There isn’t a single specific, concrete detail in any of the pieces above. That is truly one of the hallmarks of bad poetry—the generic, vague approach. What does strike me, though, about those pieces is that although simple and poorly executed there is a sense of rhythm and wordplay. In a few cases I intentionally avoided the exact rhyme and went with what is called a slant rhyme: waiting/setting, breeze/leaves (barely). The final piece of the three employed what is called a “feminine ending” on the first and third line of each stanza. I didn’t know what it was called at the time, I just knew that I liked the sound of the descending rhythm those end words created. So yeah, there may have been an inkling in my mind about the neat things language can do.

A brief sidebar here on the subject of revision. I hated it in the early days, didn’t believe in it at all. I believed that however a poem came out in its first form was how it should remain, as if there was something mystical or “pure” about that initial outpouring from the brain onto the page. I see how foolish and immature that idea was when I recall a moment when I was going over one of my poems and realized that a different word would have been far better than the original one but I refused to change it purely on principle. I’m amazed to find that many young would-be poets come to writing poems with the same belief.

OK, back to the regular post, already in progress. My juvenilia period came to an abrupt end when in my early twenties I showed a couple of new pieces to a friend whose opinion I respected, and he mistook them for something I had written in my early teens. I was embarrassed and hurt, but determined to figure out why my sing-song verses to the grandest topics of the universe weren’t being taken seriously as the high art I expected they should be. I started by doing something I hadn’t even considered before—I began reading a lot of poetry. I had always read the old masters in some limited quantity—Shakespeare, Coleridge, Poe, but I had never read anything written after the turn of the twentieth century. Which means, yes, I had planned to blaze a new trail and become famous in a genre I literally knew nothing about.

And so my education began. And it’s still going on. My poems have matured in the last twenty years. I have an idea (what real artists might call their “vision”) of what I want to accomplish in my poems. I like to focus on specific objects and contemplate the event that led to them being in that exact location at that exact moment. For instance, I once stumbled upon an old pick-up truck in a field that had been overtaken by trees and underbrush. The driver’s side door was hanging open, as if the driver had stepped out of the truck thirty years prior and just walked away. From that came this:

Bankrupt

I have seen how, in the slow burn of summer,
a life of work and faith can rust away
in the high weeds and overhanging limbs
of an abandoned apple grove, how a name
can fade in the daily ascent of the sun, how one
enthusiastic blackberry vine can climb
across the cracked and rotting vinyl seat of a truck,
weave its way along the steering wheel,
and spill onto the dash, pressing itself against
the smoky glass for whatever light it can find.

I have seen the remains of a door dangling
from its failing hinges, left open by the last son
who stepped down from the cab and walked
in whichever direction was away, who walked
until the field, truck, and trees were no longer visible
and his boots had slapped awhile on the hot blacktop
of a country road, who finally stuck his thumb
into the face of a passing line of cars and caught
the first ride out of here.

The details are specific and the subject is narrow and focused. If this piece speaks to a broader topic, it is up to the reader to decide. The sounds and cadences throughout are less obvious than in my older stuff. (As that friend of mine said way back when, “Put them in your poem, not on it.”) But they are all intentional. The long “A” sound in name/fade/daily, the repetition in vine/vinyl, the alliteration of weave/way/wheel are all meant to be there. I don’t make step-by-step conscious decisions while writing, but I do now go back and replace words with better words. By the time I consider a poem to be complete every word has been contemplated and is justified in my mind. Revision has become my friend.

In closing, here are a few of the pieces I’ve written over the course of twenty years.

Void

There is a void the shape of you
I lie down to every night.
There is no other form that fills
that space. Some nights I turn
and wrap my arm around the emptiness,
and wake to the clutch of air
I’ve drawn against my chest.
I have borne this loss against my chest
Too many nights to count. A ghosted you
I’ve formed from hollow air
and placed it in its turn
against the tide of nights.
There, a shape against the emptiness,
it serves as empty form and fills
whatever space I cannot fill
with other forms. My chest,
which bears this weight of emptiness
too well, will learn that absence in its turn
is a weight too strong to bear. You,
the void that shapes and fills each night,
will remain in me more vital than the air.

