A bumper crop of nooses

Since the Great Society drowned in the rice paddies of Vietnam, Americans (and their government) have been content to let the grinding poverty, intractable hopelessness and staggering ignorance of the Mississippi River Delta region sort its own self out.

Well, it has. And that means things ain't changing a whole hell of a lot.

Squalor still abounds, government is still rotten, schools are a joke, black folk lack opportunity (and in many cases fair treatment), and white folk ain't much better off themselves. And -- as these things go in the Deep South -- the past isn't really past at all.

AND YOU GET THINGS like nooses hanging from schoolyard oak trees. White boys pulling guns on black ones. Black teens cold-cocking a white one who they heard had been hurling racial slurs.

Black malefactors getting the book thrown at them, while the white ones get a slap on the wrist . . . along with an official wink and a smirk.

Mayors of small towns in the Louisiana hinterlands thanking Mississippi white supremacists for their moral support.

You get redneck burgs like Jena, La., and the latest incarnation of America's Original Sin. You get the Jena Six. And the righteous protests. And the white right's backlash.

AS I'VE SAID, the little bigots who hung those nooses on the "white tree" at Jena High School threw a great big rock into a pond of iniquity, and the ripples have been spreading ever since, getting all the bigger the farther they travel.

And the nooses hang all across this troubled land.

From WCBS television in New York:

There was a disturbing discovery near Ground Zero in Manhattan Thursday. A noose was found hanging from a lamppost at the Church Street Post Office. This is just the latest message of hate striking the city.

Police said it wasn't clear where or at whom the Church Street noose might have been directed.

"At this point, there was no target that was evident or any motive," U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Al Weissman said Friday morning. He said no postal workers had reported any threats or other problems.

Postal workers in a second floor office at Church Street noticed the noose Thursday afternoon

Building managers removed the noose, which was later turned over to the NYPD's hate crimes unit for investigation, police said.

Speaking to reporters following a ceremony at a police memorial, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly suggested that the noose outside the post office could have been an attempt to imitate the discovery at Columbia, which shocked the Ivy League campus and received extensive news coverage.

"We have to be concerned about a copycat being out there," he said, adding that police had no suspects or motives in either incident.

Meanwhile, detectives at the NYPD Hate Crime task force have 56 hours of surveillance tapes to comb through, trying to catch the person who hung a noose on Professor Madonna Constantine's door at Columbia University.

A colleague, who Constantine is suing for defamation, says she had nothing to do placing this vile symbol of racism at her door.

"This whole thing is utterly, utterly despicable, ugly. As I've said to several people, nobody in the world should have to go through something like this," said Columbia Professor Suniya Luthar.

Nooses -- deplored as symbols of lynchings in the Old South -- have appeared in recent incidents in the New York area and across the country.

In Queens, a white woman was arrested after threatening to kill her black neighbor's children with a noose.

Other nooses have been found at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, and in the Hempstead Police Department's locker room on Long Island.

According to Morris Dees, co-founder of Southern Poverty, "Maybe Jena, Louisiana, has caused a copycat situation. There is no real database on nooses around the country, but there's been an increase in the last 10 to 15 years all over the U.S. -- not just the south."

NOW THE NATION will come to understand what we Southerners know from the day we're ripe for knowing. As William Faulkner -- who knew a little about these things -- so succinctly put it, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

God help us all.

Mr. Mellencamp is right. And people are mad.

This episode of the Revolution 21 podcast goes out to those people who, seven years into the 21st century, have firm convictions that any questioning of the "justice" occurring in Jena, La., is worth "f*** you and f*** Mychal Bell" or ungrammatical assertions that you're on the side of rampant criminality.

OF COURSE, for many of these folks, I'm sure the all-black Jena Six's so-called rampant criminality equals "boys will be boys" when the schoolyard fight is an all-white affair.

In other words, we're going to hear John Mellencamp's brand-new release, "Jena." The one that's got the town's mayor so darn mad, not to mention so much of the right-wing universe railing against "liberal rock musicians."

After all, isn't the White Right rather proving Mr. Mellencamp's point with their overreaction and venom?

Otherwise, we've got a pretty diverse show for you this week -- as usual. Not to mention a sweet "little" set of tasty tunes.

It's the Big Show, and it's designed to rock your world. One way or another.

Be there. Aloha.

Welcome back to the '60s. It's gonna get ugly

Oh, Lord.

There's no way this Jena Six thing is going to end well, now. It's going to get uglier, and uglier, and uglier, and it's going to go KABOOM!

Down there in North Louisiana, them whut runs things done got their backs up. Which will help at election time, because the True Believing Right Wing has got its back up, too, and the rednecks are going apes***.

Meanwhile, Jesse and Al ain't going to let this go. Actually, they shouldn't, because this smells to high heaven:

JENA, La. (AP) -- A teenager at the center of a civil rights controversy was back in jail Thursday after a judge decided the fight that put him in the national spotlight violated terms of his probation for a previous conviction, his attorney said.

Mychal Bell, who along with five other black teenagers is accused of beating a white classmate, had gone to juvenile court Thursday expecting another routine hearing, said Carol Powell Lexing, one of Bell's attorneys.

Instead, after a six-hour hearing, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. sentenced him to 18 months in jail on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

He had been hit with those charges before the Dec. 4 attack on classmate Justin Barker. Details on the previous charges, which were handled in juvenile court, were unclear.

