Do-Gooders Gone Wild
Liberals love to gripe about military spending. Just last week, Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti actually wrote on his Twitter account: “Thought encounter of the day: ‘Would be good if our schools are fully funded and DoD has to hold a bake sale to buy its next fighter jet.’ ” It would also be good if, à la Red Dawn, a ragtag band of plucky high school kids could drive an invading army out of Colorado— Wolverines!—but we’d best keep a few aircraft carriers around just in case. Considering that America’s worst school districts tend to be some of the best funded, Narisetti might consider this sentiment not so much a “thought” as an encounter with a bumper sticker likely to be found on a ’76 Volvo wagon.
In fact, earnest liberals might want to take a good long look in the mirror when considering why we’re so broke. The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that the famously liberal city by the bay has a procurement process that makes the Pentagon look positively Scrooge-like. City policies “mean paying about $240 for getting a copy of a key that actually cost a worker $1.35 to get done at a hardware store on his break.” In -another case, the paper found the city had paid $3,000 for a “vehicle battery tray” that could be found online for as little as $12.
Now it would be one thing if this were simply incompetence, but San Francisco’s problem is a direct result of the city government’s misdirected do-gooderism. The city has rigorous “social justice” requirements for contractors that include everything from enforcing a ban on tropical hardwoods to ensuring they’ve never been involved in the slave trade. Regarding that last sticking point, blogger Moe Lane quips this “would be an impressive moral stance to take if it weren’t for the minor detail that they never seem to require that sort of thing from, say, the Democratic party.”
Rather than deal with the costs of “social justice” compliance, many would-be contractors have found a novel solution: Any business with the city is done through a third party that amounts to little more than a shell company that meets the “social justice” requirements. The middleman takes a markup of anywhere from 10 to 150 percent, according to the Chronicle. But the important thing is preserving the illusion that San Francisco city council members are saving the rainforests, oblivious to the fact they’re really just throwing taxpayer funds down a rathole. It seems the road to hell is paved with Brazilian walnut. ♦
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Comic books and state budgets collided recently in Minnesota when it came to light that, in 2010, the Twin Cities’ public library system paid author Neil Gaiman a hefty speaking fee to give a talk. In a fit of pique, state house majority leader Matt Dean said that Gaiman is a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state.” Gaiman has written both science fiction novels and screenplays, and is also known for his work in comics. He responded gamely to Dean’s criticism. “If I actually wanted to come after you, dude, I could,” Gaiman said of Dean in an interview with the Star-Tribune, which went on to report that “Gaiman said he would not file a lawsuit, but was considering other options that would be ‘so much more fun than going legal.’ ”
But the substance of Gaiman’s defense was a little strange. In an interview with a local alternative newspaper, he claimed that (1) his speaking fee was actually only $40,000; (2) he only took home $33,600; (3) he normally gets upwards of $60,000; (4) he spoke for four hours, putting his hourly rate well under $10,000; and (5) in any event, he gave the money to charity.
As defenses go, that’s about the best Gaiman can hope for, because the rest of the story is even more unflattering to him and the librarians who paid him. The Twin Cities library system paid Gaiman using money from the state’s Heritage fund, a program set up in 2008 that raised the state’s sales tax for 25 years in order to set aside money for outdoor projects and the arts. Minnesota itself is facing a $5.1 billion budget deficit right now, but Gaiman claims that when the library called him offering the $40,000, they said that “they have this money and it can only be spent on speakers in libraries. It can’t even be spent on books or paper clips or staff. And they will lose it, and if they haven’t spent it, their budget will be cut by that amount.” So rather than help the library and the state of Minnesota live within its means, Gaiman took the money. (The library also billed nearly $2,800 in travel expenses for Gaiman, who lives just over the Wisconsin state line.)
