This is my back deck. The actual measurement is 20 inches.

Some of the trees are having a hard time coping.

And our maple hadn’t gotten around to losing its leaves yet. It will probably lose some branches instead.

Another tree has lost its leaves and the snow on the branches is simply stunning.

Make a little birdhouse in your soul:

Even the trucks were having a tough time:

But the real trouble was that my minivan was parked in the driveway. It’s tall. I’m short. It was not fun to clear off.

Every Sunday morning we go to brunch in Denver. There are lots of great spots and we sort of rotate between them. Today we were going to see if we could get into the new Snooze location at Colorado & 7th. We’ve tried a couple of times before, but with no luck. See, the way Sunday brunch works most places in Denver is that things don’t start to pack up until 9:30 or 10:00. If you’re there before then the wait won’t be too bad.

Except for Snooze. We keep trying earlier and earlier and the lines keep getting longer and longer. Damned early-rising bastards. So today we got up earlier and arrived by 8:45…to find a 45-minute line ahead of us.

Since we were hungry we agreed that we’d head over to Racine’s and next week we’d get to Snooze by around 6:00 pm Saturday night so we could camp out and maybe beat the rush.

So, as our saga begins, it’s 8:45, I’m hungry and already a tad annoyed.

We hop in the car and head west down 8th toward the Governor’s Park neighborhood, where Racine’s is located. As we pass Cheeseman Park (if you don’t know Denver, hold on – a map is on the way) we notice lots of people in running attire with official numbers. Angela says “looks like a race – I wonder if today is the marathon?”

Can’t be, I say. A couple of the people I see couldn’t drive 26 miles without their hearts exploding. Running it would be out of the question. But there are lots and lots of people, and as we cruise by we see that there is, in fact, some kind of very organized race event under way. Hmmm.

Shortly thereafter traffic begins stacking up. And Angela remembers that she did see something on the news, after all – this is the day of the Denver Marathon, and while we haven’t seen the race map, it looks like we’ve wandered into the thick of things. Wonderful.

At Josephine we’re forced to detour, and I’m thinking no sweat, I’ll just buzz through the neighborhood, get around the traffic, and we’ll be at Racine’s in a couple of minutes.

Woops. I try to head west on 9th but it seems they’ve turned the runners south, so I’m dead-ended. Dammit. All right, fine, I’ll hang a left and work my way down to 7th. Nuh-uh. Streets are closed to the south – can’t get across 8th, and from the intersection we can see that they have the runners heading back east along 7th. What the fuck?

It’s right about now that I’m starting to think about the time my trash can disappeared. There are malevolent and contrary forces in the universe, and it sucks when it’s your turn to entertain them.

Right about now Angela checks her watch and says “you know, by the time we get back to Snooze it will be about 45 minutes since we put our names on the list.” Which is funny, of course. No big deal, she says – it’s a beautiful day, we love driving around Denver and we love this neighborhood. Fine. So we loop around to head back east, the way we came from.

Son. Of. A. Bitch! We can’t go east on 8th, obviously, because it’s one-way to the west, and 9th dead-ends at the park. I’m not going to panic just yet, but I’m getting an uneasy feeling about this whole scene.

Well, hell – I guess we can work our way back to the north, catch 14th east and go the long way around.

But…PIGFUCKERS!! They’re running them down 13th! (I do some calculations in my head, and of course, there’s no way they can get from Cheeseman, heading west, to running south on Logan without closing us off to the north somewhere. I should have realized this by now.)

How in the hell did they do this? You can’t go west, you can’t go east, you can’t go south and you can’t go north, either! I mean, there are only four options, people, and since we somehow or another got into the middle of the damned course, there has to be a way out.

By now I’m beginning to get a little irritated. I roll up to the blocked intersection at 13th, where a cop is manning the barricades. He is sympathetic. Sympathetic, but not helpful. He allows as to how I could maybe swing back around thataway and get outside of the course. Somehow. I remind him (he’s working the damned race – shouldn’t he know this already?) that we’ve tried that already. His next best idea is that we can wait a half-hour or however long until all the runners get past.

As I back slowly away, looking for a place to turn around, I eye the officer and the slow stream of runners. I think about those stories where people plow into crowds. I gun my engine. Few things are less intimidating than gunning a Honda Civic, though. I sigh, soaking in my helplessness.

So, how in the hell did I find myself in the midst of the most effective mousetrap in the entire goddamned history or traffic engineering? The course map (this is the part that’s relevant to our current discussion) illustrates:

Notice the blue arrow bottom right. That’s 8th, the one-way path into the trap. The red X at Race St.? That’s more or less the point of no return. The red dashes are street closings. The purple is the race course. Now imagine that you’re in a car proceeding westbound along 8th and that you pass Race without any warning as to what lies ahead. How do you get out?

That’s right, bitches – YOU DON’T!!!

Let me state here that I have never worked on the logistics for a marathon. I’ve never mapped out a marathon course. I’m sure this is a complex process and I acknowledge, without reservation, that there are probably very few people alive who know less about this subject than I do.

That said, what the hell were these fucking rocket surgeons thinking?! A semi-housebroken monkey could look at this map and realize that, hey, maybe we didn’t think this through all the way. Never mind the fact that lots of people live in the area and may need to, you know, go somewhere. But is it a great idea to funnel lots of traffic into an area where the only means of escape is through a goddamned race course?! If I were designing the course, this is precisely what I’d do if I hated runners, drivers, the residents of Cheeseman Park and anybody else dumbass enough to assume that you can get there from here. The only thing missing was Ashton Kutcher and a camera crew.

The asshats could at least have put a sign along 8th letting us know that we were driving into the sumbitching Bermuda Triangle! (Note: If there was, in fact, such a sign, I apologize for the previous insult. Let me instead offer this: The asshats could at least have not hidden the sign letting us know that we were driving into the sumbitching Bermuda Triangle behind a goddamned tree!

[deep breath]

We eventually gave up, found a parking place and walked the several blocks to Racine’s, where we had a lovely brunch. (I had the breakfast burrito, which I heartily recommend to anyone fortunate enough to make it to the restaurant.) Along the way, we learned that there was, in fact, a way out. If you continued down 8th and sat in the line long enough (I’m guessing 45 minutes, maybe?) they were letting a car or two through at Logan whenever there was a break in the line of runners. In the defense of the race planners, we saw at least two cars escape the trap.

If whoever planned this event ever decides to get out of the marathon logistics business, I hope they go to work designing prisons. Or roach motels. As it stands right now, their gift is being wasted.

This lake and I go way back, back to when I abandoned my Catholicism in favor of a neo-paganism of my own creation. It helped me find myself and a new spirituality in a period of my life when so many things were changing that it felt like the best I could do is hang on. And I feel that it was this lake that saved my life one very, very strange night in a strange town in central Pennsylvania.

I feel a spiritual connection to this lake, like I can feel its presence with me when I concentrate.

When I arrived at the lake, though, I discovered something that saddens me. Eight years ago the lake looked like liquid glass it was so pristine and clear. But yesterday it was green.

Algae hasn’t grown in my high alpine lake. The temperatures stay too cold and there’s not enough nutrients in the surrounding terrain for algae to grow thick enough to turn the water green. But Rocky Mountain National Park is one of the most heavily visited parks in the United States because it’s so close to Denver. In 2008, it was the 7th most visited park, with almost 2.8 million visitors. For comparison, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone saw 4.4 million and 3.1 million visitors, respectively, in 2008. All those cars emit pollution that contains nitrogen oxides, and the rain washes all that extra nitrogen into the streams and lakes in and around the park.

But as polluting as all those cars are, they’re not the only source of nitrogen that the park has to deal with. Winds from the Denver metropolitan area sweep up into the park where rain and snow drop the nitrogen into the ecosystem.

All that nitrogen isn’t just turning alpine lakes green, it’s also changing the alpine tundra ecosystem, replacing native tundra plants with cold-tolerant grasses that previously couldn’t survive in the nitrogen poor soils above treeline.

But the extra nitrogen is only part of it. Something else that affects water quality in alpine lakes is warming temperatures, and the temperatures have been rising. This is especially true of winter temperatures. Greening alpine lakes isn’t the most obvious evidence of this change – that would be the large-scale killing of evergreen trees due to a pine beetle infestation.

Thankfully, the changes needed to clean up my high alpine lake are the very same changes that the global climate needs to address climate disruption. Less nitrogen pollution from industry and transportation. Fewer carbon emissions from all energy sources. Less ozone. Less sulfur dioxide. And conveniently enough, all of those things help not just alpine lakes, but also public health in general. Ozone triggers asthma attacks. Nitrogen oxides create choking smog. Sulfur dioxide makes acid rain. And lowered carbon emission, applied globally, will keep the health effects of climate disruption from becomming even worse (tropical diseases in temperate areas, fatal heat waves, more intense precipitation causing more deaths from injury, and so on).

I hope my lake will return to being liquid glass again, but it will take concerted action by people living along the Colorado Front Range. First and foremost it’ll take mass transit and the abandonment of coal, both for electricity and industry. At the moment, Denver is building a large mass transit system that will help greatly, but only if it’s finished, and finishing it will take more money than voters originally approved. But while the coal power plants that power the city are all old enough that they could be replaced, replacing the plants with cleaner sources of electricity will be much more expensive than upgrading without federal legislation enacting a price on carbon.

I’ve known about the transit and energy changes along the Front Range for at least a decade, and I’ve written about the science underlying the broader, global trends for years now. I’ve voted in support of the changes over at least six election cycles even though doing so occasionally put my employment at risk indirectly. But most of the time I was voting and writing on environmental and climate changes that were largely impersonal.

Earlier this week I discovered that it had become a bit more personal for me.

Part three of a series.

In the days following the murders at Columbine High School I visited the school and the grounds of Clement Park. Those walks produced this piece, which was originally published ten years ago today.

We have learned a great deal about the  events that took place at Columbine since  this essay was written (for instance, we now know that the  “Cassie Said Yes” story never actually happened,  and we also know that the whole “Trenchcoat Mafia”  thing was also a media-propagated fiction). But it seemed to me that going back  and revising to account for new information would damage the  fabric of what I wrote in late April and early May of 1999.  I have therefore elected to leave the factual inaccuracies  in place. I do, however, note the spots containing errors with an asterisk (*).

Salon.com and Westword.com provide as thorough and accurate  a picture as we are ever likely to have of the shootings and  the aftermath, and I recommend them highly.

_________________

Sunday, May 2, 1999

It won’t stop raining, and nobody seems to care.

I went to Columbine twice this week. On Wednesday I was simply overwhelmed – I have never seen anything like the rambling memorial site that has spread across the grounds of the high school and the adjacent Clement Park, never imagined anything like it. There was no sense of scale, of proportion – there exists no frame of reference with which to make sense of this deluge of grief. But I feel compelled to try describing what I saw, the pain, the small expressions of faith for the future, this physical manifestation of a community’s psychic anguish. So I returned yesterday, Saturday, hoping vainly for perspective where none appears possible.

As you turn east off Wadsworth and drive down Bowles the park and school grounds lie to your right. The park features picnic space and fields for football, lacrosse, soccer, and softball. Fields for small children to run and play in. Fields to watch the sun set behind the Front Range of the Rockies just a few unobstructed miles to the west. Whatever permanent monument they eventually erect here will never reflect how thoroughly and ironically public Clement Park has become. We sometimes lament how our nation has lost all sense of itself as a community, has forgotten what it is to have a town square, a shared space that symbolizes the communal spirit.

Well, here it is.

At the west end of the park, beside an athletic field, there’s a small latticework shrine featuring a lacrosse helmet and two crossed sticks mounted over a bucket of flowers. On one side there’s a small laminated sign with a prayer that reads, in part, “Dear God, we have been abused and it has wounded our souls. Our memories and thoughts, Dear Lord, are full of horror and we are powerless to heal them.” The other sign reads, “When God would educate a mans (sic) and compels him to learn better lessons he sends him to school to the necessities rather than the graces that by knowing all suffering he may know also the eternal consolation.”

Just west of the site where Vice President Gore laid a bouquet last Sunday is a tent dominated by a tribute to Cassie Bernall, the young woman whom the gunman asked,”Do you believe in God?” with information about how to contribute to the Cassie Bernall Fund rest on a table.* Notes, posters, and banners offer condolences and solidarity from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Marin County, California, and an elementary school in Wallace, North Carolina.

A major memorial has grown up around the flowers Gore placed, and a tent has been erected to protect the site from the elements. Inside lies a carpet of flowers – bouquets, formal arrangements, loose cuts, potted; a profusion of handmade cards, posters, placards, most handwritten and decorated, but few displaying anything like professional art or design skills and none that I saw were store-bought; a large poster from the people of Southern Oregon, who last year at Thurston High School came to know firsthand the pain we in Colorado are now grappling with; in front of this stands a silver and blue football goalpost – the crossbar is hung with a mobile featuring strings of paper angels; several stuffed animals, mostly teddy bears; balloons – some with sympathy messages, others in bouquets of blue and white; candles – some plain and some bearing Christian imagery; a blue baseball cap with a red and white cross; crosses, and more crosses. These artifacts – flowers, cards, posters, crosses, and hundreds, if not thousands, of stuffed animals, mostly teddy bears – make up the bulk of what people have brought and left at Columbine.

As you walk the hundred yards or so to the central memorial area the trees by the sidewalk are wrapped with blue and silver ribbons and some are draped with paper prayer chains. These were put here by a school district somewhere in the Midwest, and each link was made by a different student. Originally at least one chain hung from each tree, but to preserve them against the weather most have now been moved inside a tent down the street. Most of the trees in the park are wrapped with blue ribbons at the least; many have flowers laid beneath them and other remembrances hung from their branches. On one hangs a blue rabbit’s foot.

