Where Does a Burger Go When it Dies?

Apparently, it has become the cool thing to collect McDonald's hamburgers, leave them out, and document the progress (or lack thereof) as the burgers [fail to] decompose. The Daily Mail reports a story about artist Sallie Davies and her photo journal of a cheeseburger and fries meal that has lasted six months. And this Youtube video tells the story of a man who began collecting McDonald's burgers in 1989 to watch their lack of change. His story was featured in Morgan Spurlock's Eat This Book, which prompted Len Foley to start his very own "Burger Museum," and to create the Youtube video linked above (which climaxes with a list of trillions [an exaggeration] of chemicals implied to be inside McDonald's meals. . .but in an asterisked comment, Foley says that this is a list of pesticide residues from an FDA report).

It seems that many others are interested in performing similar experiments since Foley gives instructions on how to make your own burger museum and YouTube is flooded with videos of dry, shriveled burgers. But each of these share a similar methodology. Put a value meal on the kitchen counter (Foley warns at-home scientists not to put it in an air tight container because the moisture needs to be allowed to escape, one assumes so that it doesn't mold. Interestingly, for Davies, lack of mold is part of the evidence that something is wrong with these burgers) and wait. The fact that these burgers do not decompose, mold, or change form at all is, it seems, supposed to prove that this food is horribly dangerous. It is so full of chemicals, pesticides, and preservatives that even decomposers won't eat it.

Yet, there is one glaring problem with this evidence. One that is indeed so important that it makes this evidence, well, not evidence at all.

You see, when one eats a hamburger, it does not then sit on a counter top inside your stomach. Instead, you chew it, after which it is squeezed under fairly intense pressure down your esophagus and into a chamber filled with hydrochloric acid, potassium chloride, sodium chloride, and special enzymes. These chemicals work to dissolve the burger as the powerful muscles of the stomach mashs it into chyme, a process that in no way resembles sitting on a counter top.

So, in order to collect more valid results, I have performed an experiment which more closely replicates the conditions actually present in the body. Namely, instead of placing a value meal on the counter top, I placed it into a bucket of muriatic acid, a commercially available hydrochloric acid solution. I didn't design any way to replicate the process of muscular contractions that break down the food in an actual stomach. The little stirring that I did while trying to find pieces of the dissolving burger will have to suffice as a very under-stated simulation for that process.

In addition to achieving more valid result from my experiment, it (I am pleased to report) also took far less effort. Davies has had to take a photograph a day for 170 days, all the while having an aging hamburger stinking up her kitchen. I only took 12 pictures over the course of just over three hours. You can see my results on flikr. In short, the acid made quick work of the meal. . .and so does your body.

Placing a hamburger on a counter top and watching it [fail to] decompose proves exactly nothing, because it's not at all a valid representation of how your body works to dispose of food. The fact that this burger survived on a counter top does not mean that our body will likewise be unable to handle it. In fact, I didn't think about chucking a piece of counter top in there with the burger, but if I had, and if I had left it in there long enough, I bet it would have taken care of that too. Marvelous thing, the human body. We are wonderfully and fearfully made.

I'm not saying that we should all go out and start eating an all McD's diet. After all, Super Size Me alerted us to the dangers of that. Besides, it is fattening, it's high in sodium, and it