There’s nothing wrong with taking free money, of course. And Gaiman is entitled to take Minnesota’s suckers for all they’re willing to give him. But his huffy, and ultimately revealing, defense shows that Representative Dean at least had the “weasel” part right. ♦
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Weight Watchers
Being a kid in America is getting harder these days. The Scrapbook can still recall our carefree summers of enjoying a well-earned ice cream sandwich after a long day playing outside. We cannot remember a time we were asked by anyone to count our calories or keep a food diary. As long as you drank a SunnyD with your after-school snack and ate your serving of broccoli with dinner, your diet could be deemed “well balanced.”
Kids today, however, must prove their commitment to personal health and well-being. In San Francisco, you can only earn your Happy Meal toy by choosing a meal with a reduced amount of calories. In some states, you must prove your care for your fellow students (and teachers) on your birthday by forgoing the cupcakes and bringing a healthy snack instead.
Now, Big Brother is taking a closer look at lunch trays in the cafeteria. A new program in San Antonio, Texas—yes, land of Tex-Mex and barbecue—will carefully monitor lunches in area elementary schools. These select cafeterias will be fitted with cameras that photograph children’s meal trays after they’ve made their selections and will photograph their trays again when they are done eating to calculate the leftovers. A special program will then analyze the food for caloric content and nutritional value. Each tray is marked with a special bar code to identify the child, and the findings will then be sent home in a report to the parents. This is to allow parents to “see” what their children are eating and help adjust their diets accordingly. (Of course, results could be skewed if any last-minute lunch-time trading occurs.)
As far as The Scrapbook is concerned, we’re wondering how some of our old school-lunch favorites would stack up—gone are the days when -bologna had a first name. ♦
Of Thee I Sing
The Scrapbook hasn’t done the dishes or swept the stoop in days. We’ve been too busy reading What So Proudly We Hail, a new anthology of American short stories, speeches, letters, and patriotic songs edited by Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass, and Diana Schaub (ISI Books, $35). This whopping collection—790 pages—is stuffed with great reading. Just don’t drop it on your foot.
The good professors have gathered texts from some of America’s greatest statesmen and writers. Their goal is to illuminate questions of national identity, creed, character, civic virtue, the goals of civic life, and unity and integration. “The patriotism we seek to encourage,” the editors write, “is deep, not superficial; reflective, not reflexive; and, above all, thoughtful.” Inside you’ll find authors who run the gamut from Benjamin Franklin to Herman Melville; George Patton to Michael Shaara; Tom Wolfe to our own Andrew Ferguson. These are writers, the editors continue, who “make us think, challenge our unexamined opinions, expand our sympathies, elevate our gaze, and introduce us to possibilities open to citizens in our everyday American life that may be undreamt of in our philosophizing.” They are also—this is important—fun to read.
What’s great about What So Proudly We Hail is that you can open it to any page and immediately begin exploring timeless questions of American creed and culture. And there are no better guides to the material than the Professors Kass and Schaub.
Memorial Day is coming up. What better time to celebrate the exceptional cultural products of this exceptional nation? And Father’s Day is right around the corner. Get Pops a copy—the whole family will be singing “America the Beautiful” and quoting Lincoln in no time. ♦
The Puppet Presidency
Weekly Standard reader John W. Thomas of Cincinnati writes to us wondering
if Bill Kristol is familiar with Larry Niven’s book Ringworld, where a cynical race of aliens called Puppeteers manipulate humans. Their leader is known as the “Hindmost” because he leads from behind! Is this then the source of The Scrapbook’s musings about exactly what kind of an alien the president’s father was (“Birth of a Conspiracy” in the 5/9/11 issue)? Perhaps Obama is a “space alien.” Or maybe we’re all living in a fictional universe, one where a liberal, antiwar president has us in three wars at once? Perhaps life is just stranger than fiction.
Frankly, we’re not sure we want to know the answer. ♦
Nerd Alert!
A recent correction from the New York Times:
An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)
Inexplicably, the Times failed to mention that Sting glows blue when orcs are nearby. Or so we’ve been told by one of our senior writers who asked to remain nameless in order to preserve his dignity. ♦