Monday, October 29, 2012
WEEK EIGHT READING
MADRID — Spain's government was hit hard by the country's financial crisis on multiple fronts Tuesday as protestors enraged with austerity cutbacks and tax hikes clashed with police near Parliament, a separatist-minded region set elections seen as an independence referendum and the nation's high borrowing costs rose again
More than 1,000 riot police blocked off access to the Parliament building in the heart of Madrid, forcing most protesters to crowd nearby avenues and shutting down traffic at the height of the evening rush hour.
Police used batons to push back some protesters at the front of the march attended by an estimated 6,000 people as tempers flared, and some demonstrators broke down barricades and threw rocks and bottles toward authorities.
Television images showed officers beating protesters in response, and an Associated Press television producer saw five people dragged away by police and two protesters bloodied. Spanish state TV said at least 28 were injured, including two officers, and that 22 people were detained. Independent Spanish media reported higher numbers that could not immediately be confirmed.
The demonstration, organized with an "Occupy Congress" slogan, drew protesters from all walks of life weary of nine straight months of painful economic austerity measures imposed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and his solid majority of lawmakers. Smaller demonstrations Tuesday attracted hundreds of protesters in Barcelona and Seville.
Angry Madrid marchers who got as close as they could to Parliament, 250 meters (yards) away, yelled "Get out!, Get out! They don't represent us! Fire them!"
"The only solution is that we should put everyone in Parliament out on the street so they know what it's like," said Maria Pilar Lopez, a 60-year-old government secretary.
Lopez and others called for fresh elections, claiming the government's hard-hitting austerity measures are proof that the ruling Popular Party misled voters when it won power last November in a landslide.
While Rajoy has said he has no plans to cut pensions for Spaniards, Lopez fears her retirement age could be raised from 65 to as much as 70. Three of her seven nieces and nephews have been laid off since Rajoy ousted Spain's Socialists, and she said the prospect of them finding jobs "is very bleak."
Spain is struggling in its second recession in three years with unemployment near 25 percent. The country has introduced austerity measures and economic reforms in a bid to convince its euro partners and investors that it is serious about reducing its bloated deficit to 6.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2012 and 4.5 percent next year.
The deficit reached (EURO)50.1 billion ($64.8 billion), equivalent to 4.77 percent of GDP, through August, the government said Tuesday. Secretary of State for the Budget Marta Fernandez Curras said the deficit "is under control."
Spain has been under pressure from investors to apply for European Central Bank assistance in keeping its borrowing costs down. Rajoy has yet to say whether Madrid will apply for the aid, reluctant to ask since such assistance comes with strings attached.
Also Tuesdaythe president of the economically powerful but heavily indebted Catalonia region called early elections for November, two years ahead of schedule after Rajoy last week rejected a demand to grant the the region special fiscal powers.
Many Catalonia residents speak Catalan and don't feel Spanish, and the vote was announced two weeks after a massive rally in Barcelona by Catalans seeking independence, greater autonomy from Spain or more control of tax revenue sent to the central government in Madrid.
Concerns over Spain's public finances also came to the forefront earlier Tuesday when the Treasury sold (EURO)3.98 billion ($5.14 billion) in short-term debt but at a higher cost. It sold (EURO)1.39 billion in three-month bills at an average interest rate of 1.2 percent, up from 0.95 percent in the last such auction Aug. 28, and (EURO)2.58 billion in six-month bills on a yield of 2.21 percent, up from 2.03 percent.
The government is expected to present a new batch of economically painful reforms on Thursday when it unveils a draft budget for 2013.
On Friday, an auditor will release the results of stress tests on Spanish banks hit hard by the collapse of the country's real estate sector, which drove Spanish economic growth until the 2008 financial crisi hit. The government will then judge how much of a (EURO)100 billion loan it will tap to help bail out the banks. Initial estimates say the banks will need some (EURO)60 billion.
WEEK EIGHT WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ
Why does this sort of protesting happen in Europe so much more than in the U.S.?
Sunday, October 21, 2012
WEEK SEVEN READING
See Hawaiian royal history in a five-stop procession
Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Iolani Palace, Washington Place, Queen Emma Summer Palace and Mauna Ala provide windows into Hawaii's past monarchy.By Catharine Hamm, Los Angeles Times
October 21, 2012
HONOLULU — Palace intrigue? Check. Royal rapscallions? Some. Kings and queens and gorgeous things? You'll find those too.
You thought we were speaking of Britain, perhaps? Well, no, although Britain celebrated Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee in June. Instead, we're turning to Hawaiian royalty, who ruled a kingdom now so popular that 7.3 million people visited last year.
Royal watchers will find almost as many twists and turns in the story of the Hawaiian monarchs as they do among England's overlords. But this history is closer to home and perhaps strikes more fully at the heart. By knowing these kings and queens, you begin to understand the true majesty of Hawaii.
A quest for a refresher course recently brought me to Oahu. This isn't the only island where the past pokes its head around many corners, but its concentration in Honolulu makes it easy to seek it out and soak it in. You can separate this five-stop royal route into appetizers or consume it as one large feast. Either way, you'll find that even a tropical playground — and especially this one — can change a traveler's perspective.
Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum
Let the lessons — and the confusion — begin. Immediately inside the original part of the museum, whose exterior is almost Dickensian, the Kahili Room (feather standards borne like coats of arms in Europe) will introduce you to Hawaiian royalty, or alii, but the bloodlines may not be clear. (You can see a timeline of the monarchs who ruled the kingdom on LX.)
Sorting out who is related to whom is a chore, partly because monogamy wasn't practiced until some time after the arrival of the missionaries about 1820 (Kamehameha I is said to have had 21 or more wives) and partly because of what the Hawaiians call hanai, in which children sometimes were given to relatives or others to raise. "It is not easy to explain its origin to those alien to our national life, but it seems perfectly natural to us," Queen Liliuokalani wrote in her book "Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen."
You can get a feel for the chronology of the rulers in this room: Kamehameha I, a fighter and a diplomat who united the islands and died in 1819; Kamehameha II, who, with his wife, died of measles in 1824 while visiting King George IV in England; and Kamehameha III, who changed the government to a constitutional monarchy before his death in 1854.
Brothers Kamehameha IV (died in 1863) and Kamehameha V traveled extensively, including to the U.S., where the racial prejudice they encountered tainted their view of this country.
When Kamehameha V died in 1872 without an heir, Lunalilo was elected. The wildly popular monarch, the "People's King," died after 13 months in 1874, his ill health perhaps hastened by his taste for strong drink.
David Kalakaua was next, and during his reign was forced to accept a new constitution that depleted his powers. Upon his death in 1891, his sister, Liliuokalani, took the throne and lasted about two years before she was overthrown. She was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to five years at hard labor, a sentence later commuted.