*
Cleansing

Strike a match and set these fields ablaze.
Let them all burn, turn to ash, let the smoke
fill the sky until the sun fails for the first time
in months to touch the earth. Run black-footed,
soot-faced, to the choked throat of the dry river –
to where the rotting flesh of catfish and carp
is soaked in the thick buzz of fat black flies.
Uproot the dead that line the bank, break off
low the ones that won’t let go, and throw
them over the brink. Set these, too, on fire.
Then head north, or west, past the expanding band
of scorched air, until you reach a place
where no one Goddamns the sky or ground
for what it has done, or what it has failed to do.

*

Perspective

A hundred miles north of here, a woman
filled with forty weeks of expectation
will rupture on her bathroom floor.

Two boys will jump for the open door
of a westbound train. One will fall
short and under. And you will stand

beneath the imposing dome
of an early summer thunderstorm,
flick a lit cigarette into the rain

where it will hiss in the wet grass,
and then die.

Anyway, someone asked me recently if I planned to ever return to my poetry related posts, which I used to do on a regular basis. She recalled a poem I had introduced her to called “What The Living Do” by Marie Howe. She said that it still haunts her. She’s not the only one. It’s a gripping poem. The sort I could never read in a group setting because my voice would crack and the tears that inevitably well in my eyes each time I read it would blur my vision. No matter that, actually, because I have the poem pretty much committed to memory. I do that for a very fundamental reason—commit poems to memory. When I’m on the bus, or waiting for the bus, or lying awake in bed unable to sleep, or doing dishes, I often recite my favorite poems under my breath. Some people have mistaken my murmuring for prayer, which in a sense it is. My kids have long since learned to ignore me when they hear me mumbling off in some corner of the house, just out of earshot. But they’ve also learned that when I speak loudly enough for them to hear it is because I want them to hear, and they kindly stop what they’re doing and listen. They think they are humoring me. They often exchange knowing glances before going back to whatever occupied their minds before the interruption, completely unaware I have altered their lives in some small, subtle way. In the grand scheme of things it may be one of the more important things I do for my kids.

And, so it seems, I’ve managed to do the same thing for some other people, too. That’s cool. My greatest hope in life is to write a poem someday that haunts a reader years later, that in some small subtle way alters their life forever. But until then—optimistically assuming it will happen—I am almost just as happy to introduce them to poems that I love and to learn years later that those poems still have meaning for them. It makes indulging my passion for poetry a little less self-indulgent.

So, back to the poem that started this post in motion—“What The Living Do.” It is the title poem in a book Marie Howe wrote in the wake of her brother’s death to AIDS. What makes this poem, and the entire book for that matter, so powerful is that Howe’s grief never turns to self-pity or to sentimentality. The poem remains stark in its treatment of the subject, not allowing ornamentation or adornment to get in the way of the sharp, raw emotion. Howe’s handling of the subject reminds me of something another poet, Eavan Boland, says in a poem of her own that addresses a deeply emotional subject:

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Make no mistake: Howe’s poem is a love poem, in that it is a poem born of and steeped in her deep love for her brother. But it does not turn to the gauzy language of love, the sentimental heart-string plucking vocabulary and imagery poets pull out when they need to beg for an emotional response their poem cannot elicit on its own terms. There is no place here for that stuff.

What The Living Do
By Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

So says one of the people in the trailer for the educational documentary, “Race to Nowhere.” It’s a striking comment in that it focuses on four things our current educational policy couldn’t care less about: happy, motivated, creative, and the person. As much as our politicians and special interest talking heads jabber on and on about our children and their future, the last thing in the world they actually care about is the kids themselves—each individual human being who is, more often than not, negatively affected by our current system of education. What do they care about? Numbers in columns, statistics, rankings. What will it take to move from 11th to 10th in some comparison chart? In horse racing, you whip the horse harder to move up. In education rankings, you whip the kids harder. That drop-out rates are increasing, that suicide rates are increasing, that kids are literally buckling under the pressure is irrelevant because such things are not reflected in the bottom line. Sure, kids are unhappy. Sure, they’re doing three and five hours of homework a night. Sure, they’re learning to hate school and to hate learning more than anything else. But hey, it’s for their own good. And by “their own good” we mean it makes us look better in news reports and magazine articles. I’m reminded of the famous quote from the Vietnam War: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” We seem to be convinced that it is necessary to destroy our kids in order to save them.

