LETTER TO THE VICE PRESIDENT

 [I do not keep my opinions or advice to myself, so I wrote the following to the Democratic candidate for the presidency.  I share it with my readers because of the points it makes toward the end.]

Dear Vice President Harris:

 

I shall be brief in offering unsolicited advice on any “debate” in any format with former President Trump and on your campaign and message.

 

I expect him to speak for himself or to respond to moderators’ questions or your comments as he did in the first debate.  I advise you to respond to Trump as follows:

 

1.    Dismiss his comments as variously misleading, confused, untrue, insulting, or irrelevant,  etc.

2.    Declare that you are not going to bog yourself down in refutations or clarifications.

3.    Then do not.

4.    Observe that Trump did not answer the question.

5.    Declare your intent to answer the question.

6.    Then answer it.

 

I offer much the same advice about the various slurs—sexist, racist, whatever—which will continue to be directed at you.  Let your supporters or the press deal with them.  Stay on message, and deliver it in a few places which would be surprised by your visit, your understanding of local problems, and your support for some sensible solutions.  And keep smiling; I am not alone in preferring your smiling to Trump’s scowling.

 

A note on your message.  Trump’s choice of Senator J. D. Vance is a bad one.  Many have noted his “weird” or offensive views.  Fewer have noted their link to your theme of “freedom.”  I advise you to ask whether, with only one-and-a-half years in public office, Vance has the depth and breadth of nuanced knowledge, and the maturity of judgment to maintain freedom and democracy in this country, much less around the world, from day one.  After all, if elected, he would be one heartbeat away from Trump’s death by cheeseburger.  Maybe Trump is too old and Vance too young to be president.

 

I have supported all Democrats but one since 1964.  I was pleased by Barack Obama’s campaign and victory.  By comparison, I am totally jazzed by you and your campaign; you are the right person at the right time for this country and this cause.  I have already put my money where my mouth is; I wish I could give more.

BY THEIR WORDS OR WORKS SHALL YE KNOW THEM

      Within a few months of relocating to Las Cruces, I had a read on the governance of the state and the city.  As an outsider with considerable experience elsewhere in local government, I soon realized that, in New Mexico and Las Cruces, political rule was in the hands of GAGA, my acronym for Gringo and Grandee Alliance.  As in the territory’s past and in the state’s present, the real power of rule has been in the hands of a few powerful, usually rich, Whites and Hispanics, and devil take the hindmost.  Today, all others are valued only as a source of votes and taxes, and otherwise for silent subservience.

Within a year, I was writing a column for the Sun-News.  Under the leadership of Jim Lawitz, who wanted something spicier than the usual bland editorial stuff in the paper at that time, it got at least as much as, perhaps more than, he wanted.  Yet, to his credit, Jim censored only one column, “ It’s Time to Mess with Texas” because of the paper’s ownership.  I ran the column as a blog, a popular one, as you can imagine.  By contrast, today’s Sun-News has the idea that a free press should see no evil, hear no evil, and do nothing about evil.  Not surprisingly, the paper is much smaller than it was.

 

My blog has not been popular with local GAGA members, for obvious reasons.  My blogs describe and analyze what I have experienced in my dealings with city officials.  I doubt that I am the only citizen with criticisms of government to get shabby treatment, but I believe that I have been treated more shabbily because city officials resent me for my blogs publicizing my criticisms and their responses.  Regardless, the responses of GAGA members, their words or works, reflect on their character and conduct, and reveal their underlying attitudes and motives.  Citizens may idolize city officials but should also know about their clay feet.  They have less reason to be proud of themselves than their hubristic speechifying and strutting suggest.

 

The Brown Farm fiasco was the subject of repeated blogs on the city’s efforts to remediate a nearby floodplain.  Earlier blogs skewered Public Works’s incompetence and City Manager Robert Garza’s mismanagement.  They drew blood.  Garza issued a report which insinuated that an “angry citizen”—guess who—did not understand the topography; Councilor Sharon Thomas invited me to meet to dissuade me from further criticism.  She said that Garza was trying to change the “culture” in city government and my blogs were making his attempt more difficult.  I wanted to laugh; instead I rejected her claim and effort to silence me.  She never spoke to me again; how her snubs hurt—not.  Subsequent work by Public Works has worsened the mess at much greater expense.