It is hard now to imagine, in a place as joyful as Hawaii, the sorrow of watching the kingdom wrested away from its rightful rulers. Was it a power grab by foreign business interests or an altruistic intervention by foreigners? A morning or afternoon at the Bishop can be your own fact-finding mission, and whatever your conclusion, you'll never look at Hawaii the same.
Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 1525 Bernice St., Honolulu; (808) 847-3511, http://www.bishopmuseum.org. Open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily except Tuesdays. Admission: $17.95 adults, $14.95 seniors 65 and older and children 4-12; children 3 and younger are admitted free.
Iolani Palace
On the grounds of Iolani Palace is a sacred mound where Hawaiian royalty once were buried. "Kapu" — forbidden — a sign warns.
The palace, which served the last two monarchs, is more welcoming. Once you don the booties that keep your shoes from scratching the Douglas fir floors, you'll immediately notice the royal portraits lining the wall, providing a sort of Cliffs Notes review of the monarchy.
It's easy, however, to be diverted from those portraits by the entry's real showpiece: the gleaming koa wood staircase, said to be the largest such structure in the world. (The palace was closed for renovations for almost a decade starting in 1969; the work included tenting the building because termites had feasted on various parts of the palace. But the staircase was fine, said Kippen de Alba Chu, the palace executive director, because koa is so durable.)
This is the palace, completed in 1882, from which King David Kalakaua and his wife, Queen Kapiolani, and, later, Queen Liliuokalani, reigned.
In 1883, a coronation ceremony was held in the new palace, though it was slightly after the fact: Kalakaua had reigned since 1874. No matter. The European-influenced palace became the heart of parties and functions.
It was such a symbol that when the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in 1893, the new provisional government couldn't get rid of the palace contents fast enough. (One plate, belonging to a royal place setting, which you can see on the sumptuously set dining room in the palace, was bought for 25 cents at a flea market in San Diego and returned; other pieces came home in a similar way.) Many of the furnishings are replacement pieces.
But not the thrones. In a room resplendent with crimson and gold, two thrones stand side by side. They are originals, and they are unrestored. "They're identical," Chu said, "so we're not 100% sure which was the king's and which was the queen's." This room invites you to linger and ponder how the monarchy unraveled in a place of such innovation: electricity before the White House had it; telephones; indoor plumbing; dumbwaiters. It had everything but a fairy-tale ending.
Iolani Palace, 364 S. King St., Honolulu; (808) 538-1471 (for recorded information), http://www.iolanipalace.org. Guided tours (reservations required [808] 522-0832) $20 for adults, $6 for children 5-12; self-led and audio tours $13 and $5, respectively.
Washington Place
"It is a large, square, white house, with pillars and porticos on all sides, really a palatial dwelling, as comfortable in its appointments as it is inviting in its aspect," Queen Liliuokalani wrote of Washington Place in her book, "Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen."
Before and after Liliuokalani's ascension to the throne in 1891, Washington Place was her home. The elegant Greek Revival dwelling was owned by Capt. John Dominis, a seaman, and his wife, Mary. It was completed in 1847, a year after Dominis was said to have been lost at sea.
Their son, John, attended the Chiefs' Children's School, or the Royal School, established by missionaries for children of royal blood. (Absent any royal blood, Dominis' admission remains something of a mystery.) It was there that he met a student named Lydia Kamakaeha, who would become his wife — and the last reigning monarch. Washington Place was her home more for more than a half-century.
Given the Hawaiian history, Washington Place may seem an odd choice for a name, but it was so decreed for perpetuity by Kamehameha III and so it has remained. Today, the home, which is open for tours by appointment, is "decorated very much like it was during the queen's time," said Corinne Chun Fujimoto, the curator of Washington Place. "That's what we are trying to do: bring the house back to the time of the queen and bring her music back." Her music, of course, included "Aloha Oe," or "Farewell to Thee," one of scores of pieces she wrote.
In Washington Place, a grand piano sits as though ready for the queen herself, a tall kahili in the background. Besides the piano, she played organ, guitar and autoharp, thanks to her musical training at the Royal School. "She understands it's the culture that will take her people to the future," Chun Fujimoto said.
Of this home, the queen wrote in her memoir: "It is, in fact, just what it appears, a choice tropical retreat in the midst of the chief city of the Hawaiian Islands." That is as true now as it was then, and definitely worth the time to get to know the home of the only reigning Hawaiian queen, who loved children but had none of her own and who loved her kingdom but stepped aside to spare her people a full-bore war.
Washington Place, 320 S. Beretania St., Honolulu; (808) 586-0240, http://www.lat.ms/RkiuIk. Appointment required; email Cameron.Heen@hawaii.gov. No cost but donation for preservation accepted.
Queen Emma Summer Palace
If you look today at the Queen Emma Summer Palace, you see a graceful home set against the lush backdrop of Nuuanu Valley. If things had turned out differently, you might be watching a baseball game being played here instead of seeing how history played out.
Like many structures, this one had fallen into disrepair and was slated, along with its 65 acres, to become a ball field until the Daughters of Hawaii intervened in 1915 and turned it into a showpiece.
The palace, about three miles from downtown, is filled with beautiful artifacts, some original to the abode that Queen Emma and her husband, King Kamehameha IV (who became king after his predecessor's death in 1854) used as an escape from Honolulu's heat. You'll see a koa bed that has its own safe-deposit boxes, of a sort, built into it; a Chinese porcelain bathtub; and a necklace that was a gift from the maharajah of India.
But none is as compelling as the cradle in which the king and queen's son, Prince Albert, slept. The koa wood piece, crafted by German woodworker Wilhelm Fischer, resembles a half an egg, as though a protection against the dangers of childhood.
Ravaged by disease and perhaps a weakened gene pool, the number of Hawaiians dwindled rapidly after missionaries arrived about 1820. In the 1830s, there were 124,000 Hawaiians; by the 1880s, only 44,000 remained. Prince Albert's birth was reason enough for joy, and his survival past his first birthday gave the kingdom hope for the future of the monarchy.
If you're a student of this history now, you know that the next Kamehameha was a brother, not a son. The young boy in whom the people had placed their hope died in 1862. He was 4 years old. His father, grief-stricken, died 15 months later. After their deaths, Queen Emma was given the nickname Kaleleonalani, "flight of the heavenly ones."
Queen Emma Summer Palace, 2913 Pali Highway, Honolulu; (808) 595-3167, http://www.daughtersofhawaii.org. Open 9 a.m.-4 p.m. daily, except holidays. Docent-guided tours $10 for adults, $8 for seniors (62 and older), $1 for children (younger than 18); self-guided tours are $8 for adults, $6 for seniors and $1 for children.
Mauna Ala
After Albert's death, Kamehameha IV ordered a new mausoleum built to house his son. Mauna Ala ("fragrant mountain"), the Royal Mausoleum, is not far from the Summer Palace.