Just before you reach the main memorial area there’s a light blue wooden A-frame shrine about four feet tall and six feet wide dedicated to Cassie Bernall. It bears pictures of her and handwritten messages, as well as balloons and flowers. On the ground at one end is a one foot by one foot black board lettered in gold calligraphy: “I promise that from this day forth I will do everything in my power to insure that such a thing as this will never happen again. I will change my lifestyle and be more vocal and assertive in my beliefs.”

Some shrines are dedicated to all the dead, and others to individuals, these probably placed by the victim’s friends. As you turn into the central memorial area the first thing you come to is an elaborate tribute to Dave Sanders, the lone faculty member killed and a man who died trying to save student lives. This display features pictures of Sanders coaching, with his family, his players and students; two Columbine softball jerseys and a trophy; a pair of running shoes hangs from a tree; a soccer ball and a basketball lie loose among the flowers. The pile of flowers and stuffed animals threatens to swallow the whole display.

Some local residents went to Clement Park even as the tragedy was still unfolding and erected a series of lattices where people could place flowers. This spot has become the centerpiece of the memorial site, and eleven days later these lattices have been overtaken and literally buried beneath the artifacts of grief. I’m hard put to describe it, really. The central area around the lattices is probably thirty yards by fifteen, roughly oval. It’s bordered by row after row of displays, and if you didn’t know what you were looking at you might think yourself at some sort of carnival. Park officials have covered the ground here and in other heavy traffic areas with straw, adding to midway effect. More flowers, more teddy bears, more posters than you can possibly count, and more unconventional tributes stand in defiance of whatever hate drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to want to destroy an entire school and all those in it. A volleyball lies before a sign placed by Columbine alumni. Nearby a baseball rests amid the flowers. There are also American flags, although fewer than you might expect.

Seemingly every school in the Denver Metro area has placed a memorial of some sort – whether a simple posterboard project from a kindergarten class or something more elaborate from a neighboring/rival high school, it’s clear that this attack is being taken very personally by students no matter where they are.

There are condolences from beyond the metro area, too. In addition to the tributes from Oregon, North Carolina, Marin County, and Pennsylvania, people in many other places have sent their thoughts and prayers: besides condolences from cities across Colorado, there are tributes from Maui; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Lynchburg, Virginia; Allan, Texas; Gage, Oklahoma; Pace, Florida, and Palm Springs, California. A blue banner hangs between two trees: “Our thoughts and prayers are with you, from the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana.” A poster and letter have been sent from Belvidere High School in Illinois, where on April 21, 1967, a tornado struck the school, claiming the lives of 17 students. On the news yesterday morning they interviewed a woman who had flown here as an emissary from her church in Franklin, Tennessee. There are probably commemorations from other communities, as well – it’s easy to miss things here. I think my fellow Coloradans wouldn’t mind me speaking for them in saying thank you to the citizens of these communities.

Southeast of this area several sets of wind chimes hang from a tree, ringing in the rain and the light wind. The chimes are in the shapes of butterflies, doves, and a couple of birdhouses. A young man who looks to be in his late teens is wandering around handing out free flowers – I get a bouquet with carnations and columbines.

A sign that especially caught my attention was originally nestled in one corner, and it has now been moved under a tent near the street. On a white sheet folded in half, written in black magic marker, is a crudely drawn message that may be among the most important for a community trying to heal. In big letters: “Ours pains and sorrows for the victims of CHS.” In smaller letters across the bottom: “Not everyone who wears trench coats are killers.” Hanging just to the top and right of this sign is a print of Warner Sallman’s famous portrait of Jesus, beatifically looking toward Heaven.

You may have read in the papers or heard reporters on CNN talk about Rachel Scott’s car. But even knowing it was there, it still took me a few second to realize what I was seeing. When it became apparent that Scott might be a victim, her friends found her car in the parking lot and began placing flowers on it. Since then the red Acura has been buried beneath flowers, cards, teddy bears…. I only know it’s an Acura from news reports – you can’t really tell by looking at it. The driver’s side especially is almost completely covered by plastic. The passenger side isn’t quite so concealed, though, and I’m startled by the things we sometimes notice in times of overwhelming sorrow. Rachel needed new tires. The right front is almost bald. Another thing – lying on the bed of flowers by the driver’s-side door between three teddy bears is a loose dollar bill.

A few feet away John Tomlin’s truck, a brown-gold Chevy beater, has also become an altar. John liked to off-road in the truck – a popular diversion here in the high country – but now it’s hard to imagine it ever moving again. Vehicles are about as secular as objects get in our culture, but in the wake of this tragedy these two have been invested with a profound aura of consecration. Relocating them will seem like graverobbing.

Adjacent to this lot is the portable satellite dish farm where all the news outlets have their trucks and trailers and uplinks. The memorial area is braced on one end (the end nearest the school) by a few media tents, and one crew was preparing to tape as we walked past on Wednesday. A reporter for the Today Show was recording a segment a few feet away. Despite the presence of the implements of media, the area remains quite hushed. When people talk, they tend to whisper. They don’t look each other in the eye as they pass so much – if they’re like me, they don’t want to see their own numbness reflected back at them.

Still more remembrances have been placed closer to the school itself. The fences of the tennis complex, two sets of three or four adjacent courts each, have become walls of posters and banners. This is where the members of the San Jose Sharks, in town for their playoff series with the Avalanche, placed their banner on Friday – it’s about fifty feet long and is signed by literally thousands of fans: “To the community of Littleton, Colorado – Our hearts and our prayers are with you.” The Sharks are wearing CHS emblems on their helmets for this series.

Other signs are placed by individuals, by towns and schools, by a sorority from the University of Colorado. And here, a new symbol – there are hundreds of angels and thousands of bears, but hanging on the fence are two bears with angel wings. Another sign notes the connection between Columbine, Oklahoma City, Pearl, Paducah, Jonesboro and Springfield: “As the world watched our lives were forever changed.” On Saturday the baseball team from nearby Arvada West High School is out in full uniform touring the grounds.

Two Hills

If you watched the memorial service on CNN last Sunday you saw the hill in the distance where students were gathering. It’s actually two hills, and as you walk across the field toward them you pass several other shrines – one, at the corner of a recreation football/lacrosse field, is fairly large, maybe ten feet by fifteen, a growing mound of flowers and posters and bears. By Saturday it had been covered by a tent. Cards and tributes hang from trees. There’s a four-field softball complex between the main memorial area and the hills, and on the outside of one of the center field fences another teddy bear sits with two or three cards. A smaller bear, wearing a sweater, hangs on the fence, and there’s a piece of paper tucked under the sweater. I pull it out and unfold it. In blue and pink marker it simply says, “We care.” If you walk around a bit you find these small, private remembrances all over the place – here a loose bouquet of flowers lying in the grass with no explanation at all, there a card or a balloon or a bear, maybe indicating a mourner whose grief found no solace in the company of others.

As I approached the hills on Wednesday it was growing dark and beginning to rain. The skies have been heavy here almost continually since the shootings, but as oppressive as the weather has been there is a sense of rightness about it. On Saturday it rained all day, with temperatures in the 40s. There is only one safe path up the hill now, as the weather and the foot traffic have rendered most of the area treacherous with mud. The grounds crew has paved the main route up the lower hill with straw, and hundreds of people wait in line to view the hilltop memorial. Some make their way up by other paths, slipping and sliding, but enduring nonetheless. Some people take shelter beneath colorful umbrellas. Others, like me, expose themselves to the skies. I can’t speak for anybody else, but there is nothing here I want to shield myself from.

Several days ago fifteen crosses were erected along the ridge of the lower hill by a craftsman from Chicago. Each cross bore the name and picture of one of the dead – thirteen for the victims, and one for each of the killers. People wrote messages on each of the crosses, and many stress love and forgiveness. The message at the top of Klebold’s cross said, “God loved you.”

As you can imagine, the crosses dedicated to Harris and Klebold stood amid some controversy. The cover of Thursday’s Denver Rocky Mountain News featured a photo of two students tearfully facing off with a woman writing “a derogatory message on Dylan Klebold’s cross.” Whatever the woman wrote was conspicuously marked out, as well as whatever was written at the top of Eric Harris’ cross.

I walked from cross to cross, reading what I could in the fading light. As I paused before the monument to Isaiah Shoels, I thought about the irony of a kid who had fought to overcome so much adversity. He worked to overcome a heart condition and his small size (he was just 4′11″) because he wanted to play football, and his family reportedly transferred into the Columbine district because it represented a better and perhaps safer school environment. There he died because he was black and an athlete.* When I returned yesterday, I took a marker with me so I could write Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words on Isaiah’s cross: “I have a dream….” But the wood was so wet that the marker wouldn’t write on it. A man behind me, without even asking what I wanted to write, handed me his marker, which he said was waterproof and should work. But the soaked wood resisted this, too. I told myself I’d come back when the weather broke and try again.

I won’t get the chance. On Friday the father of Daniel Rohrbough and some relatives went to the hill and took down the crosses dedicated to Klebold and Harris. Mr. Rohrbough told reporters that it was a simple matter of right and wrong, that people coming to the hill wouldn’t realize they were honoring killers. “I don’t think any thinking person in this country is going to disagree with me,” he said.

Two small makeshift crosses were quickly erected in the place of the ones the Rohrbough family removed, and at the top of each was written “Start to forgive.”

Then, early this morning, the Chicago man who built and placed the 15 crosses originally came and took them all down. CNN captured them being loaded in the back of a pickup truck and driven away, with all the remembrances that had been hung on them still dangling from the crosspieces. He did not speak to reporters, and no reasons were given.

Thirteen seedlings have appeared on the far hill – the taller of the two – since Wednesday. A marker near the pinnacle reads: “These 13 burr oak trees have been planted on this hill as a memorial, one for each special person who had their life taken. I will pray for each family every day. – Scott.”

At the crest is yet another memorial site. At one end a variety of Christian ornamentation hangs from a crude wooden cross. I’m struck, as I have been for days, by how powerful a moment this tragedy has been for Christianity. A bit of context – I grew up Southern Baptist but left the church in my early 20s. I never rejected the lessons I learned growing up, but the institution of the church seemed to have nothing to do with morality or spirituality any more. Now I consider myself a neo-pagan, although that term is fairly broad as I use it, and a friend once listened to me for a few minutes and concluded that I was a “Jungian” pagan. I’m fortunate to have Christian friends and family who see through the trappings and accept the person underneath.

I offer this information only to explain why I feel somewhat left out by the healing process. The moral authority here has been usurped by Christianity – at the local level the churches have been the center of most gatherings, and nationally our Vice President shared the stage with the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the famous Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham. In the entirety of the memorial sprawl, which contains hundreds of thousands of individual expressions of mourning, I found precisely one overtly non-Christian religious symbol – a small Star of David on a sign placed by the Montessori School. There is another spot where I encounter sun and moon symbols often employed by neo-pagans. The largest sun ornament is attended by what I believe are Norse runes, but the symbols hang from a cross.

The Grief of Other Tribes

I don’t make these observations to diminish people’s faith – on the contrary, while I’m not a Christian, I have taken comfort in the fact that the community has a belief system which can be called on in a time of crisis to lend support and provide meaning.

But non-Christians are in pain, too, and as I faced the wooden cross on that hill Wednesday I wanted to offer some gesture in my own spiritual language, my own symbology. I was wearing my pentagram, a symbol which for pagans symbolizes the sanctity of the natural world and the human spirit (and which is all-too-often mis-associated with Satanism), and wanted more than anything to hang a symbol of my spirituality alongside those of the Christians in my community as a statement of unity.

But I feared the gesture would be misconstrued by many, if not most, visitors to the hill, and in such a time of pain I couldn’t imagine doing anything that would intrude upon the grieving of others. What if somebody mistakenly took it to be a Satanic cult mocking their sorrow? So I was forced to a compromise. I was also wearing a Celtic cross, an ancient pagan symbol often taken by Christians as reflecting their faith (since it’s a cross, after all), and I placed that on the wooden crosspiece amidst rosary beads, angels, and more crosses. The crosspiece itself is plastered with a bumpersticker reading “No Jesus No Peace, Know Jesus Know Peace.”

But a bridge has to be built between the normal and the marginalized. Christianity is our dominant religion, but there must be a space for those who find spiritual truth in other places, just as our schools must make room for kids who dress differently and don’t fit into the accepted idea of what normal is. On Saturday I decided to take a chance, and I hope my gesture can be accepted in the spirit it was intended. A small white board sits on the ground beside the “trench coat” sign I described earlier. I brought a marker with me, and I knelt in the mud and wrote this: “My tribe grieves with our Christian brothers and sisters. We may walk different paths, but we are all children of the divine. We love you.” I signed it with my online handle/craft name, Road Angel, and drew a small pentagram.

I can manage my own spirituality well enough, but can’t help noticing that even in the wake of a crime which resulted in at least small part from the failure of conventional society to respect those who are different, my own mode of expression was limited and prescribed by the dominant belief system. I thought back to whoever placed the sign saying that all people who wear trench coats aren’t killers – we praise individualism and tell our kids to be themselves, not to bow to peer pressure, to express their uniqueness, etc. But identity is negotiated, and self-image often fights a losing battle with the perceptions of the larger community. And now these children, these outcasts, must prepare to face people who are pledging to “be more vocal and assertive” about their beliefs.

I said earlier that there were shrines to individual victims, and the clear heroine of the tragedy, if number of tributes is a fair indicator, was Cassie Bernall. When the gunman asked, “Do you believe in God,” her affirmative reply was her death sentence, but it was also her entree into immortality in the Christian community. She died in what most Christians would see as the most noble way possible, as a martyr affirming God, and the Rev. Graham assured us Sunday that she was ushered directly into the presence of the Lord for her faith.