"He's locked up again," Marcus Jones said of his 17-year-old son. "No bail has been set or nothing. He's a young man who's been thrown in jail again and again, and he just has to take it."

After the attack on Barker, Bell was originally charged with attempted murder, but the charges were reduced and he was convicted of battery. An appeals court threw that conviction out, saying Bell should not have been tried as an adult on that charge.

Racial tensions began rising in August 2006 in Jena after a black student sat under a tree known as a gathering spot for white students. Three white students later hung nooses from the tree. They were suspended but not prosecuted.

More than 20,000 demonstrators gathered recently in Jena to protest what they perceive as differences in how black and white suspects are treated. The case has drawn the attention of civil rights activists including the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Sharpton reacted swiftly upon learning Bell was back in jail Thursday.

"We feel this was a cruel and unusual punishment and is a revenge by this judge for the Jena Six movement," said Sharpton, who was instrumental in organizing the protest held Sept. 20, the day Bell was originally supposed to be sentenced in the case.

Mauffrey, reached at his home Thursday night, had no comment.

Bell's parents were also ordered to pay all court costs and witness costs, Sharpton said.

"I don't know what we're going to do," Jones said. "I don't know how we're going to pay for any of this. I don't know how we're going to get through this."

MONTHS BACK, I was telling Mrs. Favog that we're in for a rough ride, because the '00s are the new '60s . . . with an attitude. Sad to say, I think I was right.

Hang on, folks. This is gonna get ugly.

Floodwall . . . art and history from the ruins

A wall of ruined dresser drawers eight feet high by 100 feet long doesn't sound like a showstopper of a museum exhibit.

BUT WHEN YOU REALIZE that all these wrecked remnants of ruined furniture are the remnants of people's homes -- and lives -- wrecked when New Orleans' levees gave way during Hurricane Katrina, well, the emotion washes over you like the dirty water did that benighted city. Powerful stuff, particularly as the people behind the wall of debris tell their own stories via a sound system hidden in the wall.

It's called "Floodwall," and it's on display for a couple more days at the Louisiana State Museum, across the street from the State Capitol in Baton Rouge. I could prattle on, but I suppose the artist behind the project, Jana Napoli, better can tell the story of the art she salvaged from trash piles outside flood-wrecked homes all across the New Orleans area:

“Having to throw your furniture out in front of your house -- your life is sort of taken from you and sort of dumped out in your front yard.” . . . “New Orleans was here before America was here and we are a part of America.”

(snip)

"We were driven to create a wailing wall that builds intimate and homely detritus from a world destroyed into a wrenching cry of grief," said Ms. Napoli. "This emotional endeavor quickly grew into a sculptural and historical work allowing the people of New Orleans to tell their own story about what they value and why.”

I THINK NAPOLI achieved her objective with this amazing combination of historical salvage, art and oral history. If you can get there in the next couple of days, go to the Louisiana State Museum and do yourself a big favor.

And speaking of the year-old museum just off the capitol grounds, I'll just say that I thought it would be a fine museum, but I was shocked at exactly how good it is. If I had had more time, I could have spent the whole day there . . . and I would have, too.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Floodwall web site

Louisiana State Museum -- Baton Rouge

Muslims want to make nice. I think.

Newsweek reports that a broad cross section of the world's Muslim leaders want to make nice with Christians. Just the fact that the leaders got together to pen this letter is amazing enough, but what if they really mean what they seem to say?

Interesting would be a gross understatement:

Getting religious leaders to agree on anything is notoriously difficult. So this morning’s announcement—that 138 of the world’s most powerful Muslim clerics, scholars and intellectuals from all branches of Islam (Sunni and Shia, Salafi and Sufi, liberal and conservative) had come together to write a letter to the world’s Christian leaders—is being hailed as something of a miracle.

In a display of unprecedented unity, the letter — which calls for peace between the world’s Christians and Muslims — is signed by no fewer than 19 current and former grand ayatollahs and grand muftis from countries as diverse as Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq. It is addressed to Christianity’s most powerful leaders, including the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury and the heads of the Lutheran, Methodist and Baptist churches, and, in 15 pages laced with Qur’anic and Biblical scriptures, argues that the most fundamental tenets of Islam and Christianity are identical: love of one (and the same) God, and love of one’s neighbor.

On this basis, the letter, entitled “A Common Word Between Us and You,” reasons that harmony between the two religions is not only necessary for world peace, it is natural. “As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them — so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes … Our very eternal souls are all at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace,” the letter reads. “It’s an astonishing achievement of solidarity,” says David Ford, director of the Cambridge University’s Interfaith Program. “I hope it will be able to set the right key note for relations between Muslims and Christians in the 21st century, which have been lacking since September 11.”

One profound obstacle to establishing positive relations among mainstream Muslim and Christian groups, argues Ford, has been the lack of a single, authoritative Muslim voice to participate in such a dialogue. This letter changes that. “It proves that Islam can have an unambiguous, unified voice,” says Aref Ali Nayed, a leading Islamic scholar and one of the letter’s authors.

(snip)

Early responses indicate that Christian leaders are welcoming the “Common Word” with open arms. In Britain the bishop of London told NEWSWEEK that the letter would “invite” young people to view the world as “a place where dialogue is possible, instead of a place full of threats.” America’s evangelical Christian leaders are being similarly positive. Rod Parsley, senior pastor of the World Harvest Church in Ohio, says, “My prayer is that this letter begins a dialogue that results in Muslims and Christians uniting around the love we have for each other as God’s children.”