"These grounds were special to the Hawaiian people, especially the Kamehameha family," said Kainoa Daines of the Oahu Visitors Bureau, an active member of the Royal Order of Kamehameha I, responsible for ceremonial protocols. "It was at this very spot … where Kamehameha's army met Kalanikupule's army [in 1705], and blood was shed for the first time. It was a pivotal place, a very pivotal battle in the unification of the islands."
The bodies of other royals, who were in the burial mound at Iolani, were moved here in 1865. "From 9 p.m. until 2 a.m. the commoners were told to stay inside their house" because they didn't have the rank — the mana — to witness the procession, Daines said. To muffle the sounds of beasts and the wagons they pulled, the streets were lined with pili grass (often used in thatch work), and all of the caskets were moved into what was then the mausoleum and what is now the chapel.
Soon the mausoleum wasn't large enough, so one crypt was built for the Kamehamehas (except Kamehameha I, whose body was hidden) and one for the Kalakauas. (Lunalilo also is not here; he's buried at Kawaiahao Church in downtown Honolulu.)
Mauna Ala is a who's who of Hawaiian royalty, and it was humbling to stand before them. Daines chanted and placed leis at the Kalakaua and Kamehameha crypts. A light rain fell as he bent to put the flowers on the pink granite monument that marks the tomb of the Kamehamehas.
Making sure to face the tomb, he stepped backward, saying softly, "It's for all of us."
Mauna Ala Royal Mausoleum, 2261 Nuuanu Ave., Honolulu; http://www.lat.ms/WqNvvC. Open 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays-Fridays. Admission is free.
travel@latimes.com
WEEK SEVEN WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ
What is the point of travelling?
Where would you go on a dream trip?
Do you imagine an active trip (bike down a volcano, bungee jump, etc) or a more relaxing journey(resort, funny umbrella in your drink)?
Where would you go on a dream trip?
Do you imagine an active trip (bike down a volcano, bungee jump, etc) or a more relaxing journey(resort, funny umbrella in your drink)?
Sunday, October 14, 2012
WEEK SIX BLOG ENTRY
If you don't mind talking about it, when did your family arrive in the United States? On my mother’s side, they arrived in the 1600s from England. They went to North Carolina. On my father’s side, they arrived from Germany in the 1880s. How does where you come from dictate who you are?
WEEK SIX READING
SOURCE:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-deportation-story,0,6963488.htmlstory
Could he be a good American?
Guatemalan man with a U.S. family is threatened with deportation.
Richard Fausset
June 4, 2011
Reporting from Chapel Hill, N.C. — On a bright Saturday morning, Emily Nelson Guzman packed a beet-red Prius for the journey that would take her once more to Lumpkin, Ga., with its forlorn town square and sleepy barbecue joint and the nation's largest immigration detention center.
Her husband was there, locked away. Nineteen months earlier, federal agents had arrested him in his yard.
She loaded into the Prius a bag holding the old tight jeans she could finally squeeze into again, the ones she would model so he could see, through the visitation window, how much weight she had lost.
She loaded in another bag, full of action figures -- the Shazams and Spider-men and Power Rangers her little boy pretended to be when he fantasized about setting his father free.
THE NEW LATINO SOUTH
The Latino population in the South has grown dramatically over the last decade. This is one in a series of occasional stories chronicling the lives of Latinos in a changing region.
Pedro Guzman's bag, a small Old Navy backpack, had already been packed and stowed away in a locker at Stewart Detention Center. It was the only luggage he would be allowed to take to his native Guatemala if a federal immigration judge, in a hearing two days hence, rejected the argument that Pedro had transformed from gang member to good American, a family man who had earned the right to live in the United States.
At the hearing, Emily would have a chance to vouch for his character. So would her mother. So would Pedro himself.
Emily's mother, Pamela Alberda, brought out a bag of turkey sandwiches from her boyfriend's house. The boyfriend improvised something on the piano. The music spilled out into the driveway, urgent and sad, like the day itself.
“I really, truly do not know what will happen,” Emily had written on her blog. “He will be freed or sent to a country he does not know.”
She is a family therapist, 34, white and Midwest-born, with a voice as plain as milk. A dozen years ago, she fell in love -- and discovered that the object of her affection had been smuggled across the border by his mother when he was 8 years old.
She also discovered that his immigration issue would not be solved by marrying a U.S. citizen.
A wife's devotion
When Emily met Pedro, he was a sweet kid at a bus stop, a 19-year-old high school dropout on his way to one of his two restaurant jobs, a lost soul who escaped the street life of San Luis Obispo and had gone to Minneapolis hoping for a fresh start.
He had covered up his watch on that first meeting, giving himself an excuse to ask the time. She answered in a confident Spanish perfected during a study-abroad year in Mazatlan.
Soon there was passion and friendship, and trust. He told her about his old life: He had run with a gang, but it was minor-league hooliganism, he assured her. It was San Luis Obispo, after all, not Los Angeles.
There was a small wedding, despite her parents' initial reservations, and a move to North Carolina. In between came Logan, now 4 years old, with his big brown eyes and head of loose black ringlets and little fists that pounded his mother when his father's absence drove him to fits.
Emily knew that most women in her position didn't have the means or the connections to publicize their cases.
But she had her blog, “Bring Pedro Home.” He had been the subject of a postcard campaign and an online petition drive. They had retained an Atlanta lawyer who arrived at hearings in a big silver BMW.
And she had formed alliances with the South's small core of pro-immigrant activists, the Mennonites and liberation theology types with their earnest bumper stickers and their belief -- inspiring to some, naive to others -- in a justice that transcends borders.
The drive from North Carolina would take her through a changing South, where pro-Dixie bumper stickers vie for attention with the billboards for restaurants named El Molcajete, and roadside signs like the one in Columbus, Ga., asking, Necesita un Trabajo? Need a Job?
Lumpkin's Stewart Detention Center is itself a sign of the region's transformation, with 1,400 detainees, most of them culled from Georgia and the Carolinas, a rotating cast of Juans and Miguels and Manuelitos. Somebody's father, somebody's son. The ones who were angels and the ones who should probably be kicked out. The ones who fell somewhere in between.
Activists have targeted the privately run detention center and had held up Pedro, 31, as an example of the kind of good person being ground down by a misguided immigration policy. Emily told them about the injustice of his case -- about the judge who declined to grant Pedro legal residency, or even bond, citing two marijuana arrests from when he was a teen.
And yet, despite her allies and advantages, Emily had never felt more pessimistic about Pedro's case as they rolled out of Chapel Hill. She knew there was a kink in his story of redemption.
Unfortunate events
The day before they left North Carolina, Emily took Logan to his therapy session. She and a social worker watched him play Candyland, and invent the rules as he saw fit. This was something he could control, unlike the situation with Pedro.
