Daily Hawk

The All Consuming Weblog

Funny thing about weblogs...they really are growing at an exponential pace. As spring dawned here in Minnesota (finally, in about mid-May), my free time was sucked up by yardwork and other outdoor activities. The frequency of blog postings declined proportionally.

Despite posting only once in a while, traffic on this site has increased. Go figure.

A Chesterton Home Run from the Star Tribune

So the Star Tribune hired a conservative columnist for their metro section--a vain attempt to balance out the unreconstructed socialists that inhabit the section.

Kathrine Kersten's first attempt did not impress...she devoted her column to criticizing the Archbishop Flynn, who had published an article the previous week advocating higher taxes to fund programs for the poor. My problem wasn't that she criticized the archbishop--he offered himself for criticism with some controversaial views.  My problem was that in her first column as the Star Tribune's  conservative house cat, she beat up on the leader of the Twin Cities' Catholic community. Has she already been cowed by her liberal editors? They must have giggled with delight when her draft landed on their desks.

She makes up for it today, writing a piece that features Dale Alquist, the leader of the Chesterton Society, a locally-based group that spreads the word about the prominent turn of the century Catholic philosopher. Dale is the father of Julian Alquist, who was in a group I chaperoned to World Youth Day in Toronto a couple of years ago.  I remember him talking about his dad's job back then--I thought it sounded nuts. When I got home I subscribed to the magazine, and it's really a piece of work. It really is a "society" complete with its own inside jokes and bizzare language. If that society is large enough to making a living, than Dale Alquist has struck gold. 

Kudos to Dale (and his family) for making it work, and for keeping Chesterton on the short roll call of famous philosophers.

    

Destination: Mexico--Check it out!

Tonight I'm working on the weblog for the youth group from Sts. Peter and Paul. I'm helping out with their trip to Agua Prieta, Mexico, just across the border from Douglas, Arizona (made famous by the Minutemen in these pages).  I just got back from a day long retreat with the teens, and their a great group a kids.

In the coming weeks you can read all about them at the Destination: Mexico weblog at www.supersixfour.typepad.com/destinationmexico.

A Daily Hawk Personal Note

Yes, the posts have been sparse the past couple of weeks. Lack of fodder? Lack of ideas? Lack of time? A little from each.  One thing is that I've become content to leave the complaining to the professionals. Do you know how hard it is to be Paul Krugman? Twice a week he has to think up a new and creative way to complain about the Bush administration. Even when President Bush takes up a reasonable, creative and relatively liberal idea like progressive indexing, the Nutty Professor claims it's a conspiracy. The logic goes like this: Bush wants to maintain social security benefits for the poor, and cut them for the rich. In the future, the rich will want to cut the benefits of the poor. Bush knows this, and has devised this cunning scheme to bedevil our country's lowly urchins.   Whatever, dude. (I'd link to the article but my sloth has consigned it to the NY Times pay-only archive)

Ok, now that I've gotten that out of my system, back to announcements.

1) I'm starting a Spanish class next week. I work with foreigners all day.  Lots of people blame their problems in life on foreigners, but for me it's true! In all honesty, I'm the real foreigner at work, so it's high time I at least learned pidgin Spanish.   

2) I'm going to Mexico on a youth mission with our church. We're going to build houses and host a vacation bible school for orphan girls at a mission just across the border from Douglas, Arizona.

Check out Douglas on a map...Cochise County, Arizona, baby! I'm hoping to meet a real, live Minuteman that will show me the devastation illegal immigrants have wrought on his life and country.  Or failing that, the big, mishapen chip on his shoulder. We'll all be blogging (watch this space for info), and I'll be writing an article for an un-named newspaper. Hoping to find some people that will demonstrate the quixotic stupidity of the Minutemen. Wish me luck!   

Constantine Converts to Unemployment

Bo exposes Constantine as a fraud. Constantine hits the bricks.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky.

Send in the Hacks: Teens Drinking in Eagan

Teens drinking in Eagan. Mom's out of town. Dad's loaded. Cops bust the party.

Front page of the Strib's Metro section?

Here's the lede: "Whatever else happened during the big teen party at Jeffrey and Peggy Carlson's home in Eagan last Saturday night, everyone agrees on one thing: it could have turned out much, much worse."