PUT ME DOWN for a cautious "Woo Hoo!" Assuming, of course, that these Muslim leaders can put their followers where their mouth is.

May it be so.

Jena's strange fruit spreads across the land

This is a story about how there is no such thing as private sin, or sin that stays between what we think of as "the offender" and "the offended."

This is a story about how sin is a great big rock, and how dirty, rotten sinners (and that would be all of us) take that big rock and pitch it in the pond, just for the hell of it. And then big ripples spread across the water's surface from the splashdown point.

AND THE LITTLE WAVES upend little Johnny's little boat, prompting little Johnny to take out his frustration on his little sister. Which causes little Johnny's dad, upset that the commotion has disturbed his peace and quiet -- not to mention his fishing -- to beat the hell out of both of them.

Then, little Johnny's mom, upset that her old man has flown off the handle again, starts to think that maybe this is the last straw, that she ought to take the kids and leave his sorry ass.

Now consider that the nooses that hung from that schoolyard oak tree in Jena, La., constituted a damned big rock, and it made a damned big splash. And consider that the idea of responding to a black kid wanting to sit under the "white tree" with hangman's nooses -- a potent reminder of all the "strange fruit" that's hung from Southern trees throughout history -- doesn't come from nowhere.

Consider that it does take a village to raise a child, and that when it comes to hating your fellow man, you've got to be carefully taught.

The ripples from the sins of some hateful rednecks in Jena, La., suddenly start to resemble a hurricane on the open sea.

AND IT'S JUST BEEN BUMPED UP to a Category 5, as The Associated Press reports:

In the months since nooses dangling from a schoolyard tree raised racial tensions in Jena, La., the frightening symbol of segregation-era lynchings has been turning up around the country.

Nooses were left in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag, at a Long Island police station locker room, on a Maryland college campus, and, just this week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.

The noose - like the burning cross - is a generations-old means of instilling racial fear. But some experts suspect the Jena furor reintroduced some bigots to the rope. They say the recent incidents might also reflect white resentment over the protests in Louisiana.

"It certainly looks like it's been a rash of these incidents, and presumably, most of them are in response to the events in Jena," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists and other hate groups. "I would say that as a more general matter, it seems fairly clear that noose incidents have been on the rise for some years."

Thousands of demonstrators, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, converged on Jena on Sept. 20 to decry what they called a racist double standard in the justice system. They protested the way six blacks were arrested on attempted murder charges in the beating of a white student, while three whites were suspended but not prosecuted for hanging nooses in a tree in August 2006.

The noose evokes the lynchings of the Jim Crow South and "is a symbol that can be deployed with no ambiguity. People understand exactly what it means," said William Jelani Cobb, a professor of black American history at Spelman College in Atlanta.

He said the Jena incident demonstrated to some racists how offensive the sight of a noose can be: "What Jena did was reintroduce that symbol into the discussion."

Though the terror of the civil rights era is gone, the association between nooses and violence - even death - remains, Potok said.

"The noose is replacing the burning cross in the mind of much of the public as the leading symbol of the Klan," Potok said.

I DON'T WANT TO HEAR a word of complaint from Jena's mau-mauing mayor about how John Mellencamp done went and did his town wrong. What's happened there -- and spread far and wide -- doesn't come out of nowhere, and I think we all have a pretty good idea about the origin of the sparks that lit a thousand fires.

The Oz Event TBA: PETA-Greenpeace cage match

Tie me kangaroo down, sport, 'cause I've got a hankerin' for a mess of 'roo burgers. Greenpeace says this is good, and good for the environment.

But wait, what's that, mate? Crikey! It's PETA! It's a bloody, bloomin' bunch of the blokes! And there's this one inflamed Sheila who seems to be screamin' at us!

This is not good.

Alas, I seem to have skipped ahead to the coming follow-up when we're not even through with the original story about how, in the name of stopping global warming, Greenpeace says Aussies ought to eat more 'roo and less beef.

The Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia hopped right on the story:

MORE kangaroos should be slaughtered and eaten to help save the world from global warming, environmental activists say.

The controversial call to cut down on beef and serve more of the national symbol on our dinner plates follows a report on curbing greenhouse gas emissions damaging the planet.
Greenpeace energy campaigner Mark Wakeham urged Aussies to substitute some red meat for roo to help reduce land clearing and the release of methane gas.

"It is one of the lifestyle changes we can make," Mr Wakeham said.

"Changing our meat consumption habits is a small way to make an impact."

The eat roo recommendation is contained in a report, Paths to a Low-Carbon Future, commissioned by Greenpeace and released today.

It also coincides with recent calls from climate change experts for people in rich countries to reduce red meat and switch to chicken and fish because land-clearing and burping and farting cattle and sheep were damaging the environment.

They said nearly a quarter of the planet's greenhouse gases came from agriculture, which releases the potent heat-trapping gas methane.

Roughly three million kangaroos are killed and harvested for meat each year. They are shot with high-powered guns between the eyes at night.

Australians eat about a third of the 30 million kilograms of roo meat produced annually. The delicacy is exported to dozens of countries and is most popular in Germany, France and Belgium.