In a previous session, he reconstructed the night in September 2009 when immigration officers came to his house. A crowned prince action figure, hidden inside a dollhouse, served as his father.
They had come on a Friday at 4 a.m. and banged on the door, but Pedro did not come out. They returned Monday morning. The boy watched as Pedro, surprised, made a brief and hopeless attempt at flight. He watched as his father was handcuffed and loaded into a black SUV.
Pedro had been legal once, with an annually renewed work visa. But when he reapplied by mail in 2008, he was sent back a letter of rejection.
His elderly mother, for reasons not fully clear, had recently been denied legal residency. And because she had filed a 1988 asylum application listing Pedro as a dependent, his fate was tied to hers.
His mother left the United States for good, and the government sent a letter ordering Pedro to court. He says he never received it. The government then ordered him deported.
Being the spouse of a U.S. citizen didn't help much. Emily could petition for him to become a legal resident, but in that scenario, an attorney told her, Pedro would have to leave the country before being accepted for reentry. He would also have to obtain a special waiver because of his arrest record. She was advised that his chances would be slim.
Instead, Pedro took hope in a Clinton-era immigration law that extended legal resident status to some immigrants from a handful of troubled countries. To prevail, he needed to show that his deportation would create an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” for him and his family. He also needed to demonstrate good moral character.
In December 2009, the immigration judge cited the pot convictions, both misdemeanor possession cases, in ruling that Pedro's character was suspect. Since then, one case has been vacated and the family's attorney, H. Glenn Fogle Jr., has successfully appealed the immigration judge's ruling, winning Pedro another chance.
But two days before the road trip to Lumpkin, Fogle had sent Emily a worried email. He had been taking a closer look at Pedro's papers. What was this about a hit-and-run from 2008?
The hit-and-run. Her heart sank. She thought it was a non-issue, something that wouldn't appear on Pedro's record. It wasn't something she tended to bring up when she told his story to her activist allies.
Emily told her lawyer that the incident wasn't as bad as it sounded. But she knew that “hit-and-run” could sound bad to a judge.
According to the Justice Department, roughly 75% of the people who appeared before an immigration judge in the last fiscal year were ordered removed. Before the email from her lawyer, Emily had put Pedro's chances at 50-50. Now, she had to admit to herself, it seemed more like 10-90.
And yet the trip to Lumpkin was still on. If nothing else, she and Logan needed one last visit before Pedro was put on a plane for Guatemala City, alone, with his one allotted bag.
After therapy, Emily and Logan returned to their little wreck of a rental home in Durham. Pedro had been the cook, the housekeeper, the fix-it man. Now vegetation clogged the gutters. The mailbox was bent sideways and full of carpenter bees. The doorknobs had broken on the bedroom and bathroom doors. Not knowing how to fix them, Emily removed the knobs, leaving holes with naked bolts.
She met her mother and mother's boyfriend, Milo Fryling, 49, at a Thai place for dinner. Pamela, 54, is a preschool teacher and puppeteer who wears “Life is Good” T-shirts. But she had taken a dimmer view of a system that refused to free the father of her grandson.
In November, she was arrested for criminal trespass during a pro-immigrant rally at the detention center.
“I woke up this morning,” she said to her daughter, “and thought, 'There's going to be no justice.'”
The Carolinas passed in a blur of rest stops and billboards. Then it was into Georgia, where, a day before, Gov. Nathan Deal had signed an Arizona-style bill to crack down on illegal immigration.
They arrived in Lumpkin long after dark and spent the night at El Refugio, a modest rental house activists offer as a “refuge” for families visiting the detention center. With its bunk beds, frayed paperbacks and National Geographic maps of Latin America, it had the feel of a backpacker's hostel. Lumpkin has no hotels.
The next morning, they were among the first visitors at the detention center, a white, blocky complex ringed by fencing and concertina wire. More visitors would come soon, mothers and brothers and aunts and sisters, dressed smartly, as if for a casual church service, all murmuring in Spanish.
Pedro emerged from a door, on the other side of the visiting room's glass partition. His big dark eyes matched his son's.
The boy beamed. With feet planted on a table, he slammed the top of his head against the glass. His father did the same. They smiled, and then slammed again, in unison, like bucks in the woods, the vibrations the next best thing to a touch.
Emily stood and pirouetted in her tight jeans. Pedro grinned and bowed at the waist for comic effect. The boy commandeered the phone. Emily let him spend most of the hour talking about things important to a boy.
Pamela spoke to her son-in-law briefly. We love you, she said.
Pedro told her he figured his chances were slim. Pamela did not correct him.
“We're just trying to be realistic,” she said.
The boy and Pedro played hide-and-seek until the guard announced that time was up.
“Hide under the table,” Emily told Pedro in Spanish. He ducked.
Logan pretended to wonder where he was.
They returned to El Refugio and rested. At one point, Milo wandered Lumpkin looking for a piano. In an unlocked church, he found a Steinway, and banged out pieces from a Methodist hymnal.
In the morning, Pamela read Milo a letter she had written to God:
“I know that we are not perfect and that Pedro has made mistakes in his life. But the price he has paid has been greater than he deserves. In a world where people fight and argue and are often filled with hate and fear, this small family are loving and faithful.”
The hearing was in a tiny detention center courtroom, its wooden pews scratched with “Jorge,” “Cancun XIII,” “Zacatecas,” “LA.”
Pedro, dressed in blue prison garb, took the stand. There were three small tattooed dots on his left hand, above the thumb. Mi. Vida. Loca. My crazy life -- reminders of his life in the streets.
Pedro told Immigration Judge Dan Trimble that he couldn't remember when he left Guatemala. He had no friends or family there.
He described his work history: restaurant upon restaurant, group home worker, truck driver, and, after his work permit was denied, stay-at-home dad -- “the best job I ever had in my life.”
There was the question of the pot busts -- teenage indiscretions, he said, that he deeply regretted.
Soon after his move to Minnesota in 1999, there was a misdemeanor charge of theft. “I don't remember doing it,” he said.
There was another arrest for destroying property around the same time. Pedro said it was a big misunderstanding, that he was only going to retrieve his own stuff from a drunk roommate.
He described how he met Emily, and how she had taught him to be a better man. He spoke of his bond with his son. Deportation, Pedro said, would mean “taking my soul away, everything I worked for, everything I made.”
He explained the hit-and-run from 2008. It was nighttime on a North Carolina country road. He felt a thump on his FedEx truck, and thought it was a deer. He stopped, looked around, called out. Nothing. He returned in his truck, and a second time, with Emily.
A police officer met them at the scene and said Pedro had hit a man. It was a cyclist, a physician training for a triathlon. The man had cuts and bruises, and what his lawyer, Edward J. Falcone, would later describe as a “fairly significant” head injury. (Falcone says the cyclist has ongoing neck and shoulder pain.)
