No ethics medal for Rangel

We’ve long admired the achievements of Congressman Charlie Rangel of New York, who rose from a tough childhood in Harlem to a career of public service in New York and a leadership role in the U.S. House of Representatives.

With a witty – some would say charming -- demeanor, the 79-year-old Rangel is one of those rare politicians who can make himself understood clearly in ten words or less.

Chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee in the House, Rangel has been admonished by a House ethics panel for accepting trips to the Caribbean from a private corporation. While that panel exonerated four other Congressmen who were also on those trips in 2007 and 2008, they didn't absolve Rangel.

Alas, Rangel’s utterance this week in defense of those trips was more than ten words. He was dancing the old “Potomac two-step,” and it’s not a happy situation for Rangel or his supporters.

The usually amiable Rangel told a news conference, “I don’t want to be critical of the committee but common sense dictates that members of Congress should not be held responsible for what could be the wrongdoing or mistakes or errors of staff unless there’s reason to believe that member knew or should have known, and there is nothing in the record to indicate the latter.”

Army hero Charlie Rangel, winner of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star for his valiant service during the Korean War, wouldn’t duck responsibility. But this is another Charlie Rangel, numbed by some 40 years on Capitol Hill, deflecting responsibility and suggesting underlings were to blame.

Charlie Rangel has done a lot of good things for his constituents in Manhattan. And he’s done a lot of good things for his country. But I fear he has succumbed to the ways of Washington, cutting corners and losing touch with the people – and the principles – that may have lured him to public service in the first place.

It’s a powerful example of why we need term limits for most elected officials.

Anonymity breeds a bit of libel...

We’ll shed no tears over the demise of HB-1277 and HB-1278 at the state legislature yesterday (2/22/10).

The bills were crafted to help identify culprits who plaster the internet with anonymous comments that are libelous. Had they become law, they would have required web site operators to provide information about people who post articles or comments on their websites. Specifically, it would have sought logs that contain the Internet Protocol Addresses (IPA) of bloggers and people who post comments and other content onto web sites. Supporters said they were simply trying to give some recourse to people who’d been victimized by anonymous and libelous attacks on the internet.

Most of the speakers who provided testimony before the House State Affairs Committee – both pro and con – seemed to agree that something needs to be done. In the end, committee members indicated that these bills, even if passed into South Dakota law, would likely have little impact upon the worldwide web. They tabled HB-1277 and sent HB-1278 to the 41^st day, effectively killing it.

We’re no fan of anonymity on the internet. Criticism is not regular fare on Black Hills Monitor or our any of our other sites, but we do occasionally take some institutions and individuals to task for what we consider to be their transgressions. That said, we try to keep above the gutter gibberish that adorns some blogs.

We suspect this issue will not go away. Nor should it. The worldwide web is a marvelous tool, but it is increasingly abused by individuals and corporations alike. At some point, the “blogosphere” will need to embrace better tools to keep it from being overrun by a cesspool of unscrupulous marketers and disgruntled rabble-rousers who hide behind anonymity while injecting libelous venom across blog postings.

Something must and something will be done about anonymous internet postings that defame folks. That was part of the message conveyed in this KELO-TV interview (below) with a former colleague of ours, Todd Epp of Sioux Falls. We agree with that position – but it won’t be HB-1277 or HB-1278.

Let's stop apostrophe abuse!

Lorraine Collins offers her Black Hills Pioneer column to us every two weeks or so, and we always enjoy them. We trust you do, too.

The big black headline in the newspaper said, "Resident's brace for storm." I wondered who this resident was and what his brace looked like. I don't know why the headline writer was so determined to add an apostrophe between the t and the s, but maybe it results from what seems to be a widespread paranoia about the apostrophe. People seem to be afraid of it, and they aren't sure just what to do with it, so every now and then they shut their eyes and fling it onto the page, hoping it lands in the right place.

On the theory that knowledge overcomes fear, as a public service I thought I might spend a moment or two today helping folks get acquainted with the apostrophe so they can learn to live with it or, sometimes, without it. I presume the headline writer meant to indicate more than one resident was bracing for a storm. Actually, the plural of "resident" is simply "residents" with no apostrophe required. Apostrophes are used in the English language for only two reasons: to indicate a letter has been left out, as in "don't" for "do not" or to indicate possession, as in "the resident's snow shovel."