The Greenpeace report has renewed calls for Victoria to lift a ban on harvesting roos for food.

Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia spokesman John Kelly said roos invading farmers' crops were already being illegally shot.

"They are being culled and left to rot," Mr Kelly said.

I miss the First Amendment, wherever it is

Like, whatever happened to the Tinker decision?

The Nashville Tennessean tells us:

Norma Super and her daughter, Dani, proudly displayed "Free The Jena Six" T-shirts at a recent Nashville march. They didn't expect censorship, however, when they arrived at Smyrna High School last week.

The message was meant to support six African-American students charged in the beating of a white peer at Jena High School in Louisiana. While the case gained national attention, primarily for its racial overtones, locally it raised the issue of students' rights to free speech.

Super's daughter was prohibited from wearing the T-shirt inside Smyrna High, along with some other students.

"When I persisted to ask why, the quote was that 'It could cause problems,'" Super said. "It's a political statement. I feel strongly about free speech. I feel like (my daughter's) rights were infringed upon."

School systems throughout the nation have enacted stricter dress codes in recent years and have effectively banned symbols such as Confederate flags and those associated with urban clothing labels. They contend such symbols and images disrupt the learning environment and could jeopardize student safety by sparking arguments and possibly fights.

Messages were left for Smyrna High School Principal Robert "Bud" Raikes for this story, but he was not available for comment.

The Smyrna High administration treated the T-shirt as a dress code violation because it could have caused disruptions, Rutherford County schools spokesman James Evans said. Earlier that morning a handful of students made racial comments in the hallways, and administrators had to intervene, he said.

While providing a safe environment, schools must have a valid reason to stop reasonable student expression, a Nashville legal scholar says.

"Public school officials can censor student expression if they can reasonably forecast that the student expression will cause a substantial disruption of school activities or invade the rights of others," said David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.

Students' First Amendment rights on campus are supported by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1969 decision in Tinker vs. Des Moines (Iowa) Independent Community School District. In that case, two students decided to wear black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War.

(snip)

"What educators can't do is censor simply because they don't like it or because of undifferentiated fear," Hudson said. "They have to point to facts in a school environment. They just can't say, 'Oh, we think this will cause a disruption.' It has to be reasonable."

Hudson teaches First Amendment classes at Vanderbilt Law School and Nashville School of Law. He's also written books on the topic.

When it comes to the classroom, teachers have a broad authority to censor student expression because the courts have determined that learning is more important than free speech, Hudson said.

Hudson, though, said he worries about school administrators who don't provide reasonable proof about causing a disturbance and instead create an environment "where students won't appreciate our Bill of Rights."

AMAZING, ISN'T IT, that it's the First Amendment that always takes it in the shorts when school administrators can't control roving bands of little racists obviously raised by wolves. As society continues to coarsen and people further eschew socialization, how many constitutional rights will we see disappear, all in the name of keeping order?

Don't answer that.

Finally! A video update on our pal Kristy

At long last! A new Kristy Dusseau video! We'd kind of been waiting. . . .

Anyway, since this video was filmed, Kristy has been out of the hospital, and then back in. Have I mentioned lately that cancer sucks?

Not to mention the aftereffects of what they do to you to get rid of the cancer. You can ask Mrs. Favog about that one. Or Kristy, who (sadly) may be one of the world's leading experts on that score.

Anyway, here are the latest updates from Kristy's big brother, Rob:

10-7-07

Well it turns out I was dead wrong about Kristy's getting out. She's still in the hospital right now recovering from the surgery to close up the wound left behind by her feeding tube. I guess since they've removed the tube (a week or two ago) her skin keeps breaking apart where it used to be. They've cauterized it, stitched it, stabled it, you name it trying to heal it back together.

I'll let you guys know when she's out.

I finally got the latest movie together. You can see it over there on the right. I thought it was pretty dull so I added some music to jazz it up a bit. This was taken last august at one of her stays in hospital.

Very busy, get back with you guys soon.

10-4-07

Hello everyone. Thanks for your patience. Yet another stay in the hospital. This one was a little scary.

You see I had everything figured out. Last Friday night Kristy was to accompany friends and siblings to a classy comedy club here in Michigan called Joey's. It might not sound fancy, I know, but it's actually a really nice place as far as comedy clubs go. There was ten of us in total going, and Thursday night I called to surprise her with the news.

She sounded tired, but very happy to be going. Dad and I worked out how I was going to go about getting her to the club, and I took a half day off of work just to make sure I could get her in time to make it.

Friday morning she had one of her regular check-ups at the hospital, and around noon my father called to tell me she had been omitted.

"There's something wrong with her lungs. They think she might have some kind of virus. Kristy was really upset about it because you know they don't do anything on the weekends. They're worried that the Graft vs Host might have come back in her lungs ... which would be really bad"

"But I thought Kristy was doing great?"

"She has been getting weaker over the past few days. She's only able to stay awake for about four hours at a time now. The doctors want to put her out and fill her lungs with fluid. After that I guess they take it back out and study it."

I was really bummed, worried, and angry all at the same time. Needless to say I didn't have the greatest attitude that night. The comedians only got a faint smile from me.

So the weekend went by with nothing being done. Dad reported Kristy seemed stronger, but suspected the drugs had something to do with that.

I started to worry about her. It was a fresh worry, something I had buried deep into the back of my mind had resurfaced again. If it was Graft vs Host, and it was in her lungs, that's something that would take her out quickly.