Pedro was booked at the station. He later pleaded guilty to failing to stop after an accident with an injury. It went on his record as a misdemeanor.
Pamela testified next, describing how Pedro had been caring for her elderly and ailing mother.
Then it was Emily's turn. She deposited the boy on Pamela's lap and took the stand. Logan's eyes were blank and glassy, like a doll's.
Her voice was small. And soon it cracked.
Emily said she and Pedro had changed each other for the better. She said he was a compassionate man and a better father than anyone she knew.
The boy was suffering, Emily said. He was in therapy. He didn't understand why this was happening.
She told the judge she had battled depression, attempting suicide at 16.
She said she no longer needed antidepressants after she met the sweet Guatemalan boy at the bus stop. Now she could feel the black dog nipping again.
I need Pedro, she told the judge. Logan needs him.
Aminda Katz, the Department of Homeland Security's attorney, laid out the case against Pedro Perez Guzman dispassionately.
There was arrest after arrest after arrest. There was a $915 fine, apparently for a probation violation. There was a matter of tax filings. He had started working in the late 1990s when he dropped out of school to help his mother. But the IRS had filings only back to 2002.
This, she argued, was not good moral character.
As for an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship,” she said their ordeal would not be any worse than it was for many of the other families who have a loved one deported.
The judge took a break, and the family waited, pleased to at least have it over. Pedro was separated from them now only by the court's low bar.
The judge returned. He told them he had considered both sides carefully.
The family suffered, he said, while Pedro was detained. It would only get worse if he were sent to Guatemala.
Pedro, he said, “appears to have been rehabilitated.” He would grant relief.
There was a collective shriek of joy.
Moments later, the judge asked the federal attorney if she cared to reserve the right to appeal. Yes, she said.
“No!” Pamela shouted.
“What happened?” the boy asked.
The government would decide whether to keep fighting to have Pedro deported.
The next morning, Emily and the family were driving the Prius back to North Carolina. The attorney was drafting a motion to free Pedro on bond. Then Emily's cellphone rang. She yelled at Milo to turn the car around.
The government had decided not to appeal.
Back in Lumpkin, a Volkswagen Passat, driven by a Mennonite pastor, roared into the dirt driveway of El Refugio. Its bumper sticker read “GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD NO EXCEPTIONS.”
Pedro emerged from the car in jeans and a polo shirt.
The Prius skidded up in a cloud of dust. Emily and Logan dashed toward him. Then Pamela and Milo.
Crying was the only sound. They rolled in the grass. They formed a circle, fell to their knees and prayed.
The boy told them to stop crying. He had things to tell his father. About the concrete chair he found behind the house that looks like a throne. About the big deep hole over by the storage shed. About how Pamela and Milo were getting married, and about how he heard that cicadas can sting you.
Eventually, it was time to go home. Pedro grabbed the backpack he would have taken with him to Guatemala.
It was stuffed. With letters from Emily, and pictures of his American family.
Could he be a good American?
Guatemalan man with a U.S. family is threatened with deportation.
Richard Fausset
June 4, 2011
Reporting from Chapel Hill, N.C. — On a bright Saturday morning, Emily Nelson Guzman packed a beet-red Prius for the journey that would take her once more to Lumpkin, Ga., with its forlorn town square and sleepy barbecue joint and the nation's largest immigration detention center.
Her husband was there, locked away. Nineteen months earlier, federal agents had arrested him in his yard.
She loaded into the Prius a bag holding the old tight jeans she could finally squeeze into again, the ones she would model so he could see, through the visitation window, how much weight she had lost.
She loaded in another bag, full of action figures -- the Shazams and Spider-men and Power Rangers her little boy pretended to be when he fantasized about setting his father free.
THE NEW LATINO SOUTH
The Latino population in the South has grown dramatically over the last decade. This is one in a series of occasional stories chronicling the lives of Latinos in a changing region.
Pedro Guzman's bag, a small Old Navy backpack, had already been packed and stowed away in a locker at Stewart Detention Center. It was the only luggage he would be allowed to take to his native Guatemala if a federal immigration judge, in a hearing two days hence, rejected the argument that Pedro had transformed from gang member to good American, a family man who had earned the right to live in the United States.
At the hearing, Emily would have a chance to vouch for his character. So would her mother. So would Pedro himself.
Emily's mother, Pamela Alberda, brought out a bag of turkey sandwiches from her boyfriend's house. The boyfriend improvised something on the piano. The music spilled out into the driveway, urgent and sad, like the day itself.
“I really, truly do not know what will happen,” Emily had written on her blog. “He will be freed or sent to a country he does not know.”
She is a family therapist, 34, white and Midwest-born, with a voice as plain as milk. A dozen years ago, she fell in love -- and discovered that the object of her affection had been smuggled across the border by his mother when he was 8 years old.
She also discovered that his immigration issue would not be solved by marrying a U.S. citizen.
A wife's devotion
When Emily met Pedro, he was a sweet kid at a bus stop, a 19-year-old high school dropout on his way to one of his two restaurant jobs, a lost soul who escaped the street life of San Luis Obispo and had gone to Minneapolis hoping for a fresh start.
He had covered up his watch on that first meeting, giving himself an excuse to ask the time. She answered in a confident Spanish perfected during a study-abroad year in Mazatlan.
Soon there was passion and friendship, and trust. He told her about his old life: He had run with a gang, but it was minor-league hooliganism, he assured her. It was San Luis Obispo, after all, not Los Angeles.
There was a small wedding, despite her parents' initial reservations, and a move to North Carolina. In between came Logan, now 4 years old, with his big brown eyes and head of loose black ringlets and little fists that pounded his mother when his father's absence drove him to fits.
Emily knew that most women in her position didn't have the means or the connections to publicize their cases.
But she had her blog, “Bring Pedro Home.” He had been the subject of a postcard campaign and an online petition drive. They had retained an Atlanta lawyer who arrived at hearings in a big silver BMW.
And she had formed alliances with the South's small core of pro-immigrant activists, the Mennonites and liberation theology types with their earnest bumper stickers and their belief -- inspiring to some, naive to others -- in a justice that transcends borders.
The drive from North Carolina would take her through a changing South, where pro-Dixie bumper stickers vie for attention with the billboards for restaurants named El Molcajete, and roadside signs like the one in Columbus, Ga., asking, Necesita un Trabajo? Need a Job?
Lumpkin's Stewart Detention Center is itself a sign of the region's transformation, with 1,400 detainees, most of them culled from Georgia and the Carolinas, a rotating cast of Juans and Miguels and Manuelitos. Somebody's father, somebody's son. The ones who were angels and the ones who should probably be kicked out. The ones who fell somewhere in between.