Our kids walk into kindergarten, or pre-K, or even pre-pre-K now, with wide eyes and big smiles and a heart full of excitement, and our first order of business is to beat that out of them, to turn them into small compliant machines whose sole purpose is to sit quietly and receive whatever small dose of information is to be provided that day. And then to come back the next day and do it again, and then the next day, and the next. Motivation is not only unnecessary, it is discouraged, because motivation tends to lead to exploration and inquiry, which do not fit well with the scripted lessons most classes are forced to rigidly follow. Same, too, with creativity, which might lead kids to think on their own and make connections not officially sanctioned by the government mandated lesson plans. A group of students excited about a lesson and wanting to follow the train of thought in a particular direction must be reigned in and redirected to the proper path. The reason they must be so narrowly directed is so commonly repeated now that the sinister implications have been removed from the phase, “This is going to be on the test.” The inference is clear: nothing is more important than sticking to the script, to complying with the government mandate. Exploration and discovery and inquiry have no place in education. The purpose of schooling is not to expand a student’s desire to learn more, to expand his ability to seek knowledge, or to promote critical thinking, but to perform a small handful of very specific tasks on test taking day. And the only way to properly prepare students for such a task is to force them to comply with a very rigid lesson plan. Consider that education expert Jonathan Kozol was once fired from a teaching position for reading to his fourth grade students poems that were not on the approved list for fourth graders. These were not dirty limericks, but Robert Frost and Langston Hughes. When “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” becomes enough of a danger to fourth grade students to fire the teacher, something is terribly wrong.

And what about being happy? We have no room for motivation or creativity, but can we tolerate happiness in our children’s education? Most certainly not. Homework is piled on at increasing rates, with individual teachers assigning hours of homework without regard to what other teachers are assigning to the same student. The notion is that this is necessary to produce the test scores required to move up one or two places in the rankings. Just whip the kids a little harder and we’re sure to go a little faster, a little farther. One girl in the “Race To Nowhere” trailer says, “I can’t really remember the last time I had a chance to go in the backyard and just run around.” Another says, “I would spend six hours a night on my homework.” Six hours? After seven or eight hours in school? Thirteen to fourteen hours a day, five days a week, plus, no doubt, weekend work, too. Child labor laws outlawed such hours in our factories a century ago. But here we condone such abuse in our schools under the guise of education. Does it really matter that more and more of our kids are less and less happy every year? Apparently not. The happiness of our children is secondary (if it ranks that high) to good test scores and impressive rankings. What are a few suicides compared to glowing remarks in US News and World Report. Although having “a chance to go in the backyard and just run around” may be vital to that young girl’s emotional wellbeing, that time is seen as wasted because whatever she does out there in the backyard won’t be on the test.

This is the system we’ve created and that we continue to develop. Children come to school with an innate desire to learn, to explore, and we destroy that early on with too rigid lessons, too time consuming and frivolous homework assignments, and high-stakes tests at increasingly early ages. We suppress their creativity for the sake of convenience and efficiency and because it is easier to measure progress along a narrow path. Allowing students to explore what interests them may be better from a purely educational perspective, but you can’t build a standardized test around such diverse interests. And you can’t easily compile statistics and rankings without the standardized tests. Without the latitude to study topics of interest, kids quickly lose their motivation to learn. Assignments become chores instead of explorations and discoveries. Kids complete assignments and projects because they have to, not because they want to. Recess is cancelled and replaced with more work. Art and music classes are cut and replaced with more classes focusing on the narrow test-driven curriculum. And the kids get less and less happy, more and more disinterested in learning anything at all, and the overall system slips further and further into decline. And the stock answer is to whip the kids harder and harder.

The problem is not that our educational system isn’t whipping the kids hard enough, but that it is whipping them at all. And so the solution isn’t to continue to whip them harder, although that is what is being done every time some reform-minded politician demands to raise the bar higher, or to make the standards tougher, or to impose stiffer punishments for failure. We need to lose the sweatshop approach to education. The educational system is not a factory where our children are forced to work for twelve years, producing statistics and numbers and test scores of a particular style and quality. But as long as we see the product of education as numbers and statistics and rankings in reports, and not as happy, motivated and creative people, we’re going to continue to make the same mistakes we’ve been making.