Everyone? Did you actually talk to EVERYONE? I bet the kids that got cited and grounded would challenge that conclusion.

The Strib's hack even drags in an expert to prove this party was a ticking time bomb: "it's nearly impossible to teach a minor to drink responsibly," according to Judy Nelson of Wayzata High School. "The adolescent brain isn't there yet."

Well, impossible for the brains of America's kids, anyway. The brains of the rest of the world's kids seem to be able to handle it.

If anyone can tell me why the cops busting a party is front page news in a big city newspaper, drop me a line. Or if you can explain how the Strib suddenly went off the tracks into the world of sensational tabloid journalism, I'd like to hear that one, too.

P.S. Why was the Wayzata High School drug and alcohol councelor quoted in a story about kids drinking in Eagan? Maybe it took that many phone calls to get someone to say what he wanted them to say.)

Deprevity in the Public Schools

Today's Star Tribune reports that the superintendent of the Crosby-Ironton school district has instructed teachers to give students only A's and B's this semester because of the impact of the district's two-month teachers' strike.

Fine...who cares about grades anymore? Grade hyper-inflation has destroyed their meaning. But the Strib buried the more intriguing motivation:

The superintendent said she also was concerned that some teachers might penalize students whose parents opposed the union's position on the issues that led to the strike.  She said that before the strike, some teachers did just that, giving some students grades lower than what they deserved. She wouldn't say how widespread that was or identify individual cases, but said "We had a lot of parents complain about that."   

If this is true, why hasn't the superintendent fired these teachers? Why, instead, is she protecting their identity?  Why isn't the Star Tribune tracking down these students and parents, getting the names of the teachers, and asking the teachers for an explanation?

Later in the article a union representative says she's never heard of such a thing. Maybe she's right. If the superintendent is going to make such accusations, she better be able to back it up.

If this is true (and knowing how weird some teachers can be about union politics, I have a feeling that it is), it's yet another reason why teachers shouldn't be allowed to strike. Think about how petty and sad these teachers must be: a student turns in "A" quality work. But her parents have said in public that they oppose the teachers going on strike or oppose the union's demands. So the teacher gives the student a B-.  Pathetic. 

Message to the Crosby-Ironton teachers: We're not "On the Waterfront". We don't send goons out for intimidation and reprisal when someone opposes the union. You people are teachers...you can at least pretend like you care about your students more than your precious little union. 

What if?

My New Year’s resolution was to kick the talk radio habit. Sadly, I continue to flip around the AM dial when I’m driving. When one station puts me in a sour mood, I flip to another until that station puts me in a worse mood. This cycle of angst continues until I arrive at work or back home.

Today, while going through my usual five-channel rotation, I stopped to hear Sean Hannity shout about the Minutemen Project in Arizona. These are the people that have taken it upon themselves to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal immigrants. When they’re not protecting us from the mortal threat of the future bus boys and lettuce pickers of America, they work as teachers, bus drivers, accountants and bait and tackle store owners.

Hannity was interviewing a journalist that followed these people around for a few days. This guy says that while he was with the Minutemen, they were threatened by a gang of Mexican drug lords. One of the group leaders gave him a .357 magnum, and told him to sleep with it, “just in case”.  Here’s this group of regular folks, armed to the teeth, going along with their “mission” and ready to shoot their way out of any trouble with gangsters who have no qualms about killing, killing the mourning parents of their victims, or torturing their enemies and dissolving their remains in vats of acid.

The Minutemen promise they will not to intercept skulking Mexicans. Instead, they will dutifully report them the US Border Patrol. Even so, the Minutemen could easily clash with drug runners by mistake. They could also wind up reporting a drug mule—some hapless sucker paid a trifling amount of money to carry a load of drugs across the border. When that mule gives the names of his bosses under FBI interrogation, one of those drug lords could go looking for payback.

The thought of retribution against the Minutemen reminded me of the book “News of a Kidnapping” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s a book about the kidnapping of ten prominent citizens in Colombia in the early 1990s by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.   The victims were Colombia’s best and brightest: journalists, actresses, the successful family of prominent politicians, even a former beauty queen. For over a year, they were locked in tiny, dirty rooms, fed scraps and constantly threatened with torture and death.  For every day the government maintained its tense standoff with Escobar’s gang, the public nervously prayed for the safe return of these beloved native sons and daughters. 