 

Resentment of apt criticism does not subside.  Last year, before a Council meeting on a proposal for a citizens’ police review board, I encountered Tony Trevino, the Deputy Director of Public Works, in the hall outside chambers.  After greetings, he said, “you don’t like us very much.”  I said, “I do not like the messes you make and walk away from.”  He replied, “Well, we do not like you,” and walked away.  Tony is the epitome of the unprofessionalism of city leaders; it is all about personal likes and dislikes.

 

Another instance of unprofessionalism is former City Attorney Jennifer Vega-Brown’s series of exchanges, copied to others, about my case of LCPD’s five false allegations of code violations.  Long after then IA Sgt. Sean Mullen reported that the allegations were unsupported, she lied that the violations had occurred and were well documented.  In rebutting her lawyerly quibbles about the terms of the warning notice, I advised her not to get her knickers in a twist.  Ignorant of the history of the phrase, she implied that I was sexist and resented my talking about her undergarments.  I remedied her ignorance and quipped that she should exercise caution in explaining to her husband how I knew anything about them.  She never thanked me for the instruction or the advice.

 

I have also blogged about City Clerk Christine Rivera’s deliberate, repeated violations of IPRA requirements in response to my IPRA requests, violations committed to vent her spleen and that of city employees whose conduct in office I have criticized.  So she chose to play hard-ass with taxpayers’ dollars; she knew that her misconduct, unprofessional as it is, would have the support of the City Attorney, City Manager, and City Councilors.

 

Councilors are frequent targets.  One is Johana Bencomo.  At a Council meeting just after the George Floyd murder, she was for police reform, including a review board, until Mayor Ken Miyagishima attacked her for disloyalty to the police.  She submissively, swiftly shifted to the opposite position.  Later, when a panel made a case for a review board, she opposed it in the name of, as she emphasized it, “real police reform.”  Her little joke; Bencomo has never proposed or supported anything leading to police reform, real or otherwise.  More evidence of her submissiveness to male authority showed when, learning that former City Manager Ifo Pili broke his promise of an apology to me for the LCPD’s false allegations, she said and did nothing lest it prompt his rebuke.

 

Such is the quality of Councilor commitment to their constituents that they do not act on their behalf by either addressing issues to the City Manager or raising them in public Council meetings when they can speak at the end of the meeting.  Cassie McClure is the most recent instance of this type of failure.  When a friend and I met with her to discuss issues of good government, she was all for it and let on that she was not one to take the party line or be a team player if it was not on the up-and-up.  But acting no differently from her predecessor, Kasandra Gandara, she has done nothing more than urge me to meet with the City Manager or the Police Chief, neither of whom, like the insecure or the juvenile, can address, much less admit, minor LCPD mistakes after five years.  Even when she learned that Police Chief Jeremy Story broke a promise to me and failed to respond to my inquiries, she, like Bencomo, said and did nothing.

 

Councilors’ indifference to constituent service is matched only by their presumption of having some special understanding of how local government really works which those not elected to office lack.  Thus, Becki Graham suggested that we meet, purportedly to discuss my issues.  She did listen to me, then quietly, patiently explained that much of the Council’s and Councilors’ work goes on in private, to which I could not be privy.  I remarked that I could see no difference in results and that back-room conversations did not square with invocations of transparency.  I said nothing about her condescension to me, whom she presumed to be, despite my age, a naif in the world of the wise.  She did not know that I had led the reform of the computer program and the effort to terminate a merit-pay program, in the Fairfax County, VA, public schools; that, through a meeting with the Secretary of Commerce, I persuaded the White House to drop a major proposal to realign two cabinet departments; and that I consulted to a Presidential Blue Ribbon Task Group—all before she graduated from high school.

 

The point of these unflattering stories is to show that local GAGA members prefer to focus on and react to people according to their likes and dislikes, not problems and solutions.  Confronted by criticism, they are defensive and resentful.  They either protect their employees and themselves by denying mistakes or dodging responsibility, or fear alienating them if they act on their constituents’ behalf.  They resist suggestions for improvements or reform because they perceive them as implying employee deficiencies and deflating their presumption to know more and better than others.  Their sense of importance is disproportionate to the size and insularity of a city known for its culture of political indifference, inertia, or ineffectuality.  They regard themselves superior to their constituents, especially their critics, whom they scorn and treat shabbily.  A little humility rather than hubris would go a long way to improving city government and public service.