So today, I was driving to Safeway around Wakefield Circle in the light mist that has replaced the heavier rains from earlier this morning. And walking around the circle was a young couple pushing a stroller. They appeared to be out for a stroll, not walking to somewhere they had to be. The woman was pushing the stroller and the man was holding an umbrella over all three of them. Only the umbrella wasn’t quite big enough to cover all of them, so the man had tilted it to cover the mother and child, leaving himself exposed to the light rain. And he looked happy, walking with his small family on a lazy Sunday morning, being rained on. She may not acknowledge that small gesture, may not even consciously recognize it, but somewhere deep inside, where the subconscious accounting of the small things occurs, it will register.

. . .

So yesterday was September 11. It seemed pretty low-key to me. My club soccer team won its opening game 3-1 amid a sea of other games going on at the soccer complex. I picked up some peanut butter and Quaker oats (shameless product placement) amid a sea of shoppers. In other words, normal life occurred. Which is a good thing. There were remembrances and solemn ceremonies, to be sure. But there were no religious zealots burning the sacred texts of their enemies (who, by the direct command of their own god, they should be showing love toward anyway). And while there were rival protests in New York over the placement of an Islamic center, the nation in general did not cheapen the date by turning it into a religious or political rallying point. That our streets were filled more with grocery shoppers than Quran burners on this specific date speaks to an important quality that distinguishes us from others: we are less swayed by hatred and anger than others are. That is caused in part by our diversity. As a nation, there is no singular quality that 100% of our citizens share, save for being American. And because of that, it is more difficult to rally us all behind a singular cause, especially one borne of hatred against another group. This is because that, despite all the rhetoric about how intolerant Americans are, we all know people from every other group and so our opinions are tempered by our own personal experiences and relationships with those people. It is a lot harder for me to be convinced that all Muslims are radical extremists when I work with several Muslims and not once has any of them attempted to kill me or burn my house down or blow up the building we work in. I have no statistics to prove it, but I would hazard to guess that the United States is the most heterogeneous society on the planet, and that alone may be our most enduring quality.

. . .

There has been a very big and exciting and—as of right now—untrue rumor going around Southern Maryland, which will remain completely nameless on my blog (and comments referring directly to it will be removed, too, so don’t bother). There is no reason for me to speak to the specifics of the rumor because it is less about this particular one and more about the nature of rumors in general that I am interested in. In this particular instance, I heard the rumor from multiple sources within a few days—from a local bartender, from two coworkers who live in Charles County, from a county government employee, from a local real estate agent. The one place, however, that I did not hear about the rumor from was the internet. I participate regularly on only one blog and I read one or two more, and none of those blogs picked up the story. It actually seemed odd to me that the blogs were silent on the issue. And so it came as a surprise to me when the individual affected by the rumor announced publicly during a radio interview that it was the local blogs that had fanned the flames of this particular rumor. The victim of what appears to be a vicious lie by some yet to be discovered enemy chose to defend himself by issuing his own vicious lie against a blog he sees as his enemy, a blog that has been critical of his actions in the past. It is sheer hypocrisy to rail against the underhanded tactics of others while engaging in those same tactics. Does he think he can heal the wound he has suffered by wounding others? Is his best defense against these claims a misguided and baseless attack on those uninvolved in the controversy? Or does he see this as an opportunity to discredit an otherwise credible source? Whatever his motives, it stinks. If he wishes to disprove the ugly claims against him, let him do it through the honest and honorable effort of proving the claims wrong, not by trying to attack the integrity of others. In doing what he is doing he is simply reinforcing and strengthening the process by which these sorts of rumors can occur.

Commissioner President – Candice Quinn Kelly

Because I cannot vote in the Democratic primary, I will have to wait for the general election to vote for my choice in this race. And I feel pretty confident I will get that opportunity. I’ve known Candice for about twelve years or so through my involvement on a few different HOA boards. We’ve had to deal directly with each other on numerous issues throughout the years, including a few in which we held opposing positions. In all of our interactions she never once failed to behave in a professional manner toward me, even when I was being more emotional than professional. HOA matters can get quite heated and I’ve seen her handle even the most difficult situations with composure. I’ve heard all the “Candy” stories and all I can say in response to those stories is I’ve never seen Candice behave that way. Does she have the temperament necessary for the position? I believe she does.

