Empowering Senators People
That miniature public relations sidelight should not detract from the seriousness of the mission of Ms. Rice. Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Culver City) brought her to Venice Boulevard. She was addressing an interfaith gathering for the senators trademark Empowerment Congress group, an enclave for common-persons who want to be meaningfully involved,politically. The senator was striking, as usual. Destroying gangs and reforming their members is, said Sen. Ridley-Thomas, the most pressing question in our time in this community. The senator shortly explained why Ms. Rice was brought in. Our objective is to be educated to engage and to be empowered to make a response to the gangs problem.
Maybe It Was Wrong Approach
This is a guess, but not a daring one. Since most of the several hundred people in the room were faith-based in their lives, they would rather have heard Ms. Rice remind them that the education of children begins at home at or before birth continues at home, and ends at home. Instead, Ms. Rice spoke animatedly for a half-hour. Sadly, she relied on the modern-day idiot sheet, the hideous power-point presentation. She employed more figures in 30 minutes than Hugh Hefner has in the last 55 years. Power-point, you may recall, was devised by an egomaniac, explicitly to make public speakers feel better about themselves, to convince themselves they had transmitted trunkloads of useful information. I shall offer you an analogy: Picture a stuntman, holding 25 gallons of coffee, standing 10 feet above the speaker. On a prearranged signal, said stuntman turns the barrel of steaming coffee decaf, naturally upside down. This has the desired effect of drenching, nearly drowning, the speaker. The stuntman abjures the speaker to open wide and swallow all 25 gallons before the coffee washes past him and hits the floor.
One Mans Bias
I arrived at the Buddhist temple with the same suspicions about civil rights attorneys that I also harbor toward academics who teach the feminist studies courses or the educators behind Black History Month. They might have been noble ideas at their points of germination. Civil rights were historically abused. Girls were second-class citizens. And little formally or structurally was written down about black history once somebody defined what constituted black history. I was reminded of the definition of Jewish music. Is it Jewish because a Jew sings it or because a Jew wrote it or because a Gentile wrote it about Jews? Should the accomplishments of, for example, a black Cuban be indexed inside of black history. Who defined the phrase? And what were these peoples agendas? They did have agendas. Soon enough, wild-eyed ideologues seized control of all three concepts. The good days ended quickly. Extremists, who are still setting the agendas, drove all three of these potentially honorable causes into ditches.
The Promise of a Speaker
Meanwhile, back at the Buddhist temple: Sen. Ridley-Thomas promised his eager interfaith audience that Ms. Rice would deliver a two-tiered analysis. She would characterize the ubiquitous nature of Los Angeles gangs and she would explain the proposal of her 14-member research team for restoring order. We shall discuss this at some length tomorrow
Postscript
Two notes of interest: By my count, Mayor Villaraigosa is nursing two streaks four consecutive editions without having his picture show up in the Los Angeles Times, and two consecutive days spent in Los Angeles. Both are believed to be records
County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who probably should be remanded to a political hospice, ended her personal streak for not trumpeting nutty ideas. Last week, she revived her months-long campaign to convince fellow supervisors to change policy and formally encourage the county to hire ex-cons. The proposal was continued until the Feb. 20 meeting of the County Sups. This morning, Grandma Bad News was scheduled to participate in a news conference with two other busybody politicians. Her intention was to discourage the general public from consuming foods containing trans-fats. This is how you spend your days, I presume, when you become politically decrepit. The intolerable wrinkles of aging show up in your proposals rather than your skin