Cassie Bernall was indeed a heroine, even for those of us who don’t count ourselves as Christian, because these days we so rarely find somebody whose courage is genuine enough that they will die for their convictions. If I were faced with such a moment, I hope I’d have her bravery, but we never really know until the barrel rests against our heads, do we?

Again, however, there’s an element to the story that disturbs me. A major news outlet reported that for a time Cassie was involved with witchcraft and paganism (although what this means precisely is unclear). She was apparently locked in her room for a few days and was then sent by her parents to a Christian “boot-camp” where she rediscovered Jesus.

If this is an accurate accounting, then we have another dire example of the rage to conformity plaguing our culture. No matter how productive we might see the result as being, no matter how happy and loving Cassie Bernall turned out, the essential dynamic remains. The message is clear: we’ll do whatever we have to do to make sure our kids don’t become like those trenchcoat/goth/Satanic/loser/geek/punk outcasts. Different. Bad. We need to understand that the pressure that brought Cassie back to Christianity is the same pressure that drives other youths to less noble ends.

Are Our Arms Really Open?

When I started writing this I don’t think I had a point, but maybe I have come to one through remembering what I saw. If I have, this is it: in this time of pain and grieving, we have to insure that it never happens again, but perhaps our best-intentioned efforts are doomed to failure.

The community has been hit harder by these events than anything I have ever seen with my own eyes before, although tragedies of equal or greater magnitude happen somewhere in the world on a frighteningly routine basis. Before last Tuesday I was, like so many other residents of the Denver Metro area, somebody who lived here, but who wasn’t from here. I’m a North Carolinian by birth and have always considered myself a Southerner. But as I grappled to understand why this tragedy hurt me so deeply and so personally, I finally came to understand that somewhere along the way this has become home. I wasn’t an outsider looking in anymore – Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have torn my community.

So when I look at the imperative above – make sure it never happens again – I can’t help worrying that my community is missing something important. If the culture’s failure to accept differences in others contributed to this deathlust, as the killers said it did in their diaries, then how can we help being concerned when our community is uniting around messages and images of conformity instead of diversity? Somebody in a trench coat reached out with that sign – “Not everyone who wears trench coats are killers” – but I haven’t seen the community of normalcy reaching back. The media coverage and the church services (some of which were televised here) have celebrated the All-American and the Christian, and in doing so they provide a powerful balm to people in need. But the others – the outcasts, the trenchcoats, the goths, the geeks – all those who fail to fit the conventional ideal, they were ignored, or worse, scapegoated, and so an open wound in our culture continues to seep.

These kids probably don’t really want to join the church youth group. But how much good it might do if they knew that the church youth group wanted them, wanted them as they are, and was willing to love and accept the person beneath the black clothing, the person hiding behind the pale makeup, the person who isn’t very good at sports, the person who finds solace in dark and tortured music, the person whose most rewarding moments of personal acceptance come in the imaginary triumphs of his or her role-playing game characters. How much good it would do for them to know that they don’t have to buy several hundred dollars worth of Nike and Gap clothing to be validated as human beings.

And if you believe that church youth groups aren’t like that, I should explain that a large part of why I walked away from the Christian church was that all the youth groups I was associated with during the first twenty years of my life were even more cliquish and less tolerant of those who were different, new, or simply uncool than my high school was.

Time will tell. But in this issue we may have an answer to the question on everybody’s lips, a question you see repeated over and over in the cards and posters littering Clement Park: “Why?”

If Cassie Bernall becomes an icon whose memory stands for inclusion, we will have made her death and those of her classmates meaningful beyond measure, and we will at least know that their tragic passing was not in vain.

But if, in the aftermath of Columbine, we fail to understand and bridge the gulf between “normal” and “outcast” then we will be doomed to continue asking why as hate and rage and loathing lay their claim on other schools in other communities around our nation.

B&W photography by Heather Butler.

Previously

• The enduring lessons of Columbine
• Was Columbine the rule or the exception?
  

Part two in a series

How did it happen? Why did it happen? There’s simply no way to measure how many hours have devoted to these questions in the ten years and four days since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School, and while we don’t (and never will) have all the answers, we do have some of them. Obviously a good bit of the discussion focuses on the individuals themselves, and other analyses cast a broader net, examining the social factors that shaped the individuals. In a way, the question we’re still debating perhaps boils down to nature vs. nurture. Were Harris and Klebold Natural Born Killers? Or are they better understood as by-products of deeper social trends and dynamics?

The answer is probably “All of the above,” but we can’t simply check C and be on our merry, uncritical way. Checking C isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s the beginning.

Nurture

In the Winter 2000 issue of 49th Parallel, Nicholas Turse (then a doctoral candidate at Columbia), offered up an intriguing theory: that Harris and Klebold were, in some respect, the young radicals of their generation, the Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd of the New Millennium.

While these young boys may have no Port Huron statement, no manifesto, and no coordinated actions (that we know of), they are a legitimate radical faction that may have one-upped the violent Weather Underground and the revolutionary Abbie Hoffman. These boys have truly embraced “revolution for the hell of it,” maybe better than Abbie ever did. The randomness of their “non-campaign” may be the ultimate expression of “rage against the machine,” ripping into the system, as it were, at its most vulnerable and fundamental level, perhaps more so than Weatherman’s bombing of the U.S. Capitol.

While these school-age killers have no Vietnam War to protest, and may be criticized by former hippies for having no cause for which to fight, I contend that the struggle in which these boys are engaged may be as fundamentally important as ending the war in Vietnam (or imperialism, or racism, etc.) was to the hippies, Yippies, Diggers, and Panthers of the bygone era. These children, while they do not articulate the sentiment or may not even realize it, are fighting a system as insidious as the military-industrial complex was to their 1960s counterparts. They are fighting the American educational system and, by extension, the so-called American way of life.

I was invited to contribute a response. In my dissent, I suggested that

Turse seems both right and wrong. His suggestion that “kids killing kids may be the radical protest of our age” is most apt (especially given that our age has produced so little in the way of radical protest otherwise). Harris and Klebold represent a contemporary mode of resistance to the dehumanizing character of the American machine, and it is hard to imagine that thirty years from now we will have forgotten the names of those who burned the word “Columbine” into the collective consciousness.

However, instead of Hoffman and Rudd, it seemed to me that the Columbine killers owed more to

the likes of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, as well as to a larger body of neo-Luddites whose discontent with technological society finds voice in the writings of Kirkpatrick Sale, Sven Birkerts, and Mark Slouka. The public mind hasn’t yet put these things together, but I suspect a critical minority will do so eventually. While Harris and Klebold weren’t attacking the machine per se, it’s hard to argue that the monolithic educational infrastructure that helped spawn them is somehow unrelated to the trajectory of technological society generally.

The intent of the killers aside for a second, contemporary society makes it hard for young rebels to find a clear focus:

For starters, millennial culture deprives would-be rebels of both easy targets and productive means of resistance. In the sixties the enemy was easy enough to identify; seemingly all grievances found a handy focus in the Vietnam war effort or the Civil Rights movement, or some combination of both. Youth resistance found clear symbols of institutional evil against which to rally, and thus radical protest was relatively focused. The social and political structure of the era was given to a more or less one-front conflict, with the enemy over there and the rebels over here. The terms of engagement were clear, a fact that dictated and sanctioned certain forms of resistance and ruled out others.

Would-be radicals at the Millennium face a war being fought on a thousand fronts. There is arguably as much or more social evil for a young radical to oppose, but it is diffuse and sometimes intangible. Being ostracized by your high school’s mainstream is perhaps a distressing thing, especially if routine physical harassment by the football team is part of the bargain. When the school ignores the grievance it begins to take an institutional shape. Still, that is a dramatically different thing than seeing friends coming back from Southeast Asia in body bags or watching redneck police turning the dogs on young people who differ from you only in skin color.

Millennial radicals have less obvious targets, and correspondingly their rage finds no moral sanction. The lack of outlets for this anger undoubtedly makes the problem worse—the sixties radical could work these impulses out in a nonviolent fashion that found increasing acknowledgment by the press. Regardless of public reaction, at least they knew someone was listening, a condition that simply did not exist for those unhappy with their lot at Columbine.

Even now, with a decade of hindsight, it’s hard for me to tell how right or wrong I was. We’re in the midst of such dramatic political, economic and technosocial upheaval that I feel like I’m trying to sketch a tornado from inside it.

Others have questioned the role of political and economic factors in breeding the culture from which Harrises and Klebolds might spring, though. Just last week, David Sirota lamented that our national discourse, such as it is, hasn’t “yet matured past gun control and video games.”

In a country that ascribes hubristic “exceptionalism” to itself and berates self-analysis as “hating America,” we seek absolution via scapegoat, and so we upbraid bogeymen like firearms and Xboxes. Similarly, in a democracy increasingly conducting its politics through red-blue filters and 140-character Twitter updates, we crave Occam’s razors — and none are sharper than oversimplified arguments about gun control and video games.

But what about the questions and answers that aren’t so simple? For example, isn’t violence a predictable byproduct of our economy? When torture victims are waterboarded, they freak out. When a winner-take- all economy tortures society, should we be shocked that a few lunatics go over the edge?

For three decades, we converted our economy into one that enriches the rich and stresses out everyone else. Paychecks dwindled, debts accumulated, health-care bills spiked. We now spend more hours working or seeking work, and fewer hours on parenting and rest — all while schools and mental-health services deteriorate.

Sirota is asking important questions here, questions that take us far past “why did they do it?” The deeper question that we have to consider isn’t about the past, it’s about the future – what kind of world are we building and what effect would we reasonably expect it to have on those who grow up in it?There are children in our nation right now for whom the verdict is still out. Their futures have not been decided. If Sirota is right, and if I was right in my fifth prophecy for the 21st Century, some are going to be school shooters. What is happening in their homes right this minute that will make that outcome more or less likely, and what can we do to affect that equation?

Nature

On the other hand… Dave Cullen, who is probably the single best source of journalism on Columbine, characterizes Eric Harris as a stone-cold sociopath.

Harris, who conceived the attacks, was more than just troubled. He was, psychologists now say, a cold-blooded, predatory psychopath — a smart, charming liar with “a preposterously grand superiority complex, a revulsion for authority and an excruciating need for control,” Cullen writes.

Harris, a senior, read voraciously and got good grades when he tried, pleasing his teachers with dazzling prose — then writing in his journal about killing thousands.

“I referred to him — and I’m dating myself — as the Eddie Haskel of Columbine High School,” says Principal Frank DeAngelis, referring to the deceptively polite teen on the 1950s and ’60s sitcom Leave it to Beaver. “He was the type of kid who, when he was in front of adults, he’d tell you what you wanted to hear.”

When he wasn’t, he mixed napalm in the kitchen.

The picture that emerges from ten years of study suggests that perhaps the two killers were necessary elements in a toxic cocktail – a legitimately deranged sociopath in need of a follower and a weak-minded loser willing to be led. Would 4.10.99 have happened had they not found each other? And even given these facts, is there anything that could have been done – thinking back to Sirota’s reasoning above – that could have altered the outcome? Maybe not. And frankly, there’s no way to know, now or ever.

So what to do with the possibility that social context was irrelevant, that some people are born hard-wired for atrocity, that Harris was a genetically flawed Natural Born Killer.

Even if this is true, not all school shooters are Eric Harris. Disturbed, yes. Broken children all, and perhaps broken for different reasons. We still lack enough cases to pull together anything like a representative profile (and with luck it will stay this way). It seems uncontroversial enough to posit that there’s a pool of kids who, depending on the circumstances, might or might not snap. That “snap” might take a number of forms, not all of them harmful to others. But if this hypothesis strikes you as reasonable, it’s probably also not a stretch to suggest that greater stress (in all forms, including the political and economic dynamics that Sirota talks about) might nudge the likelihood of the snap in the wrong direction.

In the end, shootings happen and I fear they will continue to happen. If we knew more than we did we could perhaps better understand the nature vs. nurture question as it applies here. Maybe we’d know whether Harris and Klebold were the rule or the exception, whether the Columbine massacre could have been prevented. Hopefully we’ll someday get to the point where we can answer these questions in ways that decrease the probability of more Columbines.

What we can say, though, is that a diseased body will exhibit symptoms, and that suppressing the symptoms is no substitute for curing the disease.

________________

Previously: The enduring lessons of Columbine

Next: The power of symbols…

Recommended Reading

Dave Cullen, Columbine
Westword Columbine Reader
Salon.com Columbine coverage

And Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

The inclusion of the two shooters provoked rage that ultimately ended up with their two crosses being torn down and burned. But Harris and Klebold were victims just as surely as they were murderers. As such, they too were deserving of a level of sympathy that, to the best of my knowledge, they never recivied.

These two profoundly disturbed young men gave warning signs to a world that, for a number of reasons, wasn’t equipped to detect them or to act upon them. Harris and Klebold’s friends missed or ignored the signs. Their families missed or ignored the signs too. As did the Columbine staff. And the police. Everyone who was in a position to do something to stop the Columbine tragedy before it happened failed to do so, and fifteen people died as a result. Another two dozen were injured.

39 injured or dead. But that’s the complete list of victims of the Columbine tragedy. All of the families of the injured and dead are victims too. As were their friends. As was the entire faculty, staff, and student body of Columbine High School. As was a significant percentage of the Jefferson County School District, faculty, staff, administration, students, and all their families as well. As were the two men serving sentences for firearms violations, and their families and friends.