Also, I place a lot of value on a person’s ability to be thoughtful, to have a firm grasp on the complexities of a particular issue. It is not just enough to be able to articulate your position on certain issues, you must have a clearly defined position to start with. That comes from a broad understanding of the issues. One must have both clarity of speech and clarity of mind. In watching Candice during her previous time on the board, dealing with her directly in meetings, and reading her positions on some of the key issues facing the county today, I have no doubt she possesses both.

District One – Ken Robinson

Again, this is a candidate I will not be able to vote for until the general election, but once he has cleared the primary he easily has my vote. Ken is media and public relations savvy, I’ll give him that. His is probably the best run campaign in the county. But behind the well-oiled machine is a lot of substance to back it up. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with Ken only two or three times (he probably wouldn’t recognize me if I knocked him down on the street), but I have followed most of his conversations on the Delusional Duck blog, and I’ve read all of his position papers. The fact he has position papers indicates the amount of effort he has already put into the job he is seeking. Anyone can churn out a couple five or six word slogans; it takes a little more time and effort to develop a position paper. As a voter, I’m far more concerned with the hows and whys than I am with the whats. A candidate can tell me he is for any particular issue—say smaller government or better schools—but I want to know why he is for it (proves to me he has a reason for his position and isn’t just parroting the stance of the day), and how he plans to achieve it. Ken, thus far, has given me that.

I’m also impressed with Ken’s level of energy and involvement. There seem to have been few, if any, key events that Ken hasn’t attended. As someone once told me, if you want to know who is emotionally committed to a project, schedule a meeting at 5:00 PM on a Friday and see who attends. Consistently, Ken has been attending the 5:00 PM Friday meetings. And from his discussions on Delusional Duck this is the same approach he brought to his tenure as president of the Swan Point HOA.

Speaking of the Duck, the fact Ken has been consistently a participant there and has made himself available to all, including his detractors, indicates he isn’t afraid to face the public and be open in his actions as a commissioner. In a time when the board seems to become more insular by the minute, a truly open and accessible commissioner becomes more and more critical.

District Two – Rick Campbell

Finally, someone I can vote for in the primary! I’ve had the chance to sit down with Rick a few times in the last year and discuss several different issues. To be honest, Rick and I disagree on a few points, but I have to say I respect Rick for the process by which he has come to his conclusions. There hasn’t been a single topic I’ve heard Rick speak to that he hasn’t done his homework on. His are not positions of convenience or affiliation, even when they align, but positions of careful thought and consideration. He, too, participates on Delusional Duck and I have always been impressed with his breadth of knowledge on certain issues. He has reported numerous times from meetings I didn’t know were occurring that were being held by groups and commissions I didn’t know existed. His efforts in support of his community have been tireless.

One should want for their representative a person whose interest in the community predates and exceeds their candidacy for elected office. I’d be suspicious of any individual who suddenly began to care about the issues only after deciding to run for office. No candidate has convinced me more of his motivations for running for office than Rick has. He leans into his discussions on the issues. His eyes practically light up as he asserts his position on something. This man doesn’t just have his head in the game; he has his heart in the game, too. When talking with Rick, I can’t help but get excited about things I’ve never even heard of until then. That sort of passion and enthusiasm is sorely needed on a board that has collectively appeared to be catatonic at times.

Board of Education – Jennifer Abell

I’ve only known Jennifer personally for about a year and a half now, but I’ve heard her name repeated for years—Jennifer Abell was the only one who listened to us. Jennifer Abell was the only one who seemed to care about what we thought. Jennifer Abell was the only one who took the time to meet with us. And on and on. One of the complaints against the board of commissioners has been how detached they are from the people, how they do everything in lock-step, moving as a single body instead of as a group of independent thinkers serving together on the board. You haven’t heard those arguments made quite as much when talking about the BOE, but I think they apply. I’ve sat in BOE meetings where members have actually said that they think the board should be more united, should present a more uniform public face, that dissent among the ranks weakens the board’s position. The problem with that mentality is that board members are not elected to come to consensus, to be unified, to move as one, but to represent the best interests of the public. And if that requires dissent and debate, then that is what the public deserves.