AN INDEPENDENT'S CHOICE FOR PRESIDENT (AND VICE PRESIDENT?)

        As a registered Independent, I consider more than party affiliation or partisan issues in choosing Republican and Democratic candidates, especially for President.  Republicans think themselves the redeemers of the republic from the demonic forces of Democrats, and Democrats think themselves the defenders of democracy from the barbaric hordes of Republicans.  So this political contest augments itself as a religious/cultural conflict as well—a kind of struggle which cannot preserve democracy.  I prefer not to get embroiled in such irrational polemics, but, for the sake of full disclosure, I lean left.

 

The CNN Non-Debate(27 June) justifies a moratorium on more such nationally and internationally televised embarrassments.  No one with an ounce of sense can think that the fact-free assertions, garbled utterances, and personal insults have anything to do with rational discourse, much less reasonable debate, between two men vying for the presidency.  Who has the better golf game is a variant of who has the longer penis.  By any metric, the United States is the world’s largest, strongest economy; has the largest, strongest military; and is either the most admired or most resented country in the world because of its ideals or its lapses from them.  So I thought of the hundreds of millions in the worldwide television audience who must have asked themselves as they watched this sordid spectacle, is this the best that the United States can do.

 

But if I were like most Republicans, I would have been very pleased by Trump’s performance.  He was vigorous and forceful in his delivery of his usual claims about his accomplishments and his usual criticisms of Biden’s policies and practices.  Even if I knew that much of what he said disregarded, distorted, or denied the truth, I would have been pleased that he made his points and made such a sharp contrast with Biden.

 

If I were like most Democrats, I would have been disturbed by Biden’s performance.  He looked and acted frail, was halting in his speaking, and often seemed confused in his answers.  That appearance obliterated the truths of his answers about his and Trump’s records.  Even if I knew that he had a cold, was affected by medicines given to suppress its effects, or was tired from travel, I would not have been pleased that his performance reinforced the idea that he is too feeble to function effectively in a second term.

 

Between these candidates’ performances, there is little to choose.  If they reflect their capabilities and competence, neither candidate appears qualified to be president, though one might be less qualified than the other.  The idea that this non-debate was more than political theatre, entertaining and profitable, even a basis for choosing between them, is absurd.  When pundits’ points are analyzed and American viewers’ responses are tallied, the results cannot tell us anything about who would be the better president in his second term.  Reasonable people of both parties might wish to have other presidential candidates in 2024.

 

The only thing which can tell us anything are results from the criteria used to judge the performances.  The presumptive point of a real debate—I do not give this event that much credit—is to present the facts about each candidates’ policies, practices, and results, whether in commending one’s own or in criticizing one’s opponent’s.  The facts are always true; “alternative facts” are the falsehoods of gaslighters.  Trump’s claim to credit himself with the reduction of the cost of insulin from $400 to $35 was of a piece with almost all of his other claims: false or misleading.  Biden made no such claims.  One criterion, then, is a respect for the truth and the regard for telling it before a large national (and larger international) audience.  One candidate lied, and the other did not.

 

The criterion of truth should need no defense, but, today, it seems to need one.  Truth is not the only criterion of importance; principles and values other than truth are important as well.  However, truth is prior because it is foundational not only to trust among people, but also decisions based on truth are more likely to get good results than decisions based on falsehoods.  Decisions based on falsehoods are not going to have good results and may have bad ones, no matter who as president makes them.  Johnson’s lies about Vietnam did much to scar generations about dishonest government.

 

In times of rapid demographic, economic, and technological change, millions of people, isolated, insecure, distressed, resentful, or angry seek guidance, direction, comfort, or inspiration from a candidate who presents himself as a strongman and whose dishonest claims offer what they want.  When covid struck this country, former President Trump offered the false comfort of its quick disappearance and the false advice that it could be cured by injections of bleach.  In thrall to supply-side economics, an ideology repeatedly proven false, Trump slightly lowered individual taxes and greatly lowered corporate taxes, increased wealth disparity, added trillions of dollars to the national debt, and got nothing for it.  Despite overwhelming evidence of climate change, Trump declared it a “hoax,” undermined efforts to reduce the factors producing climate change and to mitigate its effects, and withdrew the U.S. from the Paris [Climate] Agreement.  None of these decisions and others was based on truth, and none has had helpful results.