We can count the dead and injured easily enough, but just as with the victims of the 9/11 attacks, the dead and injured represent but a small percentage of the true victims of the Columbine tragedy.

It is perhaps a cold comfort to all the victims that schools are safer today than they have ever been, that the state of Colorado has implemented an anonymous tip line that has supposedly prevented another 27 school shootings, and that the organizational barriers that prevented law enforcement, social services, and schools from sharing information on troubled students have largely been knocked down, at least in Colorado. After all, their nightmares and pain and loss can never be relieved by actions designed to prevent more school shootings.

Contrary to what was being said around Denver in late April and May of 1999, we are not all Columbine. We do not all grieve equally or in the same way or to the same deity(ies). But Zanis still had the right idea. He fought desperately to include Harris and Klebold because he understood that they, and their friends and families, were victims, too. Zanis ultimately failed, and I’m sure that there are those out there today who cannot bring themselves to consider the Harris and Klebold families with anything but derision and hatred.

I would ask that this week, as we read and listen to all the anniversary stories and reminiscences from that tragic day, all of us try to include all the multitude of victims, not just those most directly affected, in our thoughts. All the victims.

Image credit:
AP, from IndyStar.com

April 20, 2009: 11:19 am MDT

Ten years ago a co-worker turned to me and said something that I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live: “Hey, Sammy, there’s been a school shooting in Littleton.”

Since that day a great deal has been written and said about Columbine High School and the events of 4.20.99, and like a lot of other people I’ve tried my hardest to make sense of something that seemed (and still seems) inherently senseless. Tried and failed. Now, ten years on, the grief hasn’t fully dissipated here in the city that I have come to call home, and even if we manage to understand the whos, whats, and hows, there’s a part of us that’s doomed to wrestle forever with the whys.

We’ve learned a lot over the past decade, though, and as we mark the tenth anniversary of Columbine, let’s begin by recounting three important lessons.

1: The authorities cannot be relied on. From the emergency response through the investigation process, Columbine was a case study in how not to.

I hate to be overly critical of police because they really have to do a hellish job, but that day witnessed one of the worst failures by a law enforcement agency that we’ve ever seen.

Two officers exchanged fire with one of the teenage gunmen just outside the school door, then stopped — as they had been trained to do — to wait for a SWAT team. During the 45 minutes it took for the SWAT team to assemble and go in, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot 10 of the 13 people they killed that day.

The killers committed suicide around the time the makeshift SWAT team finally entered. But the SWAT officers took several hours more to secure the place, moving methodically from room by room. One of the wounded, teacher Dave Sanders, slowly bled to death. [Source]

If this is the book on how to operate, explain to me exactly why you need a SWAT team in the first place. Events would have played out more or less identically if the SWAT budget had instead been allocated to Parks & Rec.

The good news, as the article goes on to explain, is that the meltdown at Columbine led to “active shooter” training, which is credited with making police officers across the country far more effective in these kinds of cases.

Sadly, there’s no indication at all that the longer, more mind-numbing process of investigating and reporting has been improved. “Quagmire,” “spin,” “cover-up,” “embarrassment,” “lost” and “hidden” reports – at every turn those charged with getting to the bottom of the worst school shooting in history acted like they were auditioning for roles on CSI Hooterville.

If the whole story – or at least most of it – is known today, it is despite these officials, not because of them.

2: Religious interests will colonize your grief for their own ends. As I walked the grounds of Columbine and Clement Park a few days after the massacre, I was absolutely staggered at the extent to which the tragedy had been transformed into an explicitly Christian extravaganza. Which was a little fascinating, since it wasn’t a Christian school and unless you were sucker enough to believe that there was a religious tint to the killings (there wasn’t – more on this in a minute) the tragedy had about as much to do with Jesus as it did Kubla Khan. Still, the impromptu memorials prayed, beseeched, questioned and promised in a distinctly evangelical way that had to make non-evangelicals a little uncomfortable. After all, this was their town, too, and I can say with absolute certainty that it didn’t matter what your religion was or wasn’t. Columbine was personal and the grief it engendered was profound.

It wasn’t just my imagination, either. One prominent local minister said he felt like he’d been “hit over the head with Jesus.”

To top it all off, Billy Graham’s lackwit boy Franklin parachuted in to preside over a nationally televised Mournapalooza service. No doubt some were comforted by the presence of a bona fide religious carpetbagger, but it’s hard to see, looking back, how the needs of the community were actually addressed by the self-serving machinations of a C-list opportunist.

To put it in Chaucerian terms, we could have done with a little less Summoner and a little more Parson.

3: The mainstream press values the narrative above the facts. They were goths! It was the Trenchcoat Mafia! They were targeting jocks, blacks and Christians! Cassie Bernall said yes!

Lie. Lie. Lie, lie, lie. And damnable, intentional lie. Local and national “reporters” could have been outperformed by monkeys with Ouija boards.

Not that the run-of-the-mill press bumbling came as any real surprise – journalistic malpractice is well-known in Colorado. But ineptitude is one thing. Outright, overt, premeditated lies are quite another, and that’s exactly what both of Denver’s mainstream papers – the Denver Post and the recently-defunct Rocky Mountain News did when they ran the “Cassie Bernall said yes” story as fact. They knew, by their own admission, that it was false, so why did they lie? Well, the lie seemed to be providing comfort to a grieving city.

Take that as the foundational operating principle for a free press and see where it leads…

If some of us have sort of moved on, then, if we have somehow clawed our way to a modicum of closure, it has been against a backdrop of secrecy, deceit, ineptitude and a pervasive moral pathology born of evangelical self-righteousness. Whatever insights we have attained, whatever emotional peace we have found, it has all been accomplished without the help of our community’s central institutions. As a result, I suspect that many of us mark the tenth anniversary with a little anger, a little bitterness.

There’s not much I can do about that except to suggest that what happened ten years ago today was not a one-off. It has happened since and it will almost certainly happen again, and my deep suspicion is that these kinds of events arise, in part, as a result of the dysfunctions noted here. That is, the governmental breakdown, the evangelical circus and the unforgivable duplicity of those who were granted particular 1st Amendment freedoms so that they could safely tell us the goddamned truth were not results of Columbine. Maybe I’m cynical, but it seems to me that these flaws in the fabric of our society existed well in advance of 4.20.99 and it’s hardly surprising that a sick system would spawn broken children capable of unspeakable barbarism. Nor is it surprising that the system would then cannibalize those children and their victims in order to slake its spiraling lust for ignorance and hatred.

Whatever was wrong ten years and one day ago is still wrong.

Next

• Was Columbine the rule or the exception?
• Columbine and the power of symbols
  

This is unretouched, by the way. I may play with it in Photoshop later…

Short version: one the Denver area’s more challenged school districts, Adams 50 in suburban Westminster, is abandoning traditional grade levels and implementing a new “standards-based” system that will teach and promote students according to their proficiencies in individual subjects. That is, your child’s 6th-grade English class might include students ranging from ages 10-16, and a student might be 4th-grade level in Science and 8th-grade level in Math.

While this isn’t an indefensible concept on its face, what’s happening in fact is in dire need of critical examination. Unfortunately, instead of sending a reporter to do the story, the Post assigned a typist, apparently with explicit instructions to write down and treat as gospel every word the consultant said. (You knew there had to be a consultant in here, right?)

Let me preface my criticism with a couple points. First, I have been a consultant and and worked in PR on and off for a couple decades now, so my reaction to this story is a little conflicted. The citizen in me is distressed to no end, but the professional practitioner in me is overawed by how beautifully the Post was played. I assure you, the PR hacks behind the article nearly wet themselves with glee at how pliant the “reporter” was. This effort will win some PR awards, as long as it’s submitted.

Second, while I’m going to be brutally critical of the transcriptionist reporter  here – Jeremy P. Meyer, whom I’ve never read before – the fault is hardly all his. My colleague, Dr. Denny, has written at length about the plight of the print daily reporter, who is routinely asked to do more and more with less and less, so Meyer may well be doing the best that he can do. For all I know, he may have had misgivings about the disservice he was perpetrating on his readers, but decided that he had to do what he was instructed to do. It’s impossible to say. Further, the story got past the editors and made it to the front page of the Sunday edition, so at the very least he had accomplices.

All this being said, the story is right there in black and white, with Meyer’s name on it, so that makes it his responsibility.

Finally, I’m assuming that there’s a very good PR firm behind this story. If there isn’t, then the consultants are doing their own promotion and they’re definitely in the wrong line of work. They’re significantly better than some well-paid PR folks I know personally and professionally.

Cue the Marching Band

So, what’s wrong with the story? Let’s start with the headline:

“Adams 50 skips grades, lets kids be pacesetters”

The truth on this program is that it’s controversial, to say the very least. But the header makes clear that the program is a winner – the kids get to be the pacesetters. “Pacesetter” is a good thing – it’s like pioneer and trailblazer and innovator, powerful memes that Americans especially treasure. The tone of the header privileges “kids” – we love and cherish kids – and apparently the editor writing the headline never pauses to ask whether or not kids, especially kids in a failing school, might not be qualified to, you know, paceset. Children are smart. It’s those darned adults who need to shut up and get the heck out of the way of all the learning that will naturally take place when kids are put in charge.

Or am I making too much of this? Well, let’s read on and see what happens. The subhead (which doesn’t appear in the online version, but is in the print edition) reads:

In the innovative standards-based learning program the 10,000-student district will use, age doesn’t matter, but performance does.

The lead carries on:

A school district in Westminster struggling with declining enrollment and falling test scores will try something revolutionary next year that many say never has been accomplished in the Lower 48.

It’s “Revolutionary^®.” Ask yourself how often you encounter that word – revolutionary – in a context that sells it as a bad thing. If you’re like me, probably never. So, are you excited yet? Are you convinced? The reporter PR agency certainly is, and they want you to be, too.

“If they can pull this off, it will be a lighthouse for America’s challenged school districts,” said Richard DeLorenzo, the consultant who implemented a standards-based model in Alaska and is working with Adams 50. “It will change the face of American education.”

Wow. “Lighthouse”? Are you kidding me? “Challenged” is nice, too – they’re down, but not out, so long as we can innovate them a whole new way of doing things. And the last line – “change the face of American education” – it’s a shame that basic text can’t communicate the epic orchestral soundtrack that’s no doubt swelling in the background as DeLorenzo speaks.

There are two words in there that ought to set off your alarm bells, though: “consultant” and “Alaska.” Having been a consultant I’m certainly not here to tell you that they’re/we’re all necessarily evil. But many of them do make their money by repackaging old ideas, slapping some fresh buzzwords on them, and reselling them as something that’s brand spanking new. And in the ed world there’s a shiny new package being pitched every eight seconds or so. More on all this later.

Next, a brief, but critically important blurb about the district:

A district of 10,000 students and 21 schools, Adams 50 serves a working-class suburb north of Denver. Seventy-two percent of its students are poor enough for federal meal benefits, two-thirds are Latino, and 38 percent still are learning English.

Two years ago the district was put on academic watch because of achievement troubles; fewer than 60 percent of students graduate on time.

The Real Issues, Unexamined

This is key information, mainly because it provides us with some solid footing for a reality check. As we get deeper into the “solution,” keep the dynamics in those three sentences firmly in mind, because we’re going to need to question whether the deal we’re being sold seems to address the core causes of failure in the district: poverty and crippling language barriers.

I need to add a bit more texture here. I have a small bit of insight into Adams 50 because my sister-in-law taught in the district for five or six years, and the problems it faces are far more complex and confounding than even the haunting statistics above indicate. For instance, in addition to the fact that many of these students speak no English, understand that they’re not all Latino – there may be students from multiple Asian and European cultures in the room. In fact, as many as 45 different languages, including such rarely encountered tongues as Lao, Farsi, Vietnamese and Romanian, are spoken by Adams 50 students.

So even a teacher who’s conversant (or fluent) in Spanish, as a some are, have a daunting task bridging the gap with a good number of their students. Worse, class sizes can approach 40 (at the middle school level a teacher can have six of these a day), a number that’s unmanageable even if they’re all English-speaking honors students.

Finally,  a good number of the Latin students are from migrant farm worker families and they will be moving on in a few months. Odds are that they will never speak English, nor will anything meaningful ever happen to them in any classroom.

Meyer seems not to have asked the questions needed to elicit this information, although pretty much any teacher or administrator in the system could have provided it.

“What we are doing right now is not working,” said Superintendent Roberta Selleck, who was hired in 2006 to reform the district. “We think this will be huge.”

Einstein was certainly right. Doing the same thing and expecting different results is the very definition of madness. But … the way the story is constructed, it’s almost as though there are only two options: the old way or DeLorenzo’s program. “Well, shooting ourselves in the foot wasn’t working, so we decided to try stabbing ourselves in the balls instead. We think this is going to be huge.”

Not to belabor the point, but neither students, parents, teachers, administrators or taxpayers are well served by a reporter who’s too busy cheerleading to ask some basic (and almost painfully obvious) questions.

The next section of the story provides a few details on how the program works, and again, the critical reader is advised to question whether the proposed technique offers some hope against poverty and crippling language barriers. The section is capped by a sequence that’s so brilliantly crafted that the PR weasel in me leaps to its feet in wild applause:

“In a standards-based system, time becomes the variable and learning is the constant,” Selleck said. “When a kid can demonstrate proficiency of a standard, they move on. There is nothing magical about a quarter, semester or the end of school. That becomes blurred. Learning becomes much more 24-7.”