It is one thing to oppose the majority just for the sake of causing waves. Fortunately, I’ve never seen Jennifer take a stance for such a reason. Even in instances where I disagreed with her position, I respected the fact she held that position for the right reasons. Hers has always been a position of openness and transparency. Her blog, which was met not just with consternation by the rest of the board, but with attempts at reprisal and punishment, has proven to be a valuable educational resource. Where other board members continue (and prefer) to hold the public at arm’s length, Jennifer has not been afraid to throw herself to the wolves (so to speak). Again, that sort of accessibility is uncommon and needed.

So, there you have it folks. Four races, four candidates. I’m not expecting you to agree with my choices, or even to agree with my assessments of these candidates. You have your pre-existing notions and biases just as I have mine. Your opinions and views are just as clouded by your own personal experiences as mine are. As the ad says, your mileage may vary.

Beer, not unlike wine, trends with the seasons, with lighter beers being more appropriate for spring and summer, and darker beers for autumn and winter. Where summer might call for a crisp, minerally sauvignon blanc, it would also call for a crisp wheat beer with coriander and lemon zest. Think Blue Moon or Shock Top. As the season turns colder and the wine drinker reaches for a fuller bodied red wine, so too does the beer drinker reach for a fuller bodied, darker beer. My tastes tend toward red wines and toward darker beers. As much as I can enjoy a good pale ale or hefeweizen they cannot compete with a porter or a stout. And so I look forward to the leaves changing color and to the temperatures slowly dropping because it means I get to brew one of my favorite styles of beer.

To oversimplify the magic that is beer, there are two basic and competing flavor profiles in just about all beers—malt and hops. The malt provides the sweet base and the hops a counterbalancing bitterness. In spring and summer beers the hops often take center stage, providing that necessary thirst-quenching tartness and snap—descriptors often include “piney” or resinous, citrusy, spicy. But in autumn and winter beers, the hops are reduced to a supporting role and it is the malt flavor that dominates. Terms often used when describing a malty beer range from caramel to chocolate to buttered toast or biscuit to toffee and so on. (Really, how can you not like a beer that promises buttered toast and toffee in its flavor profile?)

Because winter is cold and you need to build a decent fire to ward off the chill, winter beers tend to have a higher alcohol content than summer beers do. A common unofficial style of beer is the “winter warmer,” which technically can be one of several dark beer styles but with an alcohol content in the 7% range and higher (compare that to the 4.2% to 5% of the typical nearly colorless and flavorless macrobrew). It is not uncommon for barley wines, wee heavies, and anything starting with “Imperial” to reach double digits in alcohol content.

And so with those terribly oversimplified guidelines in mind—heavy on the malt and restrained on the hops, elevated alcohol content—I’ve decided on a modified Scottish ale recipe for my upcoming brew day. I am modifying it to push it into what would be better described as a “strong Scotch ale.”

The basic recipe comes from a book called “The Brewmaster’s Bible,” and is dubbed “Pole-Tossin’ Scottish Export.” What I like about this recipe is it calls for a couple less than typical ingredients. There is 8 ounces of brown sugar going into the initial boil (caramel and toffee anyone?) and 2 ounces of oak chips going into the fermenter. The estimated ABV (alcohol by volume) is lower than what I’m shooting for (4% – 5%), so I’m going to bump up the ingredients a little to try for around 7%. The result should be a moderately “big” beer—medium to heavy mouthfeel, distinctly caramel with a touch of roastiness in both the aroma and the flavor. For reference, the BJCP (the arbiter of such things) says, among other things, this about the Strong Scotch Ale style of beer:

“Deeply malty, with caramel often apparent. Peaty, earthy and/or smoky secondary aromas may also be present, adding complexity . . . Hints of roasted malt or smoky flavor may be present, as may some nutty character, all of which may last into the finish . . . Medium-full to full-bodied, with some versions (but not all) having a thick, chewy viscosity.”