Monday they were late with the test, as was the norm, and the next day I tried calling my father to hear the results, but his cell phone was off. And no one answered the house phone. I called every hour or so, with each call implanting another terrible image into my head. Maybe they had the phone off and weren't answering because they got some terrible news. Maybe something happen to Kristy last night and they were too upset to talk to anyone. Maybe -

She was fine. It's just a virus, not the Graft vs Host, she's going to be okay. She may have gotten out of the hospital today, if not tomorrow for sure.

If you're reading this mom and dad, don't do that again.

And Kristy, if you're reading this, you're a very loving person, and everyone loves you very much, but you need to stop hugging and kissing people. I know it's hard to do, but people are walking nests of viruses, and until your immunity gets stronger, maybe you should tell people to back off a bit.

Because you and I ARE going on that plane trip to Texas this winter to visit Kenny. Mark my words.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and prayers, working on the video now, but it's a dull one, so be warned.

AS ALWAYS, go to KristyRecovers.com and say "Hey!" And maybe drop a little scratch in the kitty, y'know what I mean?

Free booze and whores would be better

Rod Dreher reports on the New York Times' report on the latest idiotic craze among some scruples-and-cerebellum-deprived Evangelical ministers.

In a story that could have been lifted from The Onion, but in fact appeared in The New York Times, hundreds of Protestant churches are using the ultraviolent videogame Halo to lure teenage boys into church. No, really, I'm not making this up. Excerpt:

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

(snip)

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

FREE BOOZE and whores would be even better. They could call the ladies of the evening the Mary Magdalene Hospitality Corps.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

And while I'm thinking of it. . . .

To tell you the truth, not only is this a fine song, well written . . . it's probably the best thing John Mellencamp has done in years. T-Bone Burnett as your producer tends to have that effect on artists.

You'll know Jena by its strange fruit

The mayor of Jena, La., is mad at John Mellencamp in the wake of the rocker's telling it like it is about his little burg's being straight out of In the Heat of the Night.

Actually, Mellencamp uses the home of the Jena Six as a stepping stone to take an unflinching look at race in America. Never mind, hizzoner is miffed, reports The Associated Press:

A video in which rapper Mos Def asked students around the country to walk out Oct. 1 to support the Jena 6 escaped comment by the town’s mayor. When John Mellencamp sang, “Jena, take your nooses down,” he took issue.

“The town of Jena has for months been mischaracterized in the media and portrayed as the epicenter of hatred, racism and a place where justice is denied,” Jena Mayor Murphy R. McMillin wrote in a statement on town letterhead faxed Friday to The Associated Press.

He said he had previously stayed quiet, hoping that the town’s courtesy to people who have visited over the past year would speak for itself. “However, the Mellencamp video is so inflammatory, so defamatory, that a line has been crossed and enough is enough.” Mellencamp could not comment because he was on a plane from California to Indiana and had not heard about McMillin’s comments, publicist Bob Merlis said late Friday.

A note from Mellencamp posted Thursday on his Web site says he is telling a story, not reporting. “The song is not written as an indictment of the people of Jena but, rather, as a condemnation of racism,” it says.

Nooses hung briefly from a big oak tree outside Jena High School a year ago, after a black freshman asked whether black students could sit under it.

IT DOESN'T MATTER, Mr. Mayor, how courteous you are to people you'd like to think well of you. What matters is how you treat your own -- how "courteous" you are to those you see no clear percentage in treating like actual human beings.

In a town where an African-American ninth-grader feels like he has to get the white principal's permission to sit under the "white tree," there's a racism problem and an oppression problem.

That hangman's nooses appeared in the tree after that request, and that those responsible weren't expelled, only exposed the preexisting gangrenous rot in Jena. Racism in Jena is the original sin -- indeed, it's America's original sin -- and every bad thing that's happened there since those nooses swung from the "white tree" are just ripples from homegrown bigots pitching a big rock into a pond called Jena, Louisiana.

Firing up the Silvertone, dusting off the vinyl

We're doing things a little bit differently on the Big Show this week, our first podcast since getting back from a trip back home to Baton Rouge, La.

The trip has led your Mighty Favog to take up the challenge of an old friend and do an extra-long, extra-tasty stroll down memory lane on the Revolution 21 podcast, looking at the music of my misspent youth, why it was important and how it fits in with who I am today.

Or something like that. Mainly, we're just reminiscing and reflecting.

Pretty much.

I'm glad I did it, being that it's been something of a tonic to salve the more bittersweet parts of the trip back home to Louisiana -- like going back to my beloved high school and documenting how it's fallen into ruins . . . all the while kids who don't deserve to learn amid squalor still attend classes there.

I guess I'll never understand how adults in positions of power can be that indifferent toward beautiful, majestic old buildings and beautiful, intelligent young people. It's a crime, and I wish the public treated it as such.

But there are wonderful things -- still -- about my home state, and I have some fond memories of growing up there. And I hope this episode of the Revolution 21 podcast conveys that with all the love I intended.

Listen now.

Be there. Aloha. Cher.

When we let our kids' schools deteriorate into dumps, is it a human-rights violation?

Let's ask the United Nations Human Rights Council . . .