 

Former President Trump’s threat to truth will be greater in a second administration because he will have loyalists to assist him.  He intends to put them in government agencies to report politically appealing or self-serving information or guidance based on selected or skewed data.  He will have them jigger with the truth about air and water quality when his elimination of regulations results in higher, unsafe levels of pollution.  He will have them limit research grants to colleges and universities unwilling to support his objectives.  He threatens to limit access to public telecommunications to those media which support his ideological agenda, and eliminate regulations which support a stable economy and a predictable business environment.  In short, he and his loyalists will set forth as truth what serves their short-term political advantage, not the nation’s welfare.

 

But the many with a short-term interest in their wellbeing and the few with a respect for their long-term interest will prefer a candidate more favorably regarded as truthful.  That candidate would be the one opposing former President Trump.  Presently, that candidate is President Biden.  My calculus is quite simple: a frail but aging man who respects the truth and regards the national interest is a safer bet to make good decisions than a vigorous but aging man who disrespects the truth and regards only himself.  I also factor in abhorrence of violence, compassion for others, and decency in language.  I want my president to be one whose character, conduct, and communications, however well or poorly delivered, I can admire.

 

However, if Biden withdraws—and it appears increasingly likely that he will, perhaps as soon as this weekend—, he should be encouraged to go one step farther, to resign from office.  There are two good arguments for his doing so.  One, if he cannot run for re-election for whatever, no doubt, face-saving reason, he could not continue in office with the public’s confidence.  Two, he would enable Kamala Harris to succeed him and thereby elevate the first woman to the presidency.  Her presidency would foreclose rival candidacies and prevent an unseemly squabble at the party’s national convention.  It would become a convocation of party unity and a celebration to introduce her to the public in the most favorable circumstances.  It would give her a big send-off on the short campaign before the November election.  (She would soon nominate a vice president who should not be her running mate because Republicans in the House and Senate would tarnish and reject him or her in the confirmation process.)

 

Then, there is my concern for the preservation of democracy.  As a notable American entrepreneur once said, “all of us are smarter than some of us.”  Only a democracy can represent all of us, “We the People.”  And a majority of smarter people is likely to make better decisions than a minority of dumber people.

 

The Republican Party has abandoned democracy.  It seeks to replace it with an autocracy, one-man rule.  It seeks to disenfranchise voters by removing targeted groups (e.g., felons, students) from voter rolls, by impeding their ability to vote, and by devaluing their vote by gerrymandering.  Though too late, even supporters will realize that they have shut themselves out of the decision-making process.  They will learn that they can do little about a decision which they do not like.  They will be ignored, silenced, marginalized, even demonized.  They have only to consider how Trump speaks about those who dissent from his views to know how he or his lackeys will deal with them.

 

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party adheres to democracy and its underlying principles and values.  It has worked to expand the franchise to all citizens and encourage their participation in the electoral processes at local, state, and national levels.  Its supporters accept that, when all participate in making a decision, the majority prevails.  They believe, not in the rule of an oligarchy of plutocrats and cronies, but in the principle of governance stated in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”  That means you, me, and the other guy.  They know that Biden supports protecting the vote of those who have it and extending it to those denied but entitled to the vote.

 

If there is any lesson to be learned from recent elections, it is the importance of voting for the same party at all levels of government.  So, in November, I shall vote in person, vote a straight party ticket, and keep my fingers crossed on one hand even if I have to hold my nose with my fingers on the other.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX ABOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION

        Think New Mexico deserves qualified credit for prompting incremental improvements in the state’s K-12 public education system.  Qualified because they defer the problems and their unpleasantness but continue their growing costs.  According to its Executive Director Fred Nathan, “There’s still much more that can be done to improve our ranking for education quality.”  Regrettably, Nathan’s desire “to improve [the state’s] ranking” misdirects the focus of improvement from “education quality” to a superficial metric.

 

Actually, TNM’s goal to improve the state’s ranking—New Mexico is again last in the nation—, is easily reached.  All it takes is for the Public Education Department to fudge the figures (like teachers inflating grades), and New Mexico can rise as high in the rankings as it wants.  The national media will report the New Mexico miracle in public education.  Of course, I jest.