This is a coup of persuasive language – and let’s be clear, the goal of this story is to sell, not inform – because it so deftly integrates an intelligent observation with a marvelously worded selling point. In doing so, it makes them seem like the same thing. The idea that there’s “nothing magical about a quarter, semester or the end of school is not only accurate and insightful, it’s one I share myself (I’ve long been a proponent of year-round schooling, for instance, and believe that the most effective education takes place in comprehensive cultures of learning where there’s a strong emphasis on learning in the home – so “school” never really ends).

But this is paired with “[i]n a standards-based system, time becomes the variable and learning is the constant.” That’s sales lingo, and very well-crafted sales lingo, to boot. “Standards-based” is a weasel term masquerading as something so scientific as to be unquestionable, and that is in fact its purpose – to deter opposition. How would it be possible to question the premise that education should be held to standards?

“What is a standard?” Meyer should have asked. He should have insisted that the people selling this program explain why their standards-based program was bound to be successful where the current standards-based programs aren’t, because in fact the programs that are failing us across America every day are standards-based.

Want some proof? Scroll back to the sentence we saw earlier: “Two years ago the district was put on academic watch because of achievement troubles…” Now, how do you suppose they concluded that the district was having “achievement troubles”? I bet there are some standards dictating the use of that term and defining where the cutoff is. And unless I’m mistaken, the people who built the old system, who reported up through a zillion layers of hierarchy to the state’s governing authorities, those people would tell you that they were doing standards-based programs. Need more?

Students will still take the state’s standardized test — the Colorado Student Assessment Program — to monitor both individual and schoolwide progress. The district has spent the year defining the standards for each level, training teachers and working with state officials to create assessments.

But what about the rest of the formulation?

…time becomes the variable and learning is the constant.

So, learning will be the constant among those students who do not and never will speak English? It will be the constant for students from homes that see schools as warehouses? For kids who have to work significant hours at jobs to help pay the bills in poverty-stricken homes?

This misdirection asks us to accept, without questioning, the premise that time-focus is the real culprit here, not poverty and crippling language barriers. Now that you think about it, does that make even a little bit of sense to you?

I imagine Denny doing this story instead of Jeremy. He’d probably tee up something like “So, Ms. Selleck, your program creates extra hours in the day?” Well, maybe not – I doubt Denny would resort to snark. But I imagine all the winking between DeLorenzo and Selleck would come to an abrupt halt as it became clear that they were dealing with a reporter who was going to do more than simply cut-and-paste from the press release.

“It’s been working so well,” said Kim Carver, who teaches first-grade math in the standards-based model at Tennyson Knolls Elementary School. “The kids are in control.”

It’s good to hear that things are going well in Carver’s classroom, but if things are better now that the kids are in control, doesn’t that suggest a follow-up question or two about her capabilities? More to the point, does this suggest another hypothesis about why the school was failing in the first place? (Or maybe I should be careful here – Carver’s actual opinions may not be reflected at all by this quote – these could be the only marginally positive words she said in a five-minute rant; the slant of the “reporting” makes it impossible to trust.)

Then there’s this, which I’m asked to accept as something like conclusive evidence, I suppose:

Six-year-old Dominic Herrera showed one of them on the subject of counting pennies. On the chart were four categories: “I need help,” “I think I can,” “I know I can” and, finally, “I can teach it.”

Dominic had reached the “I know I can” level and was onto the next category, telling time in five-minute intervals. He was at the “I think I can” level.

“It’s neat that they have ownership, and they know what proficiency means,” Carver said. “It’s not arbitrary anymore.”

Again, there’s good news and bad news here. A program that excites kids and gets them to buy into learning is about as good as it gets. So let’s file that as “potentially quite good.” But if we’re smart, we’re aware of a couple things. First, Dominic might be a perfect case study, but there’s one of him, and there’s only so much you can know about a system from looking at a sample size of one. Second, do you think they put their worst example in front of the reporter or their best? What conclusions can you legitimately draw about a large program from a cursory look at its single best result?

Did Meyer ask these kinds of questions? If he did, we have no evidence of it.

Next we get some commentary from another consultant who thinks it’s all a great idea – Bob Marzano, who’s one of the better-known ed consultants out there – and he notes, probably correctly, that “[t]he moment a district the size of Adams 50 pulls this off, you will see a lot of districts on their doorstep.” There’s a lot of “if” in that equation, of course, and Meyer chooses to reproduce the assertion without reservation.

But then a curious bit from state Deputy Education Commissioner Ken Turner.

“This is a departure from one-size-fits-all…It’s more customized learning. If we want a path to better results, we should be willing to try different things. . . . We applaud their efforts.”

On its face this makes perfect sense. Customized is good (albeit pricy). One-size-fits-all might be okay for certain kinds of things, but I’d agree that it’s not your optimal model for an entire system. So far so good.

But… the ideal path to customization, in most cases I can think of, involves more favorable student:teacher ratios. It’s great to hear that he’s willing to try different things, but not too long ago the teachers in Adams 50 negotiated a pay raise intended to foster a higher rate of professionalism and better teaching – in essence, a tactic aimed at improving customization, etc.

The district’s response: it slashed staff and increased class sizes beginning in academic year 2006-7.

It would have been enlightening if Post readers had been given an opportunity to hear Turner explain his thinking in light of this larger context.

What About Alaska?

As noted earlier, DeLorenzo’s plan has been tested.

DeLorenzo helped implement a nationally recognized standards-based system in the Chugach School District — a district of about 200 students scattered throughout 22,000 square miles of mostly isolated areas in south-central Alaska.

The model transformed the district, where 90 percent of students couldn’t read at grade level.

The results are noteworthy, assuming they’re accurate. But in a piece so thoroughly absent even the most rudimentary critical awareness, we’d be foolish to take these kinds of success claims at face value.

Further, the venue of the test was anomalous, at best, and as far removed from the conditions facing Adams 50 educators as it’s possible to imagine. For comparison purposes, we’re talking about a district that’s significantly larger in area than Rhode Island, and only slightly smaller than Delaware. The district certainly faced challenges, but nothing I can find makes clear that it’s a sensible model for systems like the one in Westminster.

Chugach’s 214 students are scattered throughout 22,000 square miles of mostly isolated and remote areas of South Central Alaska. With 30 faculty and staff, CSD is the smallest organization to ever win a Baldrige Award. CSD delivers instruction in education from preschool up to age 21 in a comprehensive, standards-based system. Education occurs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Instruction is delivered in the work place, in the community, in the home and in school. Half (50%) of the students in the Chugach School District are minorities (Alaska Natives). (Source)

How many ways can you find where Chugach is very, very unlike Adams 50? For starters, I think I see a 7:1 student:teacher ratio and while I can’t find anything that tells me about languages spoken, I’d be stunned to learn that Chugach teachers are facing the cultural diversity we see in Adams County. It looks like you have two basic cultural groups there, and I suspect that’s more manageable than what I know exists in many Adams 50 classrooms (remember that 45 different languages bit from above). Additionally, note that between state funding and private grants the Chugach district was receiving nearly $17,000 per child. In Adams 50 the figure is slightly over $10,000.

So, to sum up:

• $7,000 more per student
• 7:1 vs. 35+:1
• only about 5% of Alaskans speak native languages (pardon my Wiki here – feel free to dig deeper in the footnotes and here; I can’t find any more specific data on what languages are spoken in the Chugash district and whether these pupils also speak English, but it seems like the very worst-case scenario is substantially better than what’s going on in Adams 50)

Then Meyer, perhaps accidentally, brushes up against some potentially critical information. Let’s go line by line, because he refused to.

The Gates Foundation gave the Chugach district $5 million to replicate the model across Alaska. About a dozen Alaska districts have tried to implement the model — some with success. Others abandoned it.

How hard would it have been to tell us more specifically how many had luck and how many gave up? The way it’s put here could probably apply to a 75%-25% split in either direction, and that’s not an insignificant gap. Given how hard the story is trying to get me to buy the program, I can’t helping leaning toward the skeptical side. That’s a sure mark of bad reporting – it forces the reader into unevidenced speculation.

The ones that abandoned the program – why did they do so? Well, here we get the reporter reading directly from the talking points of every anti-teacher’s union spokesnozzle in America:

Denali Borough School District removed the system from two of its three schools when teachers complained that tracking student progress was becoming too burdensome.

Teachers “complained” that doing their jobs was “burdensome.”

This isn’t just slanted language, it’s an appalling hit job by the reporter typist. Where did this information come from, I wonder? Well, it isn’t attributed to anyone with the Denali Borough District, and we’ve seen nothing else in this story to suggest that Meyer is the type to pick up the phone and ask a lot of difficult questions. But – it’s a “fact” that serves the interests of someone we know he’s talked to quite a bit, isn’t it?

Up next, a spokesman who believes in the program:

“One of the toughest issues is not giving grades anymore,” said Roger Sampson, head of the Denver-based Education Commission of the States who was the superintendent at the Chugach district when the standards-based system was introduced.

Sampson has been a advocate for the model, which he says works “tremendously” if leadership and stakeholders are behind it.

I actually don’t doubt this – as I said earlier, I have no evidence to reject this kind of model outright. It may be a very good idea, properly executed. But I think Sampson says something very important in that last sentence. There isn’t just one way to teach, nor is there only one way to teach well. But at the system level, my guess is that most of the effective techniques have something in common – the support of leadership and stakeholders. That’s not everything, but without it nothing is going to work.

Fair and Balanced

In the waning moments of the sales presentation article, Meyer remembers that he needs to introduce some “balance,” so he turns to Van Schoales, an “education expert at the Denver-based Piton Foundation.” He is “skeptical about Adams 50’s chances.”

“There is a reason why school districts have a hard time implementing this, because they don’t replace their old systems,” said Schoales, who added that his only understanding of Adams 50’s plan is from its website.

You’re kidding me, right? We know of at least two places in Alaska where they shut the program down, and instead of talking with an informed source there Meyer hunts down an “expert” who’s never encountered the program? This means our lone voice of dissent comes up a little short on the credibility meter, huh?

So, what’s really going on here in the Skeptics Gallery? Allow me to speculate.

A good PR flak knows that a reporter is going to have to pretend to tell the “other side,” and will therefore “help” the typist reporter find a suitable source. In my own work as a PR guy, I have put reporters onto my client’s competitors – I’ve even written competitors into my pitches. This puts the PR flak not only in command of the story, but it lets him/her control the response to it. If I can guarantee a lame rebuttal, I pretty much own the whole “debate,” don’t I?

Clever, that.

Or maybe I’m being too paranoid here – I don’t know that this is what happened, do I? I do admire the professional savvy of whoever is behind the story, though, and have seen it played just this way myself. In any case, it works out in favor of the folks selling the bridge, doesn’t it?

Then we have the big finish – the compelling anecdote that seals the deal and sticks with the reader.

Richard Rodriguez thinks it will work. He pulled his children from Adams 14 to attend Adams 50’s Metz Elementary, the pilot school, because of the new model.

His kids, who are in kindergarten to fourth grade, now are more engaged in school, he said.

“They are excited about going to school,” he said. “We don’t have to get them up. They are excited about the program. They have their own goals, and they know what they are learning and why they are learning it. I have seen the transformation.”

I don’t know who Rodriguez is, and I certainly don’t doubt his concern for his children. But I would call everybody’s attention to the scorecard, where on the one side we have:

• a reporter who’s giddy as a schoolgirl,
• rhetorically gushing anecdotal pom-pomming, and
• data from an anomalous trial district.

On the other side, we have

• a hobbled “expert” who’s technically never seen the program he’s asked to talk about in a
• “skeptics” section with 92 words (out of more than 1,100 in the entire article) and
• a reporter who’s avoiding legitimate critical voices like he would a skunk with rabies.

Wow – they can’t even get false balance right.

Real Reporting, Please?

There may come a time when the Adams 50 model is indeed the lighthouse for every child in America. We may one day celebrate the consultants and administrators pushing it as heroes in our nation’s fight against ignorance. But if we do, it will be because we have asked tough questions of those selling their ideas. The most fundamental of those questions will need to address the issues noted above: how does your approach overcome poverty, crippling language barriers and cultural contexts that are largely antithetical to learning when other “standards-based” programs have failed?

In the meantime, the best we can hope for – as faint as that hope may be – are journalists who can tell the difference between reporting and shilling. Jeremy Meyer and the Denver Post should be ashamed of themselves for the damage they’ve done to the truth in this story.

If this is to be the state of local journalism in Denver from here on out, then maybe outsourcing the whole shooting match to Bangalore isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Thanks to Rob Spencer, who helped me find some of the information used in this post.

Executive Recycling and the GAO report

In August, the GAO released a report titled Electronic Waste: EPA Needs to Better Control Harmful U.S. Exports through Stronger Enforcement and More Comprehensive Regulation. The 62 page report described how the EPA is failing to enforce its own regulations regarding e-waste, especially former cathode-ray tube (CRT) television screens and computer monitors. The GAO monitored e-commerce websites for 3 months and found that “significant demand exists for used electronics from the United States, particularly in developing countries.” And when the GAO investigators posed as foreign CRT buyers from developing countries, the GAO netted 43 e-waste recyclers willing to export CRTs in “apparent violation” of EPA regulations.

Executive Recycling of Englewood, Colorado was one of those 43 companies.

While the GAO report doesn’t name the 43 companies publicly – the company names were submitted to the EPA for further investigation – a quote in the GAO report reveals the connection to ER.

The left image below (click for larger version) shows the quote in the context of the GAO report, page 28, with the quote highlighted. The right image shows the identical quote (also highlighted) from ER’s alternate website, executiverecycling.com.

A “WHOIS” search on “executiverecycle.com” and “executiverecycling.com” finds that both domains were registered and are owned by Brandon Richter, CEO of Executive Recycling.