Treaties and Human Rights Council Branch
OHCHR-UNOG
1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland

Friday, Oct. 5, 2007


To Whom It May Concern:


I realize this may be something of a stretch -- all right, a big stretch -- but I was wondering whether the deplorable condition of many U.S. public schools, particularly in the context of the United States being the richest nation on Earth, might constitute violations, at least in principle, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. I was thinking, particularly, of Articles 24 and 26:

Article 24

1. Every child shall have, without any discrimination as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, national or social origin, property or birth, the right to such measures of protection as are required by his status as a minor, on the part of his family, society and the State.

Article 26

All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law. In this respect, the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Attached are photographs I took last week at my old high school, Baton Rouge (Louisiana) Magnet High School, from which I graduated in 1979. What I found there would seem to indicate that the school, which was not in that condition when I attended there, has been allowed to deteriorate into a state of abject ruin by the East Baton Rouge Parish (county) School Board. It would appear there has been no meaningful maintenance on the building in the 28 years since my graduation, and that the copious amounts of peeling lead-based paint, crumbling terra cotta and plaster, pothole-sized craters in the gymnasium floor, rusted-over metal surfaces and gym lockers, as well as fetid, deteriorating restrooms pose a clear and present threat to the health and well-being of students who spend eight-plus hours a day there.

Furthermore, I've been informed that Baton Rouge Magnet High School is far from the only East Baton Rouge Parish school in that condition, just a particularly egregious example. One could find many schools across the American South -- and in many Northern urban centers -- in similar condition. Again, this in the context of the richest country on Earth.

I also note that -- while many Baton Rouge schools were in relatively poor condition when I matriculated some three decades ago -- Baton Rouge High's deterioration seems to have coincided with the school system's transition from 65-percent (or so) Caucasian to roughly 80-percent African American in racial makeup.
To my mind, this reflects the abject failure of school-system governors, as well as the local electorate and political and civic leadership, to provide clean, safe and adequate educational facilities for all the community's children, regardless of race, class or socio-economic status. Could not this be interpreted as a clear violation of Articles 24 and 26 of the Covenant? After all, parents with the income and inclination are able to shield their children from fetid educational facilities; the poor and working-class, largely, are not.

Is not a proper education in clean, safe, reasonably maintained facilities -- according to the standards and means of their particular country and region -- a basic human right? And is it proper for parents to expect they must pay a surcharge in private-school tuition to obtain what world governments are charged to provide as a basic service to their citizens?

These are the questions I have, and I eagerly await guidance in this matter.


Sincerely,

The Mighty Favog

cc: Charlotte Placide
Superintendent
East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools

War criminals by any standard

Perhaps it's time to start referring to the Republican Party as The Party, as in Nazi party . . . or Communist party . . . or Party apparatchik . . . or Party functionary . . . or Party orthodoxy.

You know, Party purge, Party power struggle and Party members.

As this New York Times report damningly reveals, there's not so much difference anymore between our Party chief in America and previous Party chiefs who constitute ugly stains on human history, particularly in the bloody 20th century. In fact some infamous Party types got themselves hung, shot or thrown in Allied prisons for life for the self-same things our Supreme Leader, Party chief George W. Bush and his vice premier, Dick Cheney, are most assuredly guilty of.

Here's what the Times reported Thursday:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.

More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the C.I.A. detention operations they govern.

When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Mr. Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was “a place of inspiration” that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.
The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s most authoritative interpreter of the law. “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,” he said in an interview. “The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn’t like the advice being given.”

The debate over how terrorist suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or Congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Douglas W. Kmiec, who headed that office under President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush and wrote a book about it, said he believed the intense pressures of the campaign against terrorism have warped the office’s proper role.

“The office was designed to insulate against any need to be an advocate,” said Mr. Kmiec, now a conservative scholar at Pepperdine University law school. But at times in recent years, Mr. Kmiec said, the office, headed by William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia before they served on the Supreme Court, “lost its ability to say no.”

(snip)

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

(snip)

Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith’s rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official recalled.

Mr. Bradbury’s biography had a Horatio Alger element that appealed to a succession of bosses, including Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Mr. Gonzales, the son of poor immigrants. Mr. Bradbury’s father had died when he was an infant, and his mother took in laundry to support her children. The first in his family to go to college, he attended Stanford and the University of Michigan Law School. He joined the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he came under the tutelage of Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent prosecutor.

Mr. Bradbury belonged to the same circle as his predecessors: young, conservative lawyers with sterling credentials, often with clerkships for prominent conservative judges and ties to the Federalist Society, a powerhouse of the legal right. Mr. Yoo, in fact, had proposed his old friend Mr. Goldsmith for the Office of Legal Counsel job; Mr. Goldsmith had hired Mr. Bradbury as his top deputy.

“We all grew up together,” said Viet D. Dinh, an assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and very much a member of the club. “You start with a small universe of Supreme Court clerks, and you narrow it down from there.”

But what might have been subtle differences in quieter times now cleaved them into warring camps.

Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority. Admirers describe Mr. Bradbury as low-key but highly skilled, a conciliator who brought from 10 years of corporate practice a more pragmatic approach to the job than Mr. Yoo and Mr. Goldsmith, both from the academic world.

“As a practicing lawyer, you know how to address real problems,” said Noel J. Francisco, who worked at the Justice Department from 2003 to 2005. “At O.L.C., you’re not writing law review articles and you’re not theorizing. You’re giving a client practical advice on a real problem.”

