The antidote to bombast: politicians who will listen

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As I wrote last time, the Knight Foundation recently reported the lowest levels of trust in our government since Gallup began tracking the issue sixty years ago. In 1964, for example, 74 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right at least most of the time. Today that figure is less than 25 percent. 

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Draft 'em all: an appeal for universal service (Part 2)

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From 1968 to 1970 I was stationed at ACE Counterintelligence in Mons, Belgium. ACE was not a description of our professional prowess. It was, like most things in the military, an acronym, standing for Allied Command Europe. We were the intelligence unit for NATO’s military headquarters.

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The real cost of hush money

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$32 million is a troubling amount of money. That’s how much Lis Wiehl was paid to keep silent about her allegations of sexual harassment by Bill O’Reilly, including a “nonconsensual sexual relationship,” which seems a euphemism for rape. That brings to $45 million the amount paid to O’Reilly’s victims – and almost $100 million paid on behalf of male employees of Fox News. All the agreements had confidentiality clauses.

The amounts are jaw dropping – and you could argue that the payments to Harvey Weinstein’s victims, in the form of film careers, were worth far more. More troubling is what they bought: silence.

The women are victims. The game the men were playing was not about sex, it was about power. Their behavior was reprehensible; it was also just creepy. “When you’re a star,” Donald Trump said, “you can do anything.”

The deck was stacked: Juliet Huddy told Megyn Kelly she’s still “terrified” of Fox News, even after her lawyers hammered out a six-figure settlement. “You know that you’re just this one person that’s about to go up against literally a machine.”

And that’s what’s so troubling about the silence. It wasn’t just one person. There were dozens of them at Fox, thousands elsewhere – yesterday the California Senate hired a law firm to investigate sexual intimidation claims in Sacramento.

The real cost of silence is not the huge sums the perps and their companies paid in hush money. It’s that it allowed other and future victims, in the midst of a criminal epidemic, to believe they were alone.

Blogging in a time of horror

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The aim of these blogs is to present short essays that will give you an idea to consider, if only fleetingly, much like Robert Frost’s belief that a poem could be “a momentary stay against confusion.” So perhaps they’re not equipped to deal with a tragedy of the proportions of Sunday’s massacre in Las Vegas, which to date has killed 59 people and wounded over 520 more. Yet to write about something else seems a kind of a desecration, as does engaging in the same mind-numbing dance in which accusations of “politicizing” the shootings stifle any debate at all. 

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A narrow trail lovingly made

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A new trail begins just west of Little Long Pond on the Mt. Desert Land & Garden Preserve, which consists of 1,165 acres abutting Acadia National Park. The Richard Trail is named for Richard Rockefeller, a doctor who for years chaired the advisory board of Doctors Without Borders and died when the plane he was piloting crashed in fog and heavy rain three years ago.

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The Good News

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This is a simple story about people who do their jobs well.

I’m judging a statewide newspaper contest, which consists of entries from six local daily papers, all of them multi-issue series of interest and importance to their communities. Contrary to the constant barrage of reports about fake news, sensationalism, and bias, these submissions bespeak a profession that is, well, professional. They are not large, metropolitan newspapers, but small, one-time family-owned operations, who charge their few reporters to dig deep into issues that affect their readers and the communities they serve.

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“I was one small stone."

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Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens died last week at her home near the Loire River in France. She was 98. During World War II, she served as an interpreter for a French business association during the German occupation – and also as an amateur spy whose charm, flawless German, and incredible courage enabled her to gather and pass along information on the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets that saved thousands of English lives. 

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