Scanning Laura Bush

Journalism professionals learn to “see” news.

They are taught that news has definitions and values. These definitions and values give news a dimension that is visible to the trained eye. News dimensions are as useful to journalists as silhouettes are useful to aircraft spotters.

This data about news often shapes itself into tricks of the trade. One such trick is “JDLR.” Just doesn’t look right. A journalism professional will be going along, minding his own business, when he sees something that just doesn’t look right. When he sees that, he looks again. He starts scanning with the definitions and values, looking to see if news is there.

I have started to scan First Lady Laura Bush. Actually I am scanning The White House, but Laura Bush is the focus. I wonder if I should wonder how she sleeps at night.

Mrs. Bush is a champion of teachers and libraries. Both these institutions are purveyors of information. Teachers give information to students, and libraries provide information for both pleasure and business.

It is good, reliable information. In a teacher’s information, two plus two equals four. A student can bank on that and go ahead and use the information for the rest of his life, confident that it will never contribute to his being overdrawn. In a library’s information, the United States will always be north of the Equator, and John Steinbeck will always have written “The Grapes of Wrath.” Men can go out and speak this information in public, confident that they will never be ashamed.

Mrs. Bush appears happy, content and assured in her well-positioned advocacy of good, reliable information. She has also, in her second term, decided to speak in behalf of providing good, reliable information to boys about their role in society and their need for good, reliable information about themselves, their fears, their hopes, their psyches, in helping them fulfill their role. This is a subject that is near to my heart. No boy should have to wait to the age of 50 finally to understand what he was missing as a man.

So in one of those big, airy East Wing rooms, Mrs. Bush presides while a teacher reads good, reliable information from a library book to young people sitting on the floor.

Down the administration hall, meanwhile, people who work for her husband are writing checks to journalists in return for information that they can count on as being what they want to hear. Frank Rich in The New York Times said this has happened at least six times recently, when a “journalist” has been “unmasked” as “a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally . . . while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news.”

One of these, Karen Ryan, offered “news reports” explaining the administration’s Medicare drug prescription program. These reports were seen over CNN until the Government Accounting Office pulled them as illegal “covert propaganda.” Another, television commentator Armstrong Williams, was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to put a favorable spin on administration programs.

The Department of Education? Purchasing slanted information? Does Laura Bush know about this?

Good old reliable Webster’s defines “propaganda” as “any systematic, widespread dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, practices, etc., to further one’s own cause or to damage an opposing one; ideas, doctrines or allegations so spread; now often used disparagingly to connote deception or distortion."

And so I wonder if I should wonder. It would be natural to wonder how she could sleep at night, wanting to teach boys to be strong, good, reliable men, when down the hall men are being paid to deceive. But I have to wonder if I should wonder, because it is possible in such a world that Mrs. Bush is not who she seems, or has suspended who she is. Maybe she sleeps just fine. It just doesn’t look right.

The best journalists, those who learn to “see” news the best, get promoted to the highest positions, including working in Washington and covering The White House. The absolute best of these, with their talents and experience, get to sit in the front row at the presidential press conferences. Yet behind them, at the press conferences, sat a fake journalist – Frank Rich calls him a shill – asking “softball” questions.

How did my front-row heroes let him get away with it for two years? Forget Laura Bush; hell, I feel depressed and I don’t even have to sleep with the man.

Kudos from Kettner Blvd.

The Kettner Blvd. College of Turkey Surgeons and Airport Relocation Committee is encouraged by the appearance online of Voice of San Diego.

“I am very excited to be returning to journalism and starting the next chapter of my life as the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Voice of San Diego,” said Barbara Bry in her email announcing VoSD’s debut at www.voiceofsandiego.com and describing it as “a non-profit, independent and interactive web news and information source for San Diego. It does seem like a good moment for a fresh point of view in San Diego, doesn't it?”

Yes it does, and we at KBCTSARC (“We may not get anything done, but we’re serious about it”), welcome them to the fray. We might point out, though no doubt they know it already, that they are in for a long haul. KBCTSARC, or ARC for short, was created in 1978 in the back room at the Waterfront Grill and in its bylaws dedicated itself to two propositions: devising a means to infuse moisture into roast turkey, and chronicling and commenting on efforts by San Diego leaders going back to the chief of the Diegueno tribe to move Lindbergh Field. We chose these two because of the challenge. Neither seemed likely to be achieved in our lifetime.

We have had some success on the turkey front (you use a veterinary syringe), but airport relocation rests against the same brick wall it hit five decades ago. ARC ceased active participation in that effort after recommending, in 1985, that city leaders consider moving not the airport, but downtown, just a mile or so south, to get the towers of power out of the flight path.

It was a perfectly reasonable solution. By 1985, after 35 years of talking, the airport relocation story had become just that: A story used to fill the news hole in the Union-Tribune on a slow news day, which were so plentiful there. The last such story to appear was just last Sunday, and finally in the story could be found a glimmer of hope: People are starting to think maybe we should leave the airport just where it is.