As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president’s lawyer.

Mr. Bradbury appeared to be “fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,” recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times “vituperative,” said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was “professional and collegial.”

While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances.

Charles J. Cooper, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel under President Reagan, said he was “very troubled” at the notion of a probationary period.

“If the purpose of the delay was a tryout, I think they should have avoided it,” Mr. Cooper said. “You’re implying that the acting official is molding his or her legal analysis to win the job.”

WHAT WILL BE BUSH'S FATE, and that of his Party underlings? And what fate awaits we who voted him into power and tolerated his soiling of our most sacred principles as Christians, Jews, humanists and Americans . . . not to mention a political opposition who refused to oppose when conscience demanded resolute opposition?

This is going to get ugly. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Disbelief in Omaha, or No Frame of Reference

There's one important thing I think Louisianians need to grasp that many just have no clue about: They need to know that the dysfunction and, indeed, squalor that many never give a second thought is genuinely puzzling and horrifying to most Americans.

A CASE IN POINT is that the Third World conditions at Baton Rouge's "five star school of academic excellence" leave ordinary people in, say, Omaha, Neb., shaking their heads in disbelief that a community would subject its children to such a dilapidated pit. Ordinary urban folk out here on the edge of the Great Plains have no frame of reference for what I found when I recently went back home . . . to Baton Rouge Magnet High School.

And likewise, I fear ordinary Louisianians have no frame of reference for what a functioning education system looks like. What putting your kids first -- at least as a community -- looks like.

This was brought home big-time when my wife told me about the conversation she had with the film-processing guy when she went to pick up the rolls of black-and-white pictures I shot last week at BRMHS.

AS MRS. FAVOG TELLS IT, the fellow's first question was "Do kids still go to school here?"

Yes, she replied.

"Is it in New Orleans?"

No, she said. She asked how he knew the photos were from Louisiana. He said he saw the state seal on the floor in a photograph.

Mrs. Favog told him it was a school in Baton Rouge, La.

"Was it damaged in the hurricane?" he asked. "I took one look at this and figured it was a photo from the hurricane."

No, that's just the school board's neglect of a school over 30 years, she explained, adding that the history behind BRMHS was similar to some schools here in Omaha. In other words, a magnet school created during desegregation.

Mrs. Favog told him Baton Rouge High was my lifeline -- that it was a magnificent old school when I went there, was on the historic register and that it was the first place I learned there were possibilities out there beyond a working-class life. She then explained that now, many alumni were fighting to get it renovated while the school board seemed to want to tear it down.

"Oh my," he said. "I looked at the photos and thought, 'Oh, those poor kids in New Orleans, having to attend this school after it was damaged in a hurricane.' "

He was sympathetic, and wished the BRMHS alumni and students good luck with our efforts. My wife reports the gentleman seemed genuinely stunned that anybody would be expected to attend school in such a building.

WHAT DO YOU SAY when it's your old school that shocks unsuspecting Midwesterners so? I can't speak for Baton Rougeans, but as an Omahan born, raised and educated in Louisiana's capital city, I'm deeply ashamed.

We pretty much have known for decades that the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board is incapable of shame . . . or of properly running a school system. And we pretty much have always known that there's something in the Gret Stet's drinking water that renders the population incapable of competent self-government.

But are average folks back home capable of shame anymore? Is anyone deeply, soul-shatteringly, unable-to-show-your-face ashamed that this is the best America's Next Great City (TM) has to offer its "best and brightest" teens?

IS THERE NO VOTER who's hang-your-head ashamed of hiring the incompetents who run the schools that educate their children but can't be bothered to keep them from crumbling like a Western ghost town? And whose solution to their own managerial indifference is to tear down the evidence of their crimes against Louisiana students, replacing the blight by throwing up something new that will be in the same sad shape in a generation or so?

Have they, at long last, no shame? Is their blindness, instead, merely a refusal to see?

Magnificent schools like Baton Rouge High -- great despite what and who birthed them and wonderful despite the ruins that house them -- gave many of us children of Louisiana the eyes to see the dysfunction standing plainly before us.

And we were sooooo out of there when we got the chance.

I OFTEN WONDER whether I ought to have stayed and fought. I wonder, too, whether it would have made a damned bit of difference.

Laissez les bon temps rouler, cher! But don't be surprised if, someday soon, you're rouler-ing all by your lonesome.

UPDATE: Don't forget to read the previous two installments of this Baton Rouge High trilogy of posts and pictures here and here. Heck, for that matter, just go to the front page and peruse the whole blog.

You'll be glad you did (wink).

More scenes from 'America's next great city'

Down in Baton Rouge, La., Mayor-President Melvin "Kip" Holden is fond of saying he presides over "America's next great city."

I'm from there. I love the place. I want the PR hype to be true.

THE PHOTO ABOVE shows the revitalized kind of place the good mayor wants the rest of America -- and the world -- to see. Indeed, downtown has made amazing progress since my wife and I moved away in 1988 -- never would I have thought Third Street again would be this hoppin' on a Friday night.

But to live up to the hype of "America's next great city," you need more than a rebounding downtown and big crowds for a free concert and Abita Beer pub crawl. To be "America's next great city," you need an educated populace.

You need to care about your kids, and that means giving them better places to learn than what you give Fido (or Phideaux, as the case may be) to sleep.