Activists have targeted the privately run detention center and had held up Pedro, 31, as an example of the kind of good person being ground down by a misguided immigration policy. Emily told them about the injustice of his case -- about the judge who declined to grant Pedro legal residency, or even bond, citing two marijuana arrests from when he was a teen.
And yet, despite her allies and advantages, Emily had never felt more pessimistic about Pedro's case as they rolled out of Chapel Hill. She knew there was a kink in his story of redemption.
Unfortunate events
The day before they left North Carolina, Emily took Logan to his therapy session. She and a social worker watched him play Candyland, and invent the rules as he saw fit. This was something he could control, unlike the situation with Pedro.
In a previous session, he reconstructed the night in September 2009 when immigration officers came to his house. A crowned prince action figure, hidden inside a dollhouse, served as his father.
They had come on a Friday at 4 a.m. and banged on the door, but Pedro did not come out. They returned Monday morning. The boy watched as Pedro, surprised, made a brief and hopeless attempt at flight. He watched as his father was handcuffed and loaded into a black SUV.
Pedro had been legal once, with an annually renewed work visa. But when he reapplied by mail in 2008, he was sent back a letter of rejection.
His elderly mother, for reasons not fully clear, had recently been denied legal residency. And because she had filed a 1988 asylum application listing Pedro as a dependent, his fate was tied to hers.
His mother left the United States for good, and the government sent a letter ordering Pedro to court. He says he never received it. The government then ordered him deported.
Being the spouse of a U.S. citizen didn't help much. Emily could petition for him to become a legal resident, but in that scenario, an attorney told her, Pedro would have to leave the country before being accepted for reentry. He would also have to obtain a special waiver because of his arrest record. She was advised that his chances would be slim.
Instead, Pedro took hope in a Clinton-era immigration law that extended legal resident status to some immigrants from a handful of troubled countries. To prevail, he needed to show that his deportation would create an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” for him and his family. He also needed to demonstrate good moral character.
In December 2009, the immigration judge cited the pot convictions, both misdemeanor possession cases, in ruling that Pedro's character was suspect. Since then, one case has been vacated and the family's attorney, H. Glenn Fogle Jr., has successfully appealed the immigration judge's ruling, winning Pedro another chance.
But two days before the road trip to Lumpkin, Fogle had sent Emily a worried email. He had been taking a closer look at Pedro's papers. What was this about a hit-and-run from 2008?
The hit-and-run. Her heart sank. She thought it was a non-issue, something that wouldn't appear on Pedro's record. It wasn't something she tended to bring up when she told his story to her activist allies.
Emily told her lawyer that the incident wasn't as bad as it sounded. But she knew that “hit-and-run” could sound bad to a judge.
According to the Justice Department, roughly 75% of the people who appeared before an immigration judge in the last fiscal year were ordered removed. Before the email from her lawyer, Emily had put Pedro's chances at 50-50. Now, she had to admit to herself, it seemed more like 10-90.
And yet the trip to Lumpkin was still on. If nothing else, she and Logan needed one last visit before Pedro was put on a plane for Guatemala City, alone, with his one allotted bag.
After therapy, Emily and Logan returned to their little wreck of a rental home in Durham. Pedro had been the cook, the housekeeper, the fix-it man. Now vegetation clogged the gutters. The mailbox was bent sideways and full of carpenter bees. The doorknobs had broken on the bedroom and bathroom doors. Not knowing how to fix them, Emily removed the knobs, leaving holes with naked bolts.
She met her mother and mother's boyfriend, Milo Fryling, 49, at a Thai place for dinner. Pamela, 54, is a preschool teacher and puppeteer who wears “Life is Good” T-shirts. But she had taken a dimmer view of a system that refused to free the father of her grandson.
In November, she was arrested for criminal trespass during a pro-immigrant rally at the detention center.
“I woke up this morning,” she said to her daughter, “and thought, 'There's going to be no justice.'”
The Carolinas passed in a blur of rest stops and billboards. Then it was into Georgia, where, a day before, Gov. Nathan Deal had signed an Arizona-style bill to crack down on illegal immigration.
They arrived in Lumpkin long after dark and spent the night at El Refugio, a modest rental house activists offer as a “refuge” for families visiting the detention center. With its bunk beds, frayed paperbacks and National Geographic maps of Latin America, it had the feel of a backpacker's hostel. Lumpkin has no hotels.
The next morning, they were among the first visitors at the detention center, a white, blocky complex ringed by fencing and concertina wire. More visitors would come soon, mothers and brothers and aunts and sisters, dressed smartly, as if for a casual church service, all murmuring in Spanish.
Pedro emerged from a door, on the other side of the visiting room's glass partition. His big dark eyes matched his son's.
The boy beamed. With feet planted on a table, he slammed the top of his head against the glass. His father did the same. They smiled, and then slammed again, in unison, like bucks in the woods, the vibrations the next best thing to a touch.
Emily stood and pirouetted in her tight jeans. Pedro grinned and bowed at the waist for comic effect. The boy commandeered the phone. Emily let him spend most of the hour talking about things important to a boy.
Pamela spoke to her son-in-law briefly. We love you, she said.
Pedro told her he figured his chances were slim. Pamela did not correct him.
“We're just trying to be realistic,” she said.
The boy and Pedro played hide-and-seek until the guard announced that time was up.
“Hide under the table,” Emily told Pedro in Spanish. He ducked.
Logan pretended to wonder where he was.
They returned to El Refugio and rested. At one point, Milo wandered Lumpkin looking for a piano. In an unlocked church, he found a Steinway, and banged out pieces from a Methodist hymnal.
In the morning, Pamela read Milo a letter she had written to God:
“I know that we are not perfect and that Pedro has made mistakes in his life. But the price he has paid has been greater than he deserves. In a world where people fight and argue and are often filled with hate and fear, this small family are loving and faithful.”
The hearing was in a tiny detention center courtroom, its wooden pews scratched with “Jorge,” “Cancun XIII,” “Zacatecas,” “LA.”
Pedro, dressed in blue prison garb, took the stand. There were three small tattooed dots on his left hand, above the thumb. Mi. Vida. Loca. My crazy life -- reminders of his life in the streets.
Pedro told Immigration Judge Dan Trimble that he couldn't remember when he left Guatemala. He had no friends or family there.
He described his work history: restaurant upon restaurant, group home worker, truck driver, and, after his work permit was denied, stay-at-home dad -- “the best job I ever had in my life.”
There was the question of the pot busts -- teenage indiscretions, he said, that he deeply regretted.
Soon after his move to Minnesota in 1999, there was a misdemeanor charge of theft. “I don't remember doing it,” he said.
There was another arrest for destroying property around the same time. Pedro said it was a big misunderstanding, that he was only going to retrieve his own stuff from a drunk roommate.