The GAO report says that they requested that U.S. Customs and Border Protection detain a container filled with “hundreds of CRT computer monitors.” According to the GAO report, Hong Kong had rejected the container because “under Hong Kong regulations, it is illegal to import CRTs from the United States.” Here’s what the GAO said about that container:

We received photographic evidence showing that this illegal shipment of CRT monitors originated from the Denver metropolitan area. According to a third-party source, these monitors came from an electronics recycler in Colorado, which claims to hold 20 to 30 community recycling events each year for homeowners’ associations, city governments, and property managers.

Figure 5 of the GAO report is reproduced below. The figure shows that the description of the contents as “stacked haphazardly, some with cracked plastic cases and broken glass tubes” is accurate.

This container was tracked back to Executive Recycling.

The GAO contends that exporting CRTs to Hong Kong is illegal. Beyond that, they contend that exporting to developing nations is illegal. And the GAO report outright states that Executive Recycling’s containers were illegal. An S&R review of the EPA regulations that govern the processing and export of CRTs suggests that the EPA’s ongoing investigation, started in September, will find that the GAO is right.

The EPA CRT rule

The CRT rule describes how waste handlers and recyclers need to handle cathode-ray tubes. Until the CRT rule was produced, CRTs were treated as hazardous waste. The goal of the CRT rule was to change that:

The purpose of the proposed amendments was to encourage increased reuse, recycling, and better management of this growing wastestream, while maintaining necessary environmental protection. (pdf)

In order to accomplish this , the EPA started treating CRTs as valuable commodities instead of hazardous waste, but under strict storage, labeling, transportation, and export rules. However, the GAO found that the CRT rule was widely ignored since the EPA failed to enforce it.

The specific regulations ER is accused of violating are the export requirements for “used, broken CRTs and processed CRT glass undergoing recycling” (40 CFR Part 261.39). The basic export requirements are listed below:

• The EPA must be notified at least 60 days in advance of each export to a particular port, and while the notification may cover up to 12 months of exports to that port, it must have all points of entry and departure from each foreign country the CRTs will pass through, the name and address of the importing recycler, a description of how the CRTs will be recycled, and the exporter’s identification information.
• The export is held until after the EPA notifies the receiving country and all transit countries of the export. If the receiving country objects to the CRT shipment, it is illegal to export the CRTs to that country.

Another category of CRTs, “Used, intact CRTs exported for recycling” (40 CFR Part 261.40), have similar requirements to used, broken CRTs, specifically notification of the EPA and the consent of the receiving country. Only “Used, intact CRTs exported for reuse” (40 CFR Part 261.41) have less stringent requirements on transport, etc. But even CRTs for reuse require EPA notification.

The Denver Business Journal asked EPA investigator Eric Johnson of the Denver regional office if there were any reuse export notifications from Executive Recycling as required. According to the article, Johnson said that “no CRT re-use export notifications from Executive Recycling” have been found as of November 21, the date of the article.

Executive Recycling claims to be a victim of forged documentation

ER has been trying to build a case that they’re innocent because they didn’t know that their wholesaler was shipping CRTs overseas to Hong Kong. ER’s latest press release in response to the 60 Minutes story that sparked this particular firestorm says, in part:

ER has supplied sufficient documentation regarding the shipment published on 60 Minutes that was not aired during the segment.

• ER published the forged packing list from wholesale buyer supplied by the port authorities
• ER published the freight/shipping order that was ordered by the wholesale buyer and not ER

[Ed. Note: ER has removed two of their previous press releases on this subject. The complete press release is reproduced below in the Appendix in case ER removes this press release as well.]

ER CEO Brandon Richter said as much in an interview for the Denver Business Journal article mentioned above, and the local Denver CBS affiliate quotes ER as blaming this on a “Canadian-based wholesale buyer.”

However, Jim Puckett, founder of BAN and the source for much of the information in the GAO report, doesn’t believe Richter:

It is highly improbable that ER was not aware of either what was in the container, or that it was going offshore. The notion that an exporter or broker, broke the seal and reloaded the container with other equipment is highly improbable. A recycler that is legitimate will demand to know the final disposition of all of their wastes to make sure they do not face liabilities and legal actions. All generators of CRT waste are responsible for its final disposition. Seagoing containers normally are destined to go offshore otherwise they are not used but rather trucks are used.

According to the Denver Business Journal article, Richter believed that the Canadian company’s container was “going to Canada or just to be sold here in the United States.” And in a response to the 60 Minutes story that has been removed from the ER website, ER published a brief email exchange between Brandon Richter and Tere Blake of shipping company Overseas Container Forwarding, Inc. that suggested Karen Zhang and her employer, Electronics Recycling of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, were responsible. Another ER press release that has also been removed from the website (both are available here) claimed that:

These buyers apparently sought to hide their own misconduct by leaving the impression that their shipment was the responsibility of our company. We have discovered that forged documents (provided by the port authorities) were used to improperly shift blame to us when ER sold the tested working units to a Canadian wholesale buyer. We are currently seeking legal actions against this one wholesale buyer in regards to this report.

According to an investigation by the CBC that was similar to the 60 Minutes piece, Electronics Recycling of Vancouver ships significant amounts of e-waste to Hong Kong out of the port of Vancouver. For this reason, ER’s claim that Electronics Recycling was breaking the law is reasonable, but it’s unknown if ER knew that they were making a safe claim or not – ER didn’t respond to a request for comment on ER’s relationship to Electronics Recycling. However, the CBC report ran on October 22 while the 60 Minutes piece ran on November 9, two and a half weeks later.

Electronics Recycling has partners in the United States, including one in Colorado: Electronics Recycling of Denver, Colorado. However, Executive Recycling is not listed as one of Electronics Recycling’s U.S. partners.

The CRT rule is not entirely clear on the matter of export responsibility. The export rules apply specifically to “exporters of used, broken CRTs”, exporters of “used, intact CRTs exported for recycling”, and “persons who export used, intact CRTs for reuse” (40 CFR 261.39(a)(5), 261.40, and 261.41(a) respectively). So the question of whether ER has broken the CRT rules may be determined by how the EPA categorizes the exported CRTs.

When asked about the issue of responsibility, Jim Puckett of BAN said:

However, the EPA is adamant about the fact that the generator of the waste, and not the broker, is responsible for ensuring the material does not end up being exported against the CRT rule.”

And Bob Tonetti, an EPA official who helped write the CRT rule and who was interviewed for the Denver Business Journal, is quoted as saying “[e]xport requires notification. It’s not an excuse to say I didn’t make that decision.”

Further complicating the issue of liability is is the section of the Federal Register publication discussing interstate transport. According to Section V, subsection C, the “initiating facility” is responsible for writing completing a manifest if the CRTs are traveling through states that consider CRTs a solid or universal waste product. The EPA transportation regulations require that a waste “generator” create the manifest for transportation, with a generator defined as follows:

Generator means any person, by site, whose act or process produces hazardous waste identified or listed in part 261 of this chapter or whose act first causes a hazardous waste to become subject to regulation. (40 CFR 260.10)

In addition, international transporters are forbidden from accepting shipping containers containing hazardous waste for export if the transporter knows that the required EPA Acknowledgment of Consent (by the the importing country) is wrong or missing (40 CFR 263.20(a)(2)). Again, though, the question becomes whether this specific requirement applies in the case of the shipment that the GOA opened. Only the EPA knows for certain, and they’re not commenting on the investigation.

Executive Recycling connected to multiple e-waste exports

If the one container tied to ER that the GAO opened was the only container, that would be one level of violation. But it wasn’t. The GAO found that the Hong Kong port authorities have returned 26 containers of “waste” CRTs from the United States since the CRT rule went into effect in January, 2007. According to BAN, six or seven of those returned containers are known to be connected to ER in some way, and they were all returned over a four month period from November, 2007 to March, 2008. In the same time period, BAN claims to have tracked between 20 or 21 containers of unknown electronics “waste” from ER to other countries around the world, 19 or 20 of which were bound for developing nations. The exact numbers provided by BAN have varied slightly depending on when they were presented:

• Denver Business Journal: 21 containers shipped overseas, eight that were deemed illegal by the receiving country – one to Peru, seven to Hong Kong
• S&R’s initial interview with BAN’s Jim Puckett: 20 containers overseas, 19 to developing countries, eight that were deemed illegal by the receiving country
• S&R’s followup with Puckett: seven containers that were deemed illegal by the receiving country, six to Hong Kong

While the discrepancy is curious, BAN’s information was accurate enough that the GAO used it as one basis of their investigation, and an EPA investigation into ER’s export practices is ongoing.

Even if the seven or eight returned containers are found by the EPA to be in violation of the CRT rule’s export provisions, the other containers may have been legal exports. And if the six or seven containers rejected by Hong Kong are all found to be illegal exports, then ER would be known to be responsible for between 23% and 27% of all the returned containers since the CRT rule went into effect. Over a four month period out of the 18 months between the start of the rule and the GAO report’s publication.

BAN and its affiliates figure prominently in the investigations

The Basel Action Network has played a prominent role in this entire process – Puckett traveled with 60 Minutes to China, he agreed to be interviewed for this post, he was interviewed for the Denver Business Journal story, and BAN provided much of the background information used in both the GAO report and the CBC news report. BAN also runs a program called the e-Steward program. According to the e-Steward website, e-Stewards have undergone certification as “upholding the highest standard of environmental and social responsibility.” In fact, one of ER’s competitors, Guaranteed Recycling Experts (GRX), is an e-Steward. GRX and ER compete in two markets – Denver and Salt Lake City – and ER had initially beat out GRX for the city of Denver e-waste recycling contract. According to a Rocky Mountain News article, ER lost the contract following a September audit by the city of Denver recycling organization, Denver Recycles – and GRX was awarded the contract for this year. In addition, the creation of the e-Steward program was announced on November 10, the day after the 60 Minutes program ran and three months after the GAO report was published.

According to the CBS affiliate article:

[Executive Recycling] called the negative publicity “a smear campaign led by competitors” like Denver-based Guaranteed Recycling Experts (GRX).

GRX denies it is involved.

In response to all of the negative publicity, ER claims on their website that “ER has requested to be audited by the BAN to become an E-Steward.” Jim Puckett of BAN confirmed that ER had requested e-Steward certification, but that ER’s application had been rejected for the time being:

[W]e have a prerequisite requirement of transparency and honesty with regard to current and past operations before we can enter into good-faith negotiations on qualifications of e-Stewards. We have told ER’s executive [Brandon Richter] that they currently fail to meet that standard and until they do we will not consider their application.

Executive Recycling did not respond to repeated requests for comment or an interview.

EPA penalties could put ER out of business

If ER is found in violation of the CRT rule, it could be devastating to the company. The financial penalties could be significant, although they’re difficult to estimate due to the significant discretion the EPA has when it comes to assigning penalties. The EPA may assign financial penalties ranging from as little as $129 for minor violations to as much as $32,500 for the most severe violations, plus up to $6,448 per day per violation for multiple severe violations, plus a variable amount based on the “economic benefit of non-compliance” (RCRA Civil Penalty Policy). Or the EPA may seek to suspend or revoke ER’s waste handling permit. It’s also unclear whether each shipment qualifies as a violation or whether each individual CRT in a shipment qualify. And would the per-day penalty be applied for the complete shipping cycle from ER in Denver to Hong Kong and back to the U.S. (20-30 days)? If so, the financial penalties alone could be more than enough to put ER out of business even without the EPA directly revoking ER’s waste handling permit.

S&R’s investigation into Executive Recycling’s allegedly illegal activities has uncovered a number of questions that remain unanswered. On one hand are a number of potential conflicts of interest. The Basel Action Network was the source for much of the GAO’s information, but BAN stood to benefit from the release of the GAO report and the subsequent 60 Minutes story. And one of BAN’s e-Stewards, Guaranteed Recycling Experts, stood to gain financially from the allegations against its competitor Executive Recycling. On the other hand, Executive Recycling’s claims of victimization by a wholesaler/broker and innocence of breaking the CRT rule ring hollow given the GAO sting operation and the rejected shipping container that the GAO seized and opened in the course of its investigation. However, the appearance of conflicts of interest by BAN and GRX does not automatically damn them any more than the alleged CRT rule violations automatically damn Executive Recycling.

The EPA will publish the results of its investigation, and ER’s fate may be decided, sometime in February, 2009.

Image Credits:
GAO website
GAO report, page 28
Executiverecycling.com website
Labelmaster website
National Geographic
AFP, via ABC.com.au website
EPA
Hong Kong customs
e-stewards.org website
executiverecycle.com website

Appendix: Executive Recycling’s third response to the 60 Minutes program on e-waste

Additional Follow Up to 60 Minutes Segment

ER has been working to provide our customers and the community updates on the segment completed by 60 Minutes regarding E-Waste and ER practices.

ER has supplied sufficient documentation regarding the shipment published on 60 Minutes that was not aired during the segment

• ER published the forged packing list from wholesale buyer supplied by the port authorities
• ER published the freight/shipping order that was ordered by the wholesale buyer and not ER

ER is working on our website to add a “Process” tab which will list in detail our process from inventory, sorting, decommission, testing and refurbishing of electronic materials

ER has stopped all orders from any buyer for scrap material or wholesale items until they can provide the following information:

1. Vendor contacting EPA once a year for any tested working units any buyer plans to ship out of country
2. Provide all necessary documentation of final destination of their facilities and processes
3. Require downstream sites for scrap material to be ISO Certified and provide all licenses and certifications
4. Vendor sign contract with ER that states completing all the necessary action items set by ER for the purchase of all materials

ER is using all US downstream vendors for our scrap material (metal, aluminum, wire, circuit boards, batteries, plastic, etc) until any international buyer can supply necessary documentation (certification and licenses) of end of life for all materials

ER has requested to be audited by the BAN to become an E-Steward

ER was audited in September 2008 by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and received the audit results which indicate ER is in full compliance for all local and state regulations

For ER’s other two responses to the 60 Minute program, see this prior post at S&R.