We at ARC agree. Location, location, location. Visitors arriving in San Diego by air arrive in the middle of a classic picture postcard. As my ARC associate and business expert Karen pointed out, “Why would we want to dump these people into Brown Field?” We are well aware that Lindbergh Field will soon reach its capacity. But so will San Diego, and if capping Lindbergh capacity helps maintain a lower equilibrium region-wide, we are all for it.

So we are glad to see a glimmer of leave-it-alone momentum building. ARC was tempted to submit an op-ed piece dusting off the old “move downtown” solution, which remains as viable as it was in 1985. San Diego leaders have moved downtown twice in the city’s history. It is something they should know how to do. Where is Alonzo Horton when we need him?

But submitting op-ed pieces to the Union-Tribune just isn’t fun anymore. We are happy now to welcome, as an alternative, Voice of San Diego, which states its mission: “To provide our readers with an independent and credible source for relevant news and information that: Serves as a vital resource center to help readers make better choices about everyday topics; encourages civic participation through an interactive forum that offers diverse perspectives; provides courageous reporting on a region not fully understood or reported by existing media.”

The publication is non-partisan and non-profit and already has assembled a cadre of “Contributing Voices” that reads like a list of anyone who ever had lunch with Neil Morgan.

And it promises, as Editor Bry said, “a fresh point of view.” On the airport, of course, there has been no fresh point of view since 1935, and there is no reason to look for one now. But there are plenty of other San Diego views that could use freshness, not to mention, as the mission statement suggests, knowledgeable and complete reporting. In the back room at the Waterfront, we are tired of getting our breaking City Hall news from the inside pages of The New York Times.

Mirror Theory

I have a theory about photos and mirrors. I think people look better to themselves in mirrors than they do in photos.

But then Karen said she couldn’t see any difference. Photo or mirror, she looked the same to herself.

There goes the theory, I thought. Then again, maybe not. Karen is beautiful. She is beautiful in photos, and she is beautiful in the mirror.

I am not beautiful in photos. In fact in photos, with only a few professional exceptions, I think I look drab and jowly.

But in the mirror, I always look pretty darn good, at least after a shower and I have combed my hair.

Why is that?

I have a theory.

I think what I see in the mirror is the result of a long and selective process. I have been looking at myself in the mirror for almost 60 years. Never once in all that time have I looked in a mirror for any purpose other than making myself look better. I think that is true of practically all people. I have never heard of a person using a mirror to try to make himself or herself look worse. If they hit the street looking like Michael Jackson or Tammy Faye Bakker, that’s their business.

If I hit the street looking like Michael Grant, well, that’s the best I could do. That is why I can get so discouraged when I look at myself in photos.

The difference is, I think, the camera sees me the way the camera sees me, without interpretation. In the mirror, I see me the way I have learned to see me. I have spent almost 60 years looking for good things. At the same time, I have chosen not to see bad things. Your perspective starts to get shaped. I am positive I look better in the mirror than I do on the street. That is because I have saved every little good thing I ever saw about me in the mirror, and eventually a template has emerged. The template has been forced to submit to reality and revisions over time, but the basic geometry still is of a 20-year-old lean-jawed college sophomore looking for something to like. I am looking at a vain portrait of myself, assembled stroke by stroke. A dumb camera can’t do that.

There is something else, and for this I will never have an answer. I am the only human being on earth who knows what I look like in the mirror. No one else can see me that way. When I look at myself in a photo, my left eye is on the right. I am seeing myself as anyone else sees me, with my left on their right.

But when I look at myself in the mirror, my right eye is on the right. When I first discovered that, it was disorienting. I had to devise a test before I could be satisfied. I raised my hand on the side of the eye my right eye was looking at in the mirror. I raised that hand to my face. Then I looked at my hand. It was my right hand. There was the proof: In the mirror, I was looking at myself backward, and I am the only one who can do that.

It reminded me of the funny and interesting results achieved when a person cuts two identical photos of himself down the middle, then puts the right side with the right side, and the left with the left. It’s like looking at two different people.

In the mirror, is the same principle at work? I don’t know, and I have stopped thinking about it for the time being, because a new question arises. Millions of people look at Sean Connery and drool at his good looks. If he is like me, in his mirror he must look even better to himself. But he is the only one who can see it. What would it be like, to be Sean Connery, and be the only one in the world who knows what you really look like? I will ask Karen. She is beautiful, and maybe she will know.

Flying Sideways

A cold front had just passed through Dallas, bringing the usual winds howling from the north. The overcast was giving way to blue sky as our flight taxied from the Delta terminal over to the west runways.

Ahead of us was a Delta 727, hurrying along, probably late, like we were. Without pause he took the runway and began his takeoff roll. I lost sight of him as we maneuvered on the taxiway, but when we turned to enter the runway, I saw him again. He had just lifted off, climbing sharply through 200 feet, presenting to us a topmost profile of white fuselage and silver wings.

He was flying sideways; that is, the fuselage was skewed two or three ticks to the right of its direction of travel. It is not unusual for airplanes, particularly small ones, to fly sideways. They call it “crabbing,” when a pilot, to fly straight, has to steer right or left into the wind.

