Really. How could I not post that title? It was sitting there, dying for someone to use it.
Really. How could I not post that title? It was sitting there, dying for someone to use it.
I'm mindful that we're still in the honeymoon phase of governance, and that Bill Clinton let me down repeatedly during his early years in the White House, but there's something to be said about President Obama's initial flurry of executive orders and public statements. In fact, here are 10 good things to be said about them:
That crazy Quincy Jones and his notion that what the United States is a Cabinet level Secretary of the Arts is starting to spark a little attention. Paste Magazine jumped on the bandwagon this week with their picks for such a role -- winning major points from me simply by putting Tom Waits at the top of their list. (An online petition for the creation of a Department of Art had 179,619 signatures as of today.)
Imagine if the City of Richmond had someone, anyone, actively advocating for the arts? Okay, I know, gluing arts and government together is bad, the last thing we need is more government, this would just be a shill for the corporate community. But I just came from a half-day budgeting session where a group of art advocates tried to divvy up a paltry $38,000 between 19 arts organizations representing Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield. (The other $400,000+ landed in the laps of a group of established organizations who signed onto a collaborative budgeting process some 14 years ago.)
My takeaway this morning was twofold -- the public funding mechanism for arts and culture in the Richmond region is broken, and there are a lot of amazing cultural organizations in our region doing incredible work on bare-bones budgets. Haggling over $1,000 in public monies for an organization borders on the absurd -- even though that represents as much as 5% of the annual operating budget of some smaller arts organizations.
My sense is that the Richmond Region Cultural Action Plan process has begun to identify public funding as a serious issue -- not necessarily a need for more funding (though there are advocates for that) but at a minimum a better process to distribute existing funding.
So, a Richmond Arts Administator? Maybe not. A better process to fund arts organizations? Absolutely.
A few weeks ago, I posted some random thoughts calling on Richmond's political leaders to stop viewing residents as consumers, and start viewing us as citizens. Next thing you know, I'm reading pollster John Zogby's latest screed "The Way We'll Be" and his prognastication that our society is moving toward living with limits as consumers and citizens, and are demanding more authenticity from our leaders and each other.
And then, lo and behold, uber-strategist John Robb shows up and echoes it all over again from a slightly different vantage point. The makings of a trend!
Robb talks about the consumer label as masking a transformation already in progress, and that will make our society much more resilient going forward. Here are a few things Robb sees us becoming as a culture:
So far, I've found three public spaces in the Richmond area that will be throwing down with democratic fervor when President George W. Bush lets his 78% disapproval rating hit him on the rearside, and America welcomes Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House.
Nikole, Thea and I will celebrate and watch the inauguration with friends at their Northside home. Where are you going to be inspired?
I'm sure my Richmond readers have been biting their nails over the appointment of former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta as Director of Central Intelligence. It's clear that more than one Democrat is miffed over the notion of a non-spy leading one of the nation's largest intelligence operations.
But a reader at Talking Points Cafe makes a compelling argument that Panetta is exactly what the agency, and the nation, need right now -- a competent manager who will return the CIA to the role of providing high-level, strategic intel to the President, rather than a tactical, on-the-ground outfit fighting for scraps with a dozen other groups trying to provide warfighting intel to troops on the front:
The issue is not intell guy or non-intell guy. The big issue for Blair and Panetta is strategic or tactical orientation. We are fighting two wars and the warfighter always screams they don't have enough intel or enough of anything for that matter. The dice are so loaded for support to the warfighter that critical strategic intelligence for the President and other senior leaders goes wanting due to time constraints on collection assets.
We need a significant re-orientation away from tactical support by CIA and other National agencies and back to their primary mission - direct intelligence support to the President. The last 15 years have seen an explosion of tactical intelligence capability with the advent of UAVs (which DoD fought against for so long due to the fighter pilot mentality). National systems need to be re-oriented to national priorities and away from tactical or operational desires of the warfighter.
Hmm. A president who operates using strategic intelligence. That'd be a nice change.
I read Michelle Singletary's columns on personal finance almost every Sunday in the Washington Post, operating under the assumption that eventually some of her common sense will bleed into my life without any awareness on my part.
This week, I read her column and immediately started thinking about the various downtown development schemes in play around Richmond these days.
It's time, Singletary suggests, to stop thinking of ourselves as consumers.
As Richmond enters the Dwight Jones/Kathy Graziano era of city government, wouldn't it be an interesting moment to begin to change -- or at least add to -- the measures we use to gauge our success as a city?
What if, in addition to dollars invested and commercial square footage leased, Richmond's leaders began talking seriously about the outcomes of human investment? What if the Department of Social Services initiated a Social Master Plan that mirrored the Downtown Master Plan in its efforts to engage residents in a conversation about what mattered in their lives? What if the School Board and its dramatically new membership were to create a public process that brought parents and teachers and students together to invent a different future for our educational system?
What if our leaders began to invest as much of their time and energy in the creation (or empowerment) of citizens as they in the creation of capital?
David Brin, the social scientist and science fiction author turned weblogger, has been posting a series of well-informed and well-articulated thoughts about what the Obama administration might consider tackling in its first months. He floated the idea of a "Truth and Reconciliation" commission earlier this month, and followed it up today with a provocative post on the possibility that the last eight years represented something more malicious than deliberate incompetence.
Along the way, Brin serves up a historical reminder of a simple action taken in 1775 that directed American society along a distinctly different course than its European counterparts. That action, simply put, was state laws managing the redistribution of wealth:
Brin posits that the current testing of our system of capital might force some similar creativity in the months and years to come -- and suggests we consider (again) taking a different course than our European cousins.
I was just complaining the other day about how Europeans put a splash of cheap red wine in sippy cups for fussy toddlers; apparently, that's taboo here in the States. Fortunately, by the time Thea turns three I'll be able to give her wine, cigarettes and cheap, plastic sandals. At least of you believe former KGB analyst Igor Panarin. From BLDGBlog:
And from the Wall Street Journal piece itself:
In addition to the fact that Canada and Mexico suddenly develop dramatic political and social influence over populations twice their own, I just really appreciate the notion that as a resident of Atlantic America my cash (which will be Euros, thank you) will be worth six times that of the Chinese-led California Republic. The map pretty much tells the story:
There's something to be said about good, clean mapping. It really takes the messiness out of political restructuring.
It all shook down in 1980, according to TIME Magazine.
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