He described how he met Emily, and how she had taught him to be a better man. He spoke of his bond with his son. Deportation, Pedro said, would mean “taking my soul away, everything I worked for, everything I made.”
He explained the hit-and-run from 2008. It was nighttime on a North Carolina country road. He felt a thump on his FedEx truck, and thought it was a deer. He stopped, looked around, called out. Nothing. He returned in his truck, and a second time, with Emily.
A police officer met them at the scene and said Pedro had hit a man. It was a cyclist, a physician training for a triathlon. The man had cuts and bruises, and what his lawyer, Edward J. Falcone, would later describe as a “fairly significant” head injury. (Falcone says the cyclist has ongoing neck and shoulder pain.)
Pedro was booked at the station. He later pleaded guilty to failing to stop after an accident with an injury. It went on his record as a misdemeanor.
Pamela testified next, describing how Pedro had been caring for her elderly and ailing mother.
Then it was Emily's turn. She deposited the boy on Pamela's lap and took the stand. Logan's eyes were blank and glassy, like a doll's.
Her voice was small. And soon it cracked.
Emily said she and Pedro had changed each other for the better. She said he was a compassionate man and a better father than anyone she knew.
The boy was suffering, Emily said. He was in therapy. He didn't understand why this was happening.
She told the judge she had battled depression, attempting suicide at 16.
She said she no longer needed antidepressants after she met the sweet Guatemalan boy at the bus stop. Now she could feel the black dog nipping again.
I need Pedro, she told the judge. Logan needs him.
Aminda Katz, the Department of Homeland Security's attorney, laid out the case against Pedro Perez Guzman dispassionately.
There was arrest after arrest after arrest. There was a $915 fine, apparently for a probation violation. There was a matter of tax filings. He had started working in the late 1990s when he dropped out of school to help his mother. But the IRS had filings only back to 2002.
This, she argued, was not good moral character.
As for an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship,” she said their ordeal would not be any worse than it was for many of the other families who have a loved one deported.
The judge took a break, and the family waited, pleased to at least have it over. Pedro was separated from them now only by the court's low bar.
The judge returned. He told them he had considered both sides carefully.
The family suffered, he said, while Pedro was detained. It would only get worse if he were sent to Guatemala.
Pedro, he said, “appears to have been rehabilitated.” He would grant relief.
There was a collective shriek of joy.
Moments later, the judge asked the federal attorney if she cared to reserve the right to appeal. Yes, she said.
“No!” Pamela shouted.
“What happened?” the boy asked.
The government would decide whether to keep fighting to have Pedro deported.
The next morning, Emily and the family were driving the Prius back to North Carolina. The attorney was drafting a motion to free Pedro on bond. Then Emily's cellphone rang. She yelled at Milo to turn the car around.
The government had decided not to appeal.
Back in Lumpkin, a Volkswagen Passat, driven by a Mennonite pastor, roared into the dirt driveway of El Refugio. Its bumper sticker read “GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD NO EXCEPTIONS.”
Pedro emerged from the car in jeans and a polo shirt.
The Prius skidded up in a cloud of dust. Emily and Logan dashed toward him. Then Pamela and Milo.
Crying was the only sound. They rolled in the grass. They formed a circle, fell to their knees and prayed.
The boy told them to stop crying. He had things to tell his father. About the concrete chair he found behind the house that looks like a throne. About the big deep hole over by the storage shed. About how Pamela and Milo were getting married, and about how he heard that cicadas can sting you.
Eventually, it was time to go home. Pedro grabbed the backpack he would have taken with him to Guatemala.
It was stuffed. With letters from Emily, and pictures of his American family.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
MOVIE REVIEW ASSIGNMENT
Here are the details for the next assignment. This essay is a movie review. You will choose any movie you would like to analyze and then approach the viewing of the film critically. You may not review from memory. So if you have already seen the movie, you have to see it again. You must have direct quotes and specific references to features of the film.
The review will be between 2-3 pages, typed, double-spaced.
At that length, there is not time to describe much. So, if you choose to write about the Hunger Games, for instance, you do not have time to get into wars, and peoples, and foods, and fights, and loves won and lost. You must get through the initial description of the movie quickly, as in, within the first paragraph.
If you are not describing, what are you doing? Good question, right? You are critiquing some theme that you find compelling in the film. Do you think that Star Wars is actually a commentary on people of faith and on good and evil? Good, dig into that. Do you think that the Muppets movie is social commentary on the mistreatment of farm animals? Find evidence and get after it.
Find evidence to back up some assertion you have about the film. Argue! Have a perspective! And then, find evidence to support your assertions. You may use outside sources and other reviewers, but most of the thoughts should be your own. In citing the film, just use your common sense. If you use a quote, put it in quotes and put the film's title in parenthesis, like this: "Luke, I am your father." (Star Wars)
The most crucial element here is to have a point of view. A simple description is a failing paper.
HOW TO TURN THIS PAPER IN...
On October 20th, we are meeting together here at CSUB. You will bring a copy of your completed rough draft printed out to revise that day. You will not be able to print here, so have it printed out the night before. Also, we will be doing our peer revision on that day. The only way you can get credit for peer revision is by bringing a completed rough draft of the movie review. I'll paste the Peer Revision info below.
Then, after you et back your peer review, you will revise the essay and upload the final draft to Turnitin on the 22nd.
Also, here are two pretty good sites with help for writing a film review:
HERE ARE TWO RESOURCES FOR YOU TO USE WHEN THINKING ABOUT HOW TO REVIEW A FILM:
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/7-tips-for-writing-a-film-review/
http://journalism.about.com/od/writing/a/reviews.htm
PEER REVISION: (10%) You will receive one rough draft written by your peers. You will make substantive comments on this rough draft for the purpose of helping your classmate to improve the overall written quality of the essay. We will complete this part of the course on the day we meet for the in class essay. You will bring a rough draft of your essay to be reviewed. Before writing the in class essay, we will complete a guided revision of each other’s essays.
The review will be between 2-3 pages, typed, double-spaced.
At that length, there is not time to describe much. So, if you choose to write about the Hunger Games, for instance, you do not have time to get into wars, and peoples, and foods, and fights, and loves won and lost. You must get through the initial description of the movie quickly, as in, within the first paragraph.
If you are not describing, what are you doing? Good question, right? You are critiquing some theme that you find compelling in the film. Do you think that Star Wars is actually a commentary on people of faith and on good and evil? Good, dig into that. Do you think that the Muppets movie is social commentary on the mistreatment of farm animals? Find evidence and get after it.
Find evidence to back up some assertion you have about the film. Argue! Have a perspective! And then, find evidence to support your assertions. You may use outside sources and other reviewers, but most of the thoughts should be your own. In citing the film, just use your common sense. If you use a quote, put it in quotes and put the film's title in parenthesis, like this: "Luke, I am your father." (Star Wars)
The most crucial element here is to have a point of view. A simple description is a failing paper.