It’s illegal to dump electronic waste on developing nations. But it still happens. And sometimes it turns out to be a hometown company that’s “recycling” lead-filled TV tubes and printed circuit boards in China, probably against the law. 60 Minutes ran this story on Executive Recycling (ER), of Englewood, Colorado, and the company that my hometown uses for e-waste recycling twice a year.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Interestingly enough, ER had a response to the 60 Minutes piece for a while, but it’s vanished from off the ER website. If anyone has an archived copy of the page, or could point me to where I can find one, I’d love to post it or link to it. Use “Contact Us” above.

A year ago, I recycled an old, busted television. I hope it was recycled properly, not shipped overseas to a town where a gang is willing to kill kids with lead poisoning for a few yuan.

I hope the feds charge Executive Recycling with export violations and, if ER’s guilty, the company gets shut down and the executives responsible for this get locked up for a long time.

I’d prefer that they be forced to endure the conditions that the “recyclers” do in China, but that would probably qualify as “cruel and unusual punishment”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out our post-show interview with Lee:

• part one: Is America ready for a black president (or Miley Cyrus)
• part two: “Thank God for Jon Stewart”

Have a nice Saturday…

As noted a couple weeks ago, the S&R team hooked up with the crew from Zero Coordinate and Eccentric Production at the DNC in Denver. In addition to their invaluable help in shooting the Lee Camp interview, we also worked together in covering the Returned Soldiers/Rage Against the Machine/Tent State march on the DNC.

Natalie Ashodian and her team have now produced a powerful video from that march, and for those who only read about it (or, as is more likely the case, given how little attention the mainstream press paid to it, never even heard about it in the first place) this coverage is extremely important.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re still trying to make sense of the spectacle that was last week’s DNC in Denver, and the same goes for many of the city’s residents. Our friend Karl Christian had some thoughts on the proceedings, and has agreed to let us repost this article, written on Day 2 of the DNC.

beerkitty has a lot more photos here.

This is actually not my first political convention, but my third (2000 in Philadelphia with the Republican Convention and 2004 in Boston with the Democratic Convention.) I just always happen to live where the political action apparently likes to move to. Conventions are following me like a stalker. May need some form of mace. So, this is all old hat, but it is interesting seeing the wide-eyed reactions from my Denver friends to everything that is suddenly going on. Apparently, nothing this big has hit Denver in a very long time (apparently since the G8 conference about 10 years ago.) You might think that Stanley Cup or World Series run were big, but you have seen nothing.

Yes, there are cops, COs, and SWAT patrols everywhere. The whole downtown looks like a demilitarized zone, with checkpoints and all to the point where K was nervous to even jay walk. Yes, you can happily watch the entire security patrol clampdown as you sip your Jamba Juice, kind of feel secure, and incredibly uneasy at sudden realization of the police state you live in.

While K and I were walking downtown on Saturday night, we saw a couple wearing very pro-Republican shirts. Now, anyone can say or wear anything they want and still happily look like a fool. You are allowed to do that in this country, just as I am free to mock you. Now, I believe that they thought they were being ‘edgy’ and ‘outrageous’ wearing these shirts, but in actuality, they just looked like racist assholes. The man’s shirt said: ‘IQ > Shoe Size. Vote Republican.’ The woman’s shirt: ‘ Who wants BO in the White House. Vote Republican.’ Both shirts had ‘Reelect McCain in 2012’ on the back. Yes, of course the couple was older, white, and had the same self-satisfied smirks on their faces.

I went downtown Sunday morning to meet up with K, who was watching the ‘Recreate 68’ anti-war march. My first thought was “Why, the hell, would anyone ever want to recreate ‘68? There were riots in ‘68 that would play right into Republicans hands’ (even Rush Limbaugh commented that he wanted riots in Denver.) I feel the same way about the hard core Clinton supporters. Yes, your candidate lost (and arguments can be said that she shot herself in the foot as well.) That sucks, but just give it up. Your continuing bitching about it plays into their hands: A candidate that wants to take away woman’s rights. Think about it. Do you really want to vote against your own self-interest to make a point? Who’s the fool there?

So anyway, I rode my bike down there and because of the press of the crowds I found myself in the counter-protest crowd. Yes, I was watching the parade with the hardcore Republicans, all of which were yelling “Support the Troops” and “USA!” while waving patriotic signs such as: Dissent is patriotic? You are backstabbing! (which makes me wonder, ‘what is okay dissent? Writing a particularly strong worded letter to the editor?’), Osama wants you to oppose the War on Terror, Gen Petraeus for Man of the Year, and (of course) You want real change? Accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior!! The one sign I saw that I thought was funny, sad, and exhibited without any sort of irony (which is the hallmark of the true believer ) was a photo of George Orwell with the quote “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense” George Orwell? The pro-republican, pro-government masses are using George Orwell as a symbol? Really? Really???? Then again, most of their slogans (”Peace through strength“) sound incredibly Orwellian. I don’t think they actually get it.

I found it all pretty amusing, especially at looking at who the counter-protesters were. All of them were white, middle age, and generally over weight (just as most of the protesters were white, young, and covered in tattoos.) After the parade moved on, people moved to the podium as there were a couple of pro-American speeches from the counter protesters. I stuck around cause I like to know what they are thinking. The one speech I caught was from an older woman saying how brave the troops are and how much we have to thank them for. Now, I utterly agree with that. My problem with that statement though is coming from these people. The reason is that this group only agrees to support the troops that think like them. Any troop that comments this war is fucked is quickly branded a traitor. For example, I saw a couple t-shirts proclaiming ‘Proud Vietnam Vet against John Kerry.’ I’m pretty sure John Kerry is a vet and has medals to prove it. I found all this amusing because (again, without any sort of irony) the old man wearing that shirt was also wearing a sticker supporting the fight against Alzheimer’s. Who said irony is dead?

What also bothers me about the counter-protesters (besides their blind trust in the government) is the hypocrisy. I’m positive that if Obama is elected, these pro-government masses will suddenly discover… as if a blinding religious revelation… that dissent IS patriotic. Instead of George Orwell, they will suddenly start carrying posters with Thomas Jefferson claiming that the tree of liberty must often be bathed in the blood of patriots and that dissent is the highest form of patriotism!!! Sigh…

As I left the counter-protesters to bike off, I told one of the sign wavers that he was holding his sign upside down. He was quite grateful.

So, what about the actual protesters? Well, I had a lot of problems with them as well. A large majority of them had the same old thing: No Blood for Oil, Bush is a War Monger, and such. My problem with them is that these people were the far Left. I had a conversation with a Republican friend the other day (one that was hoping for a riot) and I commented that one of the things about the Democratic Party is that they will protest themselves at a drop of a hat. These people were an example of that. Nothing the Democrats will ever do will ever satisfy the far left wing. These are the pro-Nader anarchists. These are the people that want to burn down the government and have nothing they want to replace it with. These are the people who simply want to destroy.

And they are allowed their views… I’m just concerned about anything that might let McCain slip on in to the White House. He’s a guy I once kinda respected (in 2000), but don’t recognize him or views in 2008.

I know I’m being naïve, but I wondered to K when the political discussion in this country boiled down to angry shouting slogans at one another. Of course, K patted me on the head and reminded me that it has always been this way. Look at 1968.

After the protest, we wandered over to the park. There was a lot of celebration, drum circles, people dancing, and such; as well as many little political stands set up, handing out buttons and pamphlets to people. The funniest one (in my mind) was the anti-smoking booth. Aside from the pamphlets, there was a black lung and a bottle of tar (this is how much gunk is in your lungs!!!) on the table. One of the women I was with just quit smoking and asked the kid behind the counter if he smoked. He paused, looked around, and replied, “I do, but I don’t tell the kids that.” Hilarity ensues.

On February 23, comedian Lee Camp appeared on FOX News, where he proceeded to sound off on the hosts and their audience.

“What is Fox News?” asks comedian and activist Lee Camp on the air. “It’s just a parade of propaganda, isn’t it? It’s just a…festival of ignorance.”

Obviously Camp is a man with some political convictions. He’s also a very, very funny guy, as he demonstrated during the recent DNC festivities in Denver. Appearing with several other noteworthy names (SNL’s Fred Armisen, Sam Seder, Eugene Mirman, and the guys from BarelyPolitical.com, to name a few), Camp stole the show with a set that touched on everything from whether America is ready for a black president to whether we’re ready for Miley Cyrus.

Afterward, Camp made a few minutes to answer some questions for S&R and its readers. In the interview he talks about predicting the debacle over how many houses McCain has, the role of the comic in a political society and the challenges facing the working comedian in today’s compromise-at-all-costs media environment. (This is part one of two.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2: “Thank God for Jon Stewart”

We’d like to offer a huge thanks to our great new friends at ZeroCoordinate.com for shooting the footage. Natalie Ashodian directed, Chris Bulkley-Logston did the camera work, and Paul Logston handled operations. We look forward to other projects with them in the future.

This represents the final bodies from Katrina, the last unknown victim of Katrina. This represents the pain and suffering.

— New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin; Laura Maggi of The Times-Picayune reported that “[s]even people who died during Hurricane Katrina were interred Friday morning in one of six mausoleums created to hold the remains of those who were not identified after the storm or whose families did not claim them; Aug. 29.

People are bringing five or six suitcases. We want to carry more people and less luggage.

— St. Charles Parish Emergency Preparedness Director Tab Troxler as residents of New Orleans and surrounding parishes begin evacuation of the Gulf Coast as Hurricane Gustav approaches; Aug. 30.

We’re well positioned and we’ve got a good set of plans and now we’re waiting to put them into motion.

—Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, adding that more than 1,000 buses were ready to facilitate evacuation of New Orleans; Aug. 29.

If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders.

— George Monbiotin his Guardian commentary, “The US missile defence system is the magic pudding that will never run out”; Aug,. 19.

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about 50 or 100 years from now — and there should be preserved the kinescopes of one week of all three networks — they will there find, recorded in black and white and in color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information.

Our mass media reflect this.

But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television, and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

— from Edward R. Murrow’s address to the Radio-Television News Directors Association & Foundation as depicted in the movie “Good Night and Good Luck.”

Bringing back the brooch

Before the Democratic National Convention, a plethora of questions swirled around the blogosphere. Would Barack Obama finally win over Hillary Clinton’s most loyal supporters? Would Bill Clinton’s speech come off as sincere or forced? And most important of all, what would Michelle Obama wear?

Apparently, Mrs. Obama put considerable thought into that last question, and it really paid off. Her simple blue dress received rave reviews from giddy commenters on this website, and with her jeweled pin, she may have single-handedly brought back the brooch. Grandmas, guard your jewelry boxes.

— teaser copy by Stephanie Lysaght of the Los Angeles Times prefacing a poll asking where Michelle Obama’s convention dress was “too frumpy,” “too matronly,” “flawless first lady,” or “too sexy”; Aug. 29.

During a get-out-the-vote drive, you don’t want to get out the wrong vote.

— Diane Rinaldo, political advertising director at Yahoo, which has worked with both the Obama and McCain campaigns; Washington Post writer Peter Whoriskey reported “Although both the Obama and John McCain campaigns are reluctant to discuss details, the ability to identify sympathetic voters based on their Internet habits, and then to target them with ads as they move across the Web, is one of the defining aspects of the 2008 presidential campaign. Digital advertising networks and large Web companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft are using Web behavior — which news articles people read, which blogs they visit or what search terms they enter — to target voters who may be sympathetic to a certain cause. Using a method known as ’sentiment detection,’ some companies even boast that they can tell whether the blog you go to is for or against the Iraq war”; Aug. 30.

The separation of church and state can sometimes be frustrating for women and men of religious faith. They may be tempted to misuse government in order to impose a value which they cannot persuade others to accept. But once we succumb to that temptation, we step onto a slippery slope where everyone’s freedom is at risk. … The real transgression occurs when religion wants government to tell citizens how to live uniquely personal parts of their lives. The failure of Prohibition proves the futility of such an attempt when a majority or even a substantial minority happens to disagree. Some questions may be inherently individual ones, or people may be sharply divided about whether they are. In such cases, like Prohibition and abortion, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the conscience of the individual, not the coercive power of the state.

— from an address by Sen. Ted Kennedy at Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University) in Lynchburg, Va.; Oct. 3, 1983.

At noon on Tuesday, two young men walked onto the podium at the Democratic National Convention carrying four women’s suit jackets — red, orange, light blue and teal — and holding each one up to the lights to see which would look best in the hall. It was Hillary Clinton’s night, and nothing was being left to chance.

— from a commentary by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post; Aug. 27.

So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him — use these powers wisely and as a last resort.

— from the floor speech of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on S.J. Res. 45, “A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq”; Oct. 10, 2002.

I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base. But it was a moment of great pride for me to visit our troops …

— from a speech on Iraq by Sen. Hillary Clinton at at The George Washingon University; March 17.

[A] democracy requires a certain amount of common ground. I don’t believe you can solve complex questions like this at the grass-roots level or at the national level or anywhere in between if you have too much extremism of rhetoric and excessive partisanship. Times are changing too fast. We need to keep our eyes open. We need to keep our ears open. We need to be flexible. We need to have new solutions based on old values. We can’t get there unless we can establish some common ground. And that seems to me to impose certain specific responsibilities on citizens and on political leaders.

— from a speech by President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University; July 6, 1995.

Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.