Garcia Marquez described how drugs have battered the culture of his country:

“Easy money, a narcotic more harmful than the ill-named “heroic drugs”, was injected into the national culture. The idea prospered: The law is the greatest obstacle to happiness; it is a waste of time learning to read and write; you can live a better, more secure life as a criminal than as a law-abiding citizen.”

Our insatiable appetite for coke and smack has created a cultural wasteland across Latin America. Lucrative drug supply routes run from our biggest cities south to the Andes, and in their path leave a trail of easy money, corruption, social anarchy and death. They might not know it, but Minutemen unintentionally compete with this depravity in the Arizona desert.

After Escobar executed one of those ten hostages, the mother of the victim met with the Colombia’s president. “Just think about it,” she asked of President Gaviria, “What if your daughter had been in this situation? What would you have done then?”

And I ask of the Minutemen: what if someone in your family was kidnapped? What if your son or daughter was locked in a dirty bedroom 24 hours a day for a year or more, under the constant threat of death? What if you get murdered? What if you provoke a shootout that incites Mexican drug runners to take their war into the American southwest to secure their territory? 

Maybe nothing will come of the Minutemen. Maybe their time in the desert will be a glorified campout. Before we send regular people gallivanting on self-important misadventures along our country’s border, ask yourself “What if”.

An Unscheduled Hiatus

I haven't posted anything in the past couple of weeks but not for lack of material: the death of Pope John Paul II, various rumblings in Latin America, and Tom Delay's congressional cavelcade of whimsy would provide ample fodder for the Daily Hawk.

Unfortunately, another of my sad hobbies has sucked up my spare time lately: baseball. Worse, a fantasy baseball league. I joined up just before the season started and for the first time since high school, I started obsessing over box scores and looking at the next three day's of probable pitcher matchups. It's sad, even sadder than blogging. While my team broke out to a fast start, the Millonairos have sank without a trace, falling from first place to 11th in only seven days.

Even in this though, I've learned a lesson. Before the season started, I picked a pretty good team. Then I started trading, and turned over half the players before the first series was over. I thought I was pretty smart--but later I discovered my initial instincts were right--the players I dropped continued to perform well, and the new ones I picked up stunk. Just like on Wall Street, you better have a good reason for making a trade. Trading on a whim, day trading, flipping, or trading just because you can (or because it's cheap) is a great way to go to the poorhouse. Do some research, pick a few proven winners, and stick with your insticts.

Oh, and the Star Tribune printed a great column by George Will today. Check it out.

The Star Tribune's Childish Pope Editorial

Getting right to the point--the Strib editorial today begrudgingly says some nice things about the Pope today, but tempers them with these complaints:

"It's irrefutable that he hastened the fall of Communist governments in Eastern Europe. Millions owe him gratitude for newfound political and religious freedoms.

But a man raised under the tyranny of Nazi and Soviet invaders did not liberalize the church. Indeed, he insisted on bishops who were theological clones of himself. Orthodoxy was compelled, and the generous spirit of John XXIII snuffed out. (snip)

Most notably, he rewrote church law in a way that stamped out debate on a wide range of passionately discussed topics. (snip)

In America, John Paul's strict emphasis helped to seal a remarkable alliance between Catholics and conservative evangelical Protestants that has succeeded in moving politics considerably to the right." (emphisis added)

He did not "liberalize" the church...he insisted bishops be "theological clones"...he "helped to seal a remarkable alliance"...You know, this kind of bickering about a man on his death bed is just childish.

The editorial staff clearly felt obliged to write something about the Pope today, but instead of doing it right by presenting his real accomplishments, they present a milquetoast laundry lists of positives, and what they preceive to be his flaws. It's weak writing, fraught with the prejustices of the author and the bland "and on the other hand" style that so often afflicts newspaper writing. Contrast it with editorials from other newspapers here, here and here and you'll see what I mean.

These writers were able to pay their repsects to the Pope, even if they don't necessarily agree with his conservative views or theology. These people also recognize that his moral clarity was not a liability, but his greatest asset. That concept must have been too complicated for the intellectual lightweights on the Strib's editorial staff.