It may seem odd that I'm so concerned about the apostrophe when so much other damage is being done to the English language as we used to know it. We used to worry about the degradation of language by using the lingo common to e mail, but now we have Twitter and texting syntax to worry about. Some believe these are going to be the ruination of eloquence and poetry if the trend keeps up. Can you imagine Romeo texting to Juliet, "LU! UR 6Y!"

Although I may be fighting a rearguard action in a lost war, I believe the apostrophe is the single most abused and misused punctuation mark in the English language. Some aficionados of the apostrophe have become so concerned that they formed the Apostrophe Protection Society. I'm not an official member of the society, but want to do my bit to protect the apostrophe anyway. So this is my lecture on why the apostrophe exists and what we should do with it. Please pay attention as I do not want to go through this again.

One problem folks have occurs when they want to indicate that more than one person possesses something, such as a house, so we see signs such as "The Smith's" by a front door.

Actually, this means that a single person named Smith lives there, and maybe his or her first name is "The." If the Smiths want to indicate that more than one Smith possesses the house, they should put the apostrophe after the letter s. A sign saying The Smiths' indicates the reality of the situation. But people seem even more troubled by the apostrophe in these cases.

So my solution is to simply have the sign saying "The Smiths" with no apostrophe whatever, indicating that The Smiths live here and never mind who owns the house. Another solution would be to just have a sign that says "Bob and Betty Smith". No apostrophe required and it offers more information anyway, to the guy who comes to the door wanting to sell a vacuum cleaner. He can say, "Hello, Betty, may I show you a nice vacuum cleaner?"

One last word: of all the trouble dealing with apostrophes, the worst seems to be deciding between "it's" and "its". The thing to do is to think of "its" as being just like other words indicating possession, such as his, her, our, your, or my, none of which has an apostrophe. So one can say his glove, her coat, its dog house. To put an apostrophe in the word indicates that a letter has been left out, as in "It's a really cold day" or "If that woman doesn't shut up about the apostrophe, it's going to drive me mad."

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be reached at collins1@rushmore.com.

America's "Voice"

Despite intense jamming by the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War, and unabashed political assaults within the U.S. government over the years, the Voice of America has survived.

Alas, while the broadcasting service is a mere shadow of its former self, VOA continues to span the globe in 45 languages, reaching an audience that they estimate at about 130 million people every week. To serve that audience, VOA uses shortwave, FM, medium wave AM broadcasts, the Internet, and television.

Long-time international broadcaster Alan Heil, Jr., who toiled in the vineyards of VOA from 1962 until 1998, has written Voice of America – A History, and it’s a masterful history of an important American institution. While little known within U.S. borders because of the Smith-Mundt Act (yep, that’s South Dakota’s own Karl Mundt), the Voice of American has been a beacon of information and hope for millions of people around the world since it was created in 1942.

The Heil book introduces us to VOA by providing a fascinating narrative about its role in providing news and information to some 60 million Chinese during the tumultuous 1989 uprising in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The VOA delivered news that the Chinese citizens couldn’t get from their own government. It’s a compelling story that hooks the reader right away.

Then Heil escorts readers back to the origin of the VOA in 1942, when its first broadcasts in German pledged to listeners in Europe, “We bring you voices from America. Today, and daily from now on, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.”

And that has been a guiding light for VOA for nearly seven decades.

Heil sorts out the continuing struggle to “get it straight” during the early journalistic years of VOA. He provides insightful stories of correspondents doing their jobs from Cairo and Beijing to Munich and Moscow. He adds some touching stories about the many talented immigrants who escaped from dire political and economic circumstances to find a home at the Voice of America. There’s an inside look at the abiding struggle for a VOA charter and independence – a firewall from political influence.

While the bulk of the book focuses upon news and information services at VOA, Heil also pays tribute to the value of music and cultural programs. He acknowledges the plight of many VOA broadcasters: they are well known around the world, but unknown at home. The late Willis Conover (at right), long-time producer and host of “Music USA” jazz programs was a real celebrity around the globe, but virtually unknown in the United States.

Alan Heil's book takes the reader right up to the turn of the century (it was published in 2003). It’s extremely well documented, but it reads every bit as easily as a good novel. Alas, its final chapter, “Conclusion,” leaves the reader with some anxiety about the future of VOA.