HOW TO TURN THIS PAPER IN...
On October 20th, we are meeting together here at CSUB. You will bring a copy of your completed rough draft printed out to revise that day. You will not be able to print here, so have it printed out the night before. Also, we will be doing our peer revision on that day. The only way you can get credit for peer revision is by bringing a completed rough draft of the movie review. I'll paste the Peer Revision info below.
Then, after you et back your peer review, you will revise the essay and upload the final draft to Turnitin on the 22nd.
Also, here are two pretty good sites with help for writing a film review:
HERE ARE TWO RESOURCES FOR YOU TO USE WHEN THINKING ABOUT HOW TO REVIEW A FILM:
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/7-tips-for-writing-a-film-review/
http://journalism.about.com/od/writing/a/reviews.htm
PEER REVISION: (10%) You will receive one rough draft written by your peers. You will make substantive comments on this rough draft for the purpose of helping your classmate to improve the overall written quality of the essay. We will complete this part of the course on the day we meet for the in class essay. You will bring a rough draft of your essay to be reviewed. Before writing the in class essay, we will complete a guided revision of each other’s essays.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
WEEK FIVE BLOG
I am hereby outlawing the Republican and Democrat parties...gone forever. Well, let's get rid of the Constitution too (that one hurts). The whole system of politics is wiped away. Here is the good news. You get to design a new political party or system or Constitution or way of thinking about political culture. What will you do?
WEEK FIVE READING
Can Romney and Obama tell the truth -- and win?
One day -- let us hope it comes soon -- voters will demand that their political leaders present them with a more realistic sense of the possibilities and choices they face. But for now, voters demand perfect odds and simple solutions, and politicians oblige.
President Obama confessed as much in a recent Vanity Fair profile, when he revealed he knows that each one of the decisions he makes as president could turn out wrong. "Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable," he said. "Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn't going to work." But the American public, the president suggested, cannot handle those odds. After you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it.
Despite knowing this, Obama did not project that supreme confidence and simplified arguments in Wednesday's debate. Romney did. That was not the president's only problem, but it was one of the reasons he didn't fare well.
The frustration showed after the debate, when Obama accused Romney of blatant lying in a debate that, like both campaigns, has been rife with distortions. Both candidates twisted the facts. Romney did it to better effect. It's a tragedy for American democracy that the tactic works.
Four years ago, Obama betrayed no doubts that he would succeed in achieving highly ambitious promises. It's harder to speak in dreamy, inspirational platitudes when you've been president for four years, when the prose of real life has not caught up with the poetry of the campaign.
The American political system demands charisma, leadership and boundless optimism, even if they are artificial and hollow.
Some voters tell pollsters that a "strong leader" is one of the most important traits they look for in a candidate. And pollsters track the perception obsessively. But the prevailing idea of what a strong leader is has become manufactured and artificial.
Candidates have to sound self-assured and authoritative, in a version of leadership that resembles more the utterances of Donald Trump in "The Apprentice" than the wisdom of the great politician-philosophers who founded the country.
Real charisma allows leaders to change their mind. But that's different from reshaping your supposed ideology to win different audiences.
Intellectual and political honesty are not Etch-a-Sketch tricks. Romney's penchant for telling one audience one thing and then taking it back when it doesn't suit another audience -- as he just did with his infamous "47%" comments by saying he was "completely wrong" -- does not count as mettle.
In the debate, Obama slipped in his efforts to don that leadership mantle. He even acknowledged that some of the choices are a matter of odds, that the country is a laboratory and we can only hope the experiments will turn out well.
On the economy, he said, "Look, we've tried this; we've tried both approaches," comparing the Bush approach with the Clinton years. Obama took a step toward honesty with the public in suggesting that we can make only an educated guess as to what strategy is likely to work. "In some ways," he said, "we've got some data on which approach is more likely to create jobs and opportunity for Americans."
Evidence, "data." That's not a modern American politician's way of framing a decision. Americans like it when their leaders (and their pundits) are completely sure of what they propose, totally convinced it will work.
Some people believe this is the inevitable way of politics. But it doesn't have to be.
In other countries facing great problems such as high unemployment and shrinking economies, these days, "difficult choices" and uncertain outcomes are the centerpiece of political discussions. Voters are treated as intelligent, responsible adults who have to decide what is the most promising of unpalatable options.
Friday's unemployment figures seemed to support Obama's belief in his economic approach. But they don't erase the uncertainty ahead. In the end, we have competing philosophies for facing a world where countless unexpected challenges are sure to emerge.
It's true. An appearance of self-assurance creates a reassuring aura of competence and charisma. It makes people feel better. People are drawn to those who seem most sure of their ideas. But being more certain does not make you more right.
True charisma and leadership require acknowledging the uncertainties, recognizing the gaps in our knowledge. In the view of presidential scholar Michael Beschloss, they require the courage to tell difficult truths, to make unpopular decisions, to work with people who have different beliefs.
Following the current definition, Romney proclaims with absolute conviction, as he did during Wednesday night's debate, that "the private market and individual responsibility always works best." And he promises to bring 12 million new jobs while guaranteeing without a hint of doubt that if he is not elected, life will get worse, prices will go up, incomes will come down, and American will become weaker.
Four years ago, Obama made promises that today sound just, well, sad.
After his 2008 win in the Iowa caucuses, he told his exhilarated supporters that he would put an end to years of partisan bitterness and pettiness in Washington. He would be the president who would bring "Democrats and Republicans together to get the job done."
As a candidate, Obama could draw a dreamy vision. He would bring red and blue states back together, close down the prison at Guantanamo, fight climate change and genocide. His election, he said, would "mark the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." He even vowed to "reboot America's image in the Muslim world."
Instead, he tackled much greater problems than he had expected even when he exaggerated his competence. The economy, the world, they all proved more complex than the black and white choices of the election. Unemployment is still high. He has made little headway on the environment. Republicans and Democrats remain at each other's throats, and people in Muslims countries are still not fond of America or its president.
In the first debate, candidates again avoided talking about the need to make difficult choices. The talk was of tax cuts, not tax ("revenue" is the euphemism) increases. There are other areas where the choices are difficult and unappealing in foreign and domestic policy.
Voters may feel placidly satisfied when the candidates avoid mentioning the dangers ahead or the hard truths. But beneath the wishful thinking, Americans know that the world is complicated, the economy is challenging, the choices difficult.
A candidate who tells voters he is 100% certain that the choices are clear and his plans will work out is lying, deluded or foolish.
WEEK FIVE WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ
What is the key line in this essay? Why is it so important for grasping the overall point?
Also, how do you feel about this issue? Are truth and honesty relevant to you as you consider political candidates?
Also, how do you feel about this issue? Are truth and honesty relevant to you as you consider political candidates?
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