One of the great things about homebrewed beer is that it is “bottle conditioned,” meaning that the yeast is still active in the bottle and a low level of fermentation is continuing. That process is where the carbonation comes from in a bottle of homebrew. It also means that the beer is continuing to mature as it sits in the bottle, not unlike a bottle of wine. While a homebrewed beer may be ready to drink in a few weeks, it is typically far better after a month or two. Higher alcohol beers benefit from even longer times in the bottle, and so a 7% beer will be better after four months than it will be after four weeks. Which means that if I want to enjoy this beer on my birthday (January 8 ) I’d better get brewing.

The problem we are faced with is our education system is full of holes. For me to address any number of them would probably require I write a book, and I’m far too ADD to write an entire book on a single subject. Hell, I’ll probably check two or three blogs, get updated baseball scores, and prepare my grocery list while knocking out this one post (the Braves are down 2-1 to the Reds in the top of the 8th, btw). So let me concentrate on one of the things I think is wrong in the way we approach education in America today: We have chosen to narrow its focus to one of economic value. We speak in very strict terms of how we have to “prepare students for a global economy,” or how we are under increasing pressure to compete with this country or that country (typically Japan). We increasingly refer to the whole educational process in market terms—products, management, returns, investments, etc. In doing so we are creating a myopic view of what education—and I mean specifically primary and secondary education, not college—means, and what kids should be learning. There is an unbalanced focus on an increasingly narrow range of topics, driven by standardized tests that focus only on those topics, much to the detriment of all other possible topics of instruction. It is as if we believe that turning out an entire generation of kids who can do calculus but know nothing of history or geography is a good thing . . . economically speaking of course.

“The best reason to give a child a good school . . . is so that child will have a happy childhood, and not so that it will help IBM compete with Sony . . . There is something ethically embarrassing about resting a national agenda on the basis of sheer greed.” –Jonathan Kozol

Now, by “happy childhood” I don’t think Kozol means video games and Mountain Dew and someone else mowing the lawn, but I can still hear the gnashing of teeth by all the hardliners out there who believe our kids have it way too easy already and can all be straightened out by nothing more than an old-fashioned ass kicking. The fact that kids today have far more rigorous schooling standards and far more homework (and at an earlier age to boot) than any of us did is of little importance to these folks. BTW: the subject of more and more homework is another hole in our sinking boat, but I’ll save that one for another post. (Still 2-1 Reds in the top of the 9th)

We’ve grown enamored with the idea that school is the best place to prepare children for the disappointments and brutality of “real life.” May as well beat in them at an early age that the world sucks and they are going to get the short end of the stick most of the time. Four hours of nightly homework simply instills in them the notion of overtime, while all the pressure to compete with each other for the highest grades and the best test scores prepares them for the competitive environment of the marketplace. The problem with both those notions (and the dozens I’m not mentioning) is they again presuppose the only purpose for an education is to be good little economic engines and productive little tax generators. That neither additional homework (again, another post, I swear) nor an excessively competitive focus may be the best environment for learning is subordinate to the underlying message being taught—this is how it is in middle management, and in sales, and on the showroom floor; learn to get used to it now. In doing so we’re admitting that the primary purpose of school is not education, but indoctrination.

The overall structure of compulsory schooling was established over a century ago to prepare generation after generation of school children for an industrial application—show up at the same place at the same time every day, stay for a prescribed number of hours, and do exactly as the boss (teacher) tells you. Perfectly designed for Ford’s assembly lines, and Carnegie’s steel mills. But even then the students were receiving a fairly broad-based “liberal arts” education. Now that we’ve moved into a more technology based economy we’re simply restructuring the educational assembly line to produce a slightly different product that is more suited for the industry’s current needs. And, apparently, the industry doesn’t need workers who know anything about history, or geography, or art and music, or much in the way of science. (damn Braves lost 2-1 to the Reds) As investing goes, there’s not much return on your money in those subjects. To apply another economic term to education, we’re looking for the best bang for our buck. Second graders playing kickball on a playground has far less potential economic return than does an hour of reviewing vocabulary words most likely to be found on the latest state exam. A project covering the history, culture, and geography of a particular country pays fewer dividends than does a daily dose of practice math problems.

The problem with this approach, however, is that it is producing terribly unbalanced individuals. Jonathan Kozal, in his book “The Shame of the Nation,” talks about an incident that occurred with a group of fifth and sixth grade students from P.S. 65 in New York City who, during an interview with him, were confused over the differences between cities, states, and countries. They wanted to know if Massachusetts, where Kozal is from, was part of New York. When he said it was a different state, the children were confused. Two of the children thought the country they live in was “The Bronx.” Kozal goes on the say these kids had the same disconnect with history and time (did Martin Luther King live before or after the Civil War?) He ends by saying,

“Leaving these kids so utterly adrift in time and place seemed like an act of state-determined cognitive decapitation.”

Cognitive decapitation. That really sums it up. Because the view of the purpose of education has become restrictively narrow, so has the definition of what constitutes a good education become restrictively narrow. Is it any wonder our kids are developing the intellectual equivalent of scurvy, considering how we’ve greatly reduced or completely eliminated entire subjects of instruction? Regardless of how good they look in a report, or how well they stack up against a comparison with other countries, math and reading scores alone do not define a good education. Our kids are quickly becoming one trick ponies as we continue to obsess over beating Japan or India or New Caledonia (does it matter that more and more kids can’t find those places on a map?) in the latest surveys. What does Kozal mean by a “happy childhood”? (thought I wasn’t going to answer that, didn’t you?) I think he means a full childhood, a rich childhood, a childhood with the widest possible base of experiences and explorations, a balanced childhood. As long as we continue to couch education—especially elementary school education—in terms of economic development and competition our kids are going to be the ones getting short-changed in the end.

So, what do I find interesting this week? The election season is beginning to heat up in my little backwater community of Southern Maryland. Strange goings on as the president of our county commissioners suddenly resigned a few days ago effective immediately. He couldn’t have made it any more immediately had he delivered the announcement out of the window of his car as he drove out the Charles County government building parking lot. The vice president of the county commissioners did her best Alexander Haig “I’m in charge now” impression, going so far as to hold a poorly executed “press conference” to a room filled to capacity with empty chairs. OK, that’s not fair. There was what appeared to be a maintenance worker in the room, along with a young couple who looked like they had gotten side tracked on their way to the justice of the peace, and a lady who wandered in thinking it was a taping of a new episode of Judge Judy.

In other political news, approximately two thirds of the county has filed to run for the Board of Education. In a rare happening, we now have more candidates for the board than we have students passing the HSAs from any given high school. If choice in a democracy is healthy, our current slate of BOE candidates is the Jack LaLanne of the democratic process. I think if I were to vote for the seven seats strictly in alphabetical order I wouldn’t even get out of the “C”s on the ballot. I’m not sure if the large number of filings is the result of unhappiness with the current board’s decisions or that it was recently revealed that school superintendent James Richmond holds monthly hot tub work sessions in his home.

So yeah, the local political scene is as exciting as I’ve seen it in a long time. The direction the board of commissioners goes in will be significantly different depending on who gets elected. That excites me. The unfortunate truth is that in any given election one’s choices are typically between two nearly identical shades of gray. The battles lines are frequently drawn along insignificant details within the same policies. When candidate A and candidate B are offering me nearly identical visions of the future I’m left with no choice but to vote for the one most likely to be caught in a scandal involving Asian porn stars.

Fortunately, this year we’ve got major differences between the incumbents and their opposing candidates. And on large scale long term issues, to boot. Major highway projects, zoning variances and overlays, economic development—this is the meat and potatoes of county governance, and it is all on the table this year. I’ve got very specific ideas of how I would like to see these major issues handled, and there is a clear enough delineation between candidates on these issues to make my choices on who I will vote for easy. I have been known to flip a coin in the past to help me decide on a candidate. No such game of chance needed this time. The difference between Candice Quinn Kelly and Edith Patterson, and Ken Robinson and Sam Graves –two sets of primary races on the Democrat side of the election—is night and day. It’s not often that I pay such close attention to our local races. And it is unfortunate that it took four years of what I perceive as very poor governance to bring the county to this. But I’m happy to see such diversity of views and visions laid out before the people on the ballot. I almost wish I was a Democrat just so I could vote in the primary. Sorry, got carried away there for a minute . . .