And rightfully so.

By 2010, we find a complicated menagerie of bureaucracies – each pitted against the other – fighting for missions and funding from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). It’s the 9-member BBG that tries to oversee not only the Voice of America, but a group of so-called “surrogate” broadcasters – also funded by U.S. taxpayers. English and many foreign language broadcasts have been chopped from the VOA schedule. Some of those foreign broadcasts, like Arabic, were moved to the surrogate agencies: Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), and Radio and TV Marti broadcasts to Cuba in Spanish.

As nearly as we can tell, the BBG has allowed itself to be mired in day-to-day operations, rather than focusing upon policy and planning. Some of the services seem bent on luring only a young audience, thus we find a real dominance of music and youth-oriented programming – at the expense of news and information programming.

We were taken by a quotation Heil offered by our former public broadcasting colleague and one-time VOA Director, Mary Bitterman, who said, “It is not the organizational structure which permits creativity and integrity, but the character of the people involved in oversight.”

Alan Heil’s book offers a rare glimpse of both the organizational structures – and the people – who have shaped the Voice of America.

The grass roots league

Our neighbor Lorraine Collins always has an interesting perspective on a wide range of topics. This time she writes about journalism -- specifically, well-known columnist Ellen Goodman. It's a piece that might catch your interest -- and perhaps spur a comment or two. Lorraine's commentaries appear regularly in the Black Hills Pioneer, and this is her most recent offering. She graciously allows us to share it with on-line readers here.

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A very fine columnist for the Boston Globe, syndicated in many newspapers including some in South Dakota, retired this month. Her name is Ellen Goodman and I met her a couple of times more than 30 years ago. Just as she was retiring, she was interviewed on the Public Radio show, "Talk of the Nation." She sounded great, laughing when asked why she was retiring. Her answer was, "My editor asked me that, too, and I said, 'Why not?'" She had been a journalist for 41 years.

She still is a journalist, of course, just no longer regularly employed . I'd say we're in the same boat, except she's been on an ocean liner and my craft has been more like a canoe. I was interested to hear her say that she once worked for Newsweek Magazine in New York. A few years earlier I had a similar job at Time Magazine. We were both "editorial researchers", all of whom were women, gathering data, contacting correspondents, interviewing people, getting whatever the writer needed, handing him the file. All writers were men. After the men writers had written their articles, we would have to check those for facts. If the guy said "This is the longest bridge in Venezuela" we had to find out whether it really was.

Ellen Goodman said that people she has talked to in the intervening years were not surprised that she was discriminated against for being a woman, but they were surprised that it was legal. This was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ellen Goodman's career has been much more straightforward than has mine. She left New York, as I did, but she went home to Massachusetts and continued to be a journalist for the Boston Globe. Eventually she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Well, I went home to South Dakota and eventually was named The South Dakota Presswomen' s Woman of the Year, but it's hardly the same. I first met Ellen in Mitchell in 1977 when this was the site of the South Dakota International Women's Year Conference. She was our Keynote Speaker and I was co-chair of this event.

Later that year, at the National IWY event in Houston, Ellen was there covering the conference and interviewed me. This long ago event, now buried in the detritus of history, was very controversial at the time. Betty Friedan was on one side, and Gloria Steinem was on the other. Should we be concerned about Gay Rights, or just Women's Rights? I sided with Friedan, thinking that the only issue we had was that gay women should have the same rights as gay men, just as straight women should have the same rights as straight men. Our side lost and the huge arena erupted with celebrations of pink and blue balloons up in the gallery. It was some experience, I tell you.

I've thought, sometimes, about Ellen Goodman and me, our similarities and differences. She continued to be a very good journalist and commentator in a very good venue, sophisticated, metropolitan, East Coast. I came back here to the hinterlands, which seems to be a place I like. Although apparently her life has been devoted only to journalism, I've been active in politics and public office, have ventured into writing fiction, which I love doing. I think well, she's been in the big leagues, and I've been in the minor leagues, but I'm comfortable with that.

I think of the Rapid City Rush hockey players, the minor league baseball players, the golfers who never quite make it to the PGA tour. Life is pretty good out here in the minor leagues, and sometimes I think I can still make a difference in some small way in how this community, this state, this nation runs its affairs. I call this the Grass Roots League.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be reached at collins1@rushmore.com.