 

TNM’s 25^th anniversary’s annual report again addresses the tiresome issue of public education in New Mexico.  The story is the same: the problem, as TNM defines it, low rankings, is the same; the proposed solutions are the same; and the results are the same.  The Governor and Legislators prefer to address education problems by throwing money at them.  They have increased teachers’ compensation to make New Mexico competitive with other states for teachers as it tries to get a warm body into every classroom.  Yet doing so has done nothing to improve student academic performance.  They have spent many millions on early childhood education, which at best sends students to elementary schools, the teachers in which have, according to proficiency scores in reading and math, proven themselves abject failures.

 

TNM proposes smaller class sizes, which would need more teachers, staff (when New Mexico is short about 750 of each), and money; new required courses for graduation; more training for school board members; disclosure of their campaign contributions; and a teaching residency in the last year of a college of education program.  A TNM survey showed that most of the 403 registered voters, including 183 parents of previous or current students, favor these improvements.  TNM thinks that these numbers are impressive and a reliable guide to policy decisions.  Despite such support, none of TNM’s proposed improvements can improve student academic performance because none addresses the essential elements of education.

 

Take smaller classrooms.  They mean more, not necessarily better, teachers.  For a smaller classroom does not enable a bad teacher to do a better job than he or she would do in a larger classroom.  A bad teacher is a bad teacher—period.  One result of more teachers for smaller classes: a larger constituency of teachers who, through the political power of their unions, would continue to impede meaningful reforms, some requiring higher academic standards, more work to achieve them, and more selectivity.

 

New Mexico and TNM have a choice.  They can repeat the same-old, same-old; stay focused on the same-old, same-old; and keep getting less than mediocre results.  Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  Or they can try something different to get better results.  Of course, the problem is political.  Neither the Governor nor State Legislators have the wit to think or the will to act outside the box—which makes improvement in education nearly impossible.  And TNM, with its political spectrum of directors and donors, has to work within the confines of conventional wisdom.  So everyone should expect pious platitudes, bigger busts (e.g., early childhood education), and nothing to show for bigger bucks.

 

But if lightning were to strike, three alternatives to improving public education might lead to better student academic performance, even a higher national ranking.

 

1.    Reconstruct academic curriculums to be comprehensive, properly sequenced, and challenging.  Do not attempt to revitalize Common Core curriculums.  The curriculum requirements should be stated as knowledge and skills to be taught—teachers would first have to master them—and learned, not defined by student performances.

Note: Common Core, at least in English, is a joke.  It does not stipulate a single work of literature to be known in common by public school students.  Its guidance in grammar demonstrates the multi-dimensional mindlessness of PED experts.

2.    Require for certification that all prospective teachers or transfers from other states, demonstrate competence on independently developed and graded tests in academic areas to be taught (95% or better, with one chance every 3 years).  Certification would be open to all (e.g., military retirees) regardless of formal classes in education.

Note: With the advent of feminism, talented women previously limited to jobs as teachers, nurses, or librarians left or never took those jobs.  Those teaching today are the untalented.  Accustomed to letting “psychic benefits” supplement low pay—education on the cheap—, school boards never adjusted to these facts.

3.    Require state schools of education to prepare its enrollees to achieve competency (see above) in state-defined curriculums in those courses which they expect to teach before the schools graduate them.

Note: These schools, though funded by state funds, serve, not the state’s interests, but their own.  They focus, not on the academic preparation of their enrollees, but on trendy social issues and, of course, methods.  Greatly exaggerated is the need for courses in teaching methods, educational psychology, and educational philosophy.

 

I know that these brief statements of alternatives and the associated notes are stated broadly and require refinements.  Of course, there are exceptions to my generalities, but they prove them.  So I invite comments either by email or by website comments; my blog appears at <https://firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com>.  Since my discussion will irritate some and perhaps prompt them to impugn me as ignorant of education or inexperienced in the classroom, I offer a brief bio of relevant background to deter them or to deflect them to something pertinent.  I have an M.Ed. (Cornell U) in secondary education (English); permanent certification in New York; a Ph.D. in English and a Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award (U of Michigan, where I designed and directed a training program for teaching fellows); 45 years intermittently teaching in public and private high schools, community colleges, and colleges and universities in nine states and D.C. in a variety of demographic environments; and 15 years county-level PTA work on merit pay, curriculum, computers, and other issues.