These pictures belie the "great city" hype. These are more pictures of my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High School. These pictures do not reflect a great city.

These pictures reflect Mogadishu, or something equally wretched. These are pictures of how a local school board refuses to perform even basic, routine maintenance on a grand old building -- a grand old building filled with the city's best and brightest teen-agers -- and lets it rot until it falls apart.

With the city's children within its crumbling walls.

Great cities don't stand still for this kind of outrage. Great cities' boards of education don't neglect a venerable and acclaimed school until it molders in Third World squalor.

Great cities' school boards don't then have public panic attacks, wondering whether the whole thing just ought to be torn down, when the evidence against them becomes damning and blatant.

See, that's what you call destroying evidence of the crime.

NO, GREAT CITIES don't put up with crap like that when its children's lives and futures are at stake. And great cities don't go around tearing down giant pieces of its history when they can do better than that.

They don't. They. Just. Don't.

I want my hometown to be a great city. Sadly, I see little in the Baton Rouge Magnet High fiasco to bolster my confidence that it will be someday.

Home is where the heartbreak is

My wife and I just got back to Omaha from a visit to Baton Rouge, during which I spent a few hours at Baton Rouge Magnet High taking several rolls of pictures documenting what's become of the place.

By the time I was done shooting in the gym and the boys' locker room, I was near tears. Let me try to explain a bit.

I GRADUATED FROM BRMHS in 1979. Except for my kindergarten year in Catholic school -- my neighborhood public school had no such thing as kindergarten then -- I spent my entire school career within the EBR system.

Until my fourth-grade year, the schools I attended still were legally segregated and all-white. In fourth grade, I got a stern lecture -– from a teacher -- for playing with one of two black students at Red Oaks Elementary.

All this is to say that the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board has been on the cutting edge of backwardness and stupidity for a very long time now.

To get to my roundabout point here, every public school I attended was a dump. That is, until I got to Baton Rouge High the first year of the magnet program.

To me, BRMHS seemed like the Taj Mahal. Hard as it is to believe, the building had just been spruced up and was in great shape. I loved going to BRMHS, particularly in such a grand old building -- if you tried, you almost could see all the generations that preceded you still walking the halls.

AT THAT SCHOOL, in that wonderful old structure, you hardly could escape the realization that you were part of something bigger than yourself. That's an intangible, yes, but some of life's most important things are unambiguously intangible.

And in this age of out-of-control individualism, I can't think of anything more important than coming to the realization we're all part of things bigger than ourselves.

But now, as my visit doubly confirmed, BRMHS now is a dump, too. And it seems that more than a few people there on South Foster Drive want to tear it down . . . and all the intangibles with it. For what?

To build a new school God-knows-where that EBR Schools will let deteriorate into just as big a dump 20 years down the road?

And any new BRMHS will become a dump, too. Visiting the existing building -- and for an old alum like myself, it is a profoundly heartbreaking experience -- makes clear that the place has not been decently maintained since I graduated nearly 30 years ago.

THERE ARE CHUNKS of terra cotta on the facade just about ready to fall on someone's unsuspecting head. Inside, ditto for the ceiling tiles. There are whole sections of classroom walls -- the ones that are exterior walls -- missing gigantic chunks of plaster. Both exterior and interior walls are horribly cracked. Every wall in the entire school, it seems, is peeling paint like a dog sheds fur.

The school-board powers that be blame "moisture intrusion," saying that the building can no longer "breathe" since they installed air conditioning in the early '70s.

But the gym -- the structure that's never been air-conditioned, doesn't trap moisture and still "breathes" -- is worse. I don't know how it hasn't been condemned. In Omaha, where people generally care and government generally works, it would be condemned.

THERE ARE POTHOLE-SIZED craters in the gymnasium floor, thanks to the leaky roof. The "guest" restrooms -- I photographed both, with Abbey Gauthier of the alumni association running girls' room interference for me -- are not for those with weak stomachs.

A coach told me a school-board maintenance crew once "fixed" the leaky roof with duct tape. Duct tape! Duct tape is an amazing product, but it isn't going to do a thing for a leaky roof.

”Moisture intrusion” hasn’t been solely a function of air conditioning a 1920s structure. It’s largely been a byproduct of nonexistent maintenance on a world-class structure.

If the boys' locker room were a kennel -– for that matter, if the whole school were a kennel -- you wouldn't let your dog stay there for a minute. But that's what the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board thinks is acceptable for children, because it is the school board’s decades-long neglect that has left those students in abject squalor today.

THE SCHOOL I LOVE now is unfit for dogs; it's unfit for convicted murderers; it's certainly unfit for the parish's "best and brightest." But there you are.

Baton Rougeans apparently are OK with that, because it's been going on parishwide for generations. And they wonder why there's a "brain drain" in Louisiana.

The school board doesn't care, and neither does the electorate. If they did, the children of Baton Rougeans wouldn't be attending classes in a neglected dung heap. That the neglected dung heap is a beautiful, historical landmark only makes the outrageous even worse . . . if that's possible.

In Omaha, inner-city schools just as old as Baton Rouge High -– or, in one case, decades older -- are comparative palaces. Suburban schools are newer palaces.

In Baton Rouge, citizens have no frame of reference for what it looks like when a community cares about its kids. In Omaha, those who don't hail from places like Baton Rouge have no frame of reference for what I beheld when I went back home . . . to Baton Rouge High.