But this was different, this glimpse of a 727, 200 feet off the ground, flying sideways at takeoff. Here was a three-engine aircraft, 100 feet long, weighing 115,000 pounds, driven forward by 45,000 pounds of thrust, and the wind had blown it sideways the instant its wheels left the ground. The pilot had to steer left to fly straight. It showed how strong the wind was, and how effective the countering design, a design that joined flexibility with control. It was a triumph of equilibrium.

Then we turned, and the 727 was gone, but its image remained. It occurred to me, at that moment, that the ability to fly sideways is the central theme in human happiness. Those who live in happiness will tell you that it feels a lot like freedom. Personal freedom, like political freedom, consists of the power to make choices. That is, of course, a great power. People who come to experience happiness are amazed when one of its features turns out to be a feeling of great power.

People without choice-making power live in fear. Personally and politically, the remedy is to take back power. It requires courage, but people make that decision all the time, because otherwise life is miserable. They start to take back power that most of them lost, or gave away, as children. It is a wonderful moment in their lives.

What they are gathering is the power to take off. In aviation, the point on the runway where the airplane reaches takeoff power is called “rotation.” The pilot can lift, or rotate, the nose, and the airplane will fly.

Both airplanes and human spirits are safest on the ground, but on the ground, both are out of their element. People have associated flight with spirit since the first recorded human thought. Daedalus invented wings on which Icarus, his son, soared free of the Labyrinth. Daedalus was a prophet of happiness. Unfortunately, Icarus in his exhilaration flew too near the sun, which melted the wax that held his wings, and he fell to his death in the sea.

People reach rotation at their own speed and usually not without professional guidance. It may take years. One day they realize the power is there, and it is as if there is no alternative but to lift the nose and take off. Some people call it commitment, but it also feels very much like surrender. They surrender safety, surrender the ground. It is a feeling of liberation they have known only in their dreams.

The spirit, entering its element, instantly feels equilibrium take hold, and that is the moment at which people understand how great the power of happiness is. The wind will still blow you sideways sometimes, but steering into it, you can fly straight. It is as exhilarating as life should be, as long as you don’t fly too near the sun.

Pi

I have this vague feeling about pi. I wonder if it is how the world is going to end.

As we learned in high school math (yes, I realize in this wonderful new world that young people now learn about pi as three-year-olds seated at computers), pi is the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle. Pi is a constant – that is, it describes the circumference-diameter relationship in all circles big or small – and most people even years later remember its numerical value: 3.1416.

Many people also remember that the value of pi is infinite. That “1416” keeps going, without end, and the latest supercomputers have computed it out to several million digits and are still going.

Or at least the mathematicians and physicists think pi is infinite, and that is what started to worry me. I was doodling, drawing circles and stars, and finishing a bag of Fritos. With my pencil I was drawing a circle about the size of a dollar pancake, and just as the tip of the pencil reached the point where I had started the circle, it jumped. Or bumped. Like a tiny collision, or the flick of a needle on a seismograph.

I lifted the sheet of paper and underneath was a tiny crumb of Frito stuck to the point where on the other side my circle closed. So that was it. For a second, it had crossed my mind that it might have been the pencil point actually bumping into the graphite end of the circle where I had started, like a train circling around and running into its own caboose.

That’s when this vague thought started to form. There was in fact a collision, too tiny for me to feel, but there truly were bits of graphite, much bigger than molecules, at the place on the paper where I started the circle. Under a powerful microscope, they would appear quite huge, certainly huge enough to be of interest to producers of “The Discovery Channel.” The pencil point, coming around, would have run into them with an impact that would have been significant to me if I were the same size as a graphite particle.

So I had closed the circle and satisfied pi, at least to its crude constant human-circle-drawing value of 3.1416. But if I had left a teeny micron of space between the circle’s starting place and its end, then pi would not be satisfied, and be straining to close, and consummate itself, at least to my romantic way of thinking.

Straining to close. Out there in the elegant world of millions of digits, is pi not infinite after all, but simply straining to close? Are the computers, spewing out their digit torrents, tracing a circular path forward, out at the pencil-point end of the universe toward some place where the circle closes, and pi becomes not infinite after all, but consummated, and the computers slam to a halt, still wanting to run, and glowing and warm to the touch with their effort?

I wonder if pi, before our very eyes, is describing the universe as a circle that one day will close, and pi is screaming through the computers toward that day. The pencil microscope says when it does, there will be a collision. Was that the real Big Bang, where our circle started? The last universe completing itself in its huge collision, and our new universe blasting out on the other side. And now the same thing happening to us. The universe may be only the point of a pencil billions of light years wide, drawn through time and space by God, doodling circles and stars. How cool, on holy Earth at least, if all this importance turned out to be a doodle of God.

In the movie (Fritos will pay oodles for the placement), I will be a scientist unable to convince more than a handful of others of my conviction, and that handful will watch the computers and wait for the vibrations to start. When they do, and we tell world leaders what is causing them, the leaders will ask, “How long?” We will shrug and say, “Don’t know. But you will sure know it when it ha