— President Bill Clinton, challenging Sen. Barack Obama’s claim that the senator had always opposed the Iraq war; Jan. 11.

Pro-and anti-Democrat protesters yesterday besieged the streets of Denver, Colorado, United States (US), venue of the Democratic National Convention. They made their voices heard on issues ranging from the Iraqi war, abortion rights, gay marriage and rights for swingers (a club of people who swap wives, husbands or partners). … Policemen swarmed every block in the city on horses, motorcycles and vans. Helmet wearing cops, armed to the teeth with guns, clubs and combat style outfits patrolled the area.

— from a story by Constance Ikokwu for the Nigerian newspaper This Day; Aug. 26.

Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. John McCain at rally. [AP photo]

Here’s what I’m worried about. McCain had to protect his reputation as an opponent of status quo Washington. He had to pick someone with the shortest Washington résumé. He did that. He picked someone the right wing is going to be happy about. But it’s a gamble. The question is, what does it do to the argument that Obama’s not ready?

— Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist and former aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, discussing the selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as Sen. John McCain’s running mate; Aug. 29.

She really doesn’t have the experience for this job.

— councilwoman Dianne Woodruff of Wasilla, where Gov. Sarah Palin served as mayor, on her performance as governor; Aug. 29.

Go, Sarah. We’re pumped over here. We’re really, really excited. My kids went to school with her. Todd buys his guns here.

— McCain supporter Roy Wallis, owner of Chimo Guns in downtown Wasilla; Aug. 29.

The President is looking forward to the honor of speaking at the Republican Convention on Monday night. The speech expresses gratitude. The President will thank his family, his administration, and most of all, the friends, supporters and volunteers in the convention hall who have supported him and the Republican agenda for these past eight years.

The speech reviews the major issues facing the country, from terrorism and war to the economy and the direction of our culture. Above all, the speech reflects on the role of the presidency and the qualities that are demanded by the job, and makes the case that John McCain is the best qualified to be our next leader and commander-in-chief. In particular, it highlights McCain’s unique judgment, perspective, and experience to deal with the unexpected, to stand firm on his convictions, put the country above himself, and make hard decisions necessary to protect the American people.

— White House press secretary Dana Perino at a press briefing; Aug. 29.

The American workforce continues to be the marvel of the world. Yet many working families have been weathering tough economic times. There are families across our country struggling to make ends meet. There is an understandable concern about the high price of gas and food. And many Americans are worried about the health of our housing and job markets. I share these concerns about our economy.

— President Bush, in his weekly radio address; Aug. 30.

photo credits:

• Edward R. Murrow: The Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy at Tufts University
• Michelle Obama and her daughters, Malia and Sasha: Rodolfo Gonzalez, Associated Press
• Sen. Ted Kennedy: Susan Walsh, Associated Press
• Sen. Hillary Clinton: Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

All links go to photos.

Our little outfit was issued one hall pass and one perimeter pass at the beginning of the convention. Our esteemed leader Sam was able to fandangle an extra hall pass for Thursday and we heard that our perimeter pass was now upgraded to an arena pass.

It was getting close to 1 pm so I took the perimeter pass and planned to meet up with the rest of the crew there. I took my usual route to the Pepsi Center since I heard there will be a shuttle there to Mile High. Sure enough, there were a hundred people from the press lined up to get on. Then there is an announcement saying that the perimeter passes can no longer get you into the stadium at the request of the Secret Service. So, no shuttle for me.

The distance between the two was less than a mile so I figure I’d hike there to see if I could get in. As soon as I got to the road a mini-bus with a hand-written sign saying Press Shuttle pulled up and let some guy on. I hustled over, flashed my street cred and they let me in.

Good thing. It didn’t take long before we saw the end of the line. It turned out to be about a mile long. The cop who was riding with us said that there were no port-a-potties along the route and he had no idea how the crowd will hold out. It didn’t look like it was moving at all. Somehow, there was still parking here, although it would set you back $40.

Our bus was able to bypass security where other vehicles were having their trunks sniffed by dogs and mirrors passed under their carriage.

The security checkpoint tent we had to go through was identical to the one at the Pepsi Center, except that there was no line at all. It was just for press.

Inside I decided to get lost, since it worked so well for me on Monday. I first tried to get inside the stadium to see what would happen and the lady in the red shirt said nope, that’s the only one that won’t get you in. Well, at least they didn’t try to kick me out.

Since I was here early enough, I was able to find an unguarded entrance to the arena and get inside. Again, like all of the other stagecraft produced by the DNC, it is impressive.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After asking around, I found the press elevator that brought me up to the fourth floor which was just for press. You can get a different view of the “pedestrian” halls from here. Again, dipping into that endless reservoir of blogging content called Get Yourself Lost, I started walking in the direction no one else was going.

I’ve got to tell ya, the press has a sweet deal going here. Air conditioned and everyone has a perfect view. Each seat is assigned to a press outlet; I saw Glamour seated between The Nation and Harper’s. Everyone has their own power outlets, high-speed LAN (that’s 2855 Kb/s down, 1323 Kb/s up with a latency of 69ms) and phone (ours aren’t plugged in). (Some lucky crew has a bank of large LCDs to work from.)

After a while I found the press organizers room and they pointed me all the way back to the other side of the stadium to the mini-blogger lounge. Don’t know why but they have given us the best viewing area for the press; we are right in front of the podium. Good thing they specified mini-bloggers because they are packing us in here like sardines (I’m squeezed between Under The Dome and Talking Points Memo). Still, it’s overflowing and we are going to start rotating. We get 30 minutes in the seat and then we are kicked out to roam around for an hour before they allow us back in.

And to leave you on a happy note, they have just put on the big screens the emergency evacuation plan. You know, just in case.

Click here to view the embedded video.

]]> http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2008/08/28/the-power-of-the-press-pass/feed/ 2 http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2008/08/28/meet-satans-towel-boy-ralph-nader-and-other-famous-rabblerousers-in-a-call-for-open-debates/ http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2008/08/28/meet-satans-towel-boy-ralph-nader-and-other-famous-rabblerousers-in-a-call-for-open-debates/#comments Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:08:30 +0000 Mike Sheehan http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/?p=3523

He’s the man who caused Sep. 11, war in the Gulf, a million Iraqi deaths and probably mad cow disease too. Of course I’m talking about Evil Incarnate, consumer advocate and political gadfly Ralph Nader.

As evidenced by the comments to my piece on him way back when, he’s still roundly feared and loathed by countless Democrats for supposedly helping George W. Bush, no matter how indirectly, steal the 2000 election from Al Gore and allowing everything that followed to pass. Well, he’s running for president again, and his anti-bigwig rhetoric has grown more pointed and caustic, just as the general lefty revulsion for him and his supporters has.

Having the cojones to show up in Denver amid the Dem Convention, Nader gave a closed-door, packed press conference at Magness Arena that also featured anti-war icon Cindy Sheehan, Green Party vice presidential nominee Rosa Clemente, actress Brooke Smith, always-animated punk legend (and Colorado native) Jello Biafra and others.

The Nader et al. rally was nominally a demand to open the presidential debates to third parties and major independents, but as might be expected, the press conference and the subsequent rally featured plenty of denunciations of the Republican and Democratic parties, and the obligatory excoriations of the Bush White House.

I’ll include transcribed quotes from Nader in this post soon, but for now, here was his money quote: “The youth vote needs a kick in their ass.”

I managed to get a question in at the very end of the press conference, asking Nader what his reception in Denver had been like so far. He had only arrived that day, but said that during his brief appearance at the Convention site, he was treated politely and there was not much hubbub. He quipped that it was probably due to Sen. Clinton’s dramatic appearance at the same time for the roll call which gave the official nomination to Obama.

Cindy Sheehan (Ed. note – No relation to me) spoke, discussing her congressional run and reinforcing the theme of the rally. “I want Nancy Pelosi to debate me,” said Sheehan as she began her press conference. She is running against powerful incumbent Pelosi (”the queen of the corporatists,” as Sheehan later called her) in California’s 8th U.S. House District. “We have a system in this country that supports the two-party duopoly,” continued Sheehan. “Alternative voices to the corporate war party are stifled in the media.”

The hallowed anti-war activist who famously ensconced herself in President Bush’s home of Crawford, Texas, later made an impassioned appearance at the rally that followed the press conference, thundering, “Power to the people!” and calling Bush “the boil on the ass of democracy.”

Jello Biafra didn’t hold anything back at either his press meet or the rally. “I come here as a heartbroken former Democrat who’s being reminded yet again as I look around Denver at how anti-democratic the Democratic Party really is,” said the legendary Dead Kennedy to journos, who clicked and filmed away. “They spent $15 million on so-called security for this convention!”

Later, at the rally–with an announced attendance of over 4,000–Biafra shrieked, “What are so they afraid of?!” Challenging the major party candidates to action, Biafra wondered what they would do to end the drug war, repeal the Patriot Act, and bring a close to the military and economic occupation of Iraq. “Iraq is not ours to sell!” he shouted, to cheers and applause.

Biafra also observed that Hillary Clinton’s pantsuit during her key speech on Tuesday “was the same color as a prison uniform” and drew loud boos when he brought up Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar’s vote to approve torture.

Whether it was unconscious or brashly intentional, Biafra kept raising his middle finger as he waved his hands around time and again.

Others were scheduled to follow Biafra, such as Tom Morello, Val Kilmer and Nader running mate Matt Gonzalez, but by this time I had almost run out of audiotape, space on the digicam, and what was left of my energy reserves after several straight days of intense working, walking and writing. I was saving what I had left for one last participant.

Sean Penn is famous for being an intense actor, a scrappy foe of the paparazzi, and a former Mr. Madonna, but he’s gaining quite of bit of notoriety as a ballsy social activist. He went to Iraq before the invasion to see for himself what was going on, attended a prayer meet in Tehran, met with Hugo Chávez, and paddled a boat around flooded New Orleans while Bush was sharing cake with John McCain. His intense dislike of the Bush administration is palpable the minute he opens his mouth.

Perhaps the most anticipated of all the rally guests, Penn declared he supported no candidate but rued the general national tendency to exclude third parties from campaign coverage. “The solution,” he asserted, “is to put all challengers on an open table — and to do that we must have open debate.” He called Nader “an American hero.”

Penn ripped the two main parties: “I’m sick of this high school with suits on called the Democratic and Republican parties.” Of Obama, Penn said, “He’s an elegant man who has great potential,” but “his record is so dominantly status quo.” As for McCain, Penn called him “the man who would be George Bush the Third.”

He saved his harshest words for the White House, indicting various members of the Bush administration as “elitist terrorists” and “traitors” and warned Americans that to prevent the same tragic mistakes of the Bush years, “whoever you vote for, you better hold his ass to the fire.” ∞

What follows are a few shots from the press conference and the main event, taken by Jack Shaftoe, as are all other photos in this piece except for the one at the top, taken by the author.

Jello Biafra

Sean Penn

Nellie McKay

Cindy Sheehan

Rosa Clemente

At the press conference…

Jello Biafra

Brooke Smith

Cindy Sheehan

Outside Magness arena

Where are the homeless?

Before the DNC, there were rumors flying around that the homeless would be rounded up and carted away to some other part of the city, or given money for a meal and a bus ticket out of Denver entirely, or even arrested and held for a week on trumped-up charges that would be conveniently dropped Friday or Saturday after the election. But no-one knew for sure. According to the Voice article “Denver Won’t Hide Homeless for the DNC”, New York city police issued “quality of life” tickets in advance of the 2004 convention, and Denver’s homeless were concerned that the same thing would happen here. The article quoted Denver’s Road Home project manager Jamie Van Leeuwen as saying that the DNC would be largely business as usual for homeless shelters, with a few “extending hours or involving the homeless in politics related activities.” And Commander Deborah Dilley, the Denver Police Department’s downtown district commander said in the article that “the homeless won’t be unfairly targeted by any law enforcement during the DNC.”

So where are they?

Most of Denver’s homeless live in the public spaces of downtown and LoDo, panhandle along the 16th Street Mall and the Cherry Creek Path, and sleep in the large parks and public space that have been taken over or blocked off by the DNC, various security forces, and protesters. But they’re all gone. I’ve been getting into downtown between 7 and 8 AM since Monday, walking from one end of downtown to the other, and the only possible homeless people I’ve seen all week were on Sunday up on Capitol Hill, well outside the main areas where the homeless would congregate. And you’d think that, with such a huge influx of people and wealth, panhandlers would be all over the place trying to get as much money from the delegates, press, staff, and politicians as they possibly could. But they aren’t there. They’re not just invisible, they’re actually gone.

I’ve heard rumors that the homeless were given movie tickets during the day to keep them off the streets. But fellow Scrogue Edmundo Rocha, who used as a homeless specialist for the Harris County Community Development Department says that most cities do exactly what DPD Commander Dilley and Van Leeuwen said they weren’t going to do – they round up the homeless and either detain them at an undisclosed detention center, or they ship them off to economically depressed suburbs and away from the throngs of visitors like all of those attending the DNC.

I’ve asked my fellow Scrogues if they’ve seen any homeless, and the only one of us who has seen more than one or two is Edmundo.

It’s terrible thing to be picked up and hauled away, even temporarily, for the “crime” of not being able to afford a home. But they’re not here in downtown Denver, so they have to have gone somewhere. If you know where they’ve gone, if you’ve talked to some of the sudden influx of homeless in your area and they’re from Denver, let us know. We’d like to know who to point a finger at and accuse of caring more for public appearances during the DNC than for the homeless of Denver.

Street theater is a traditional medium of political dissent, but the protesters at the 2008 Democratic National Convention might do well to look to the Denver police for a lesson in clear and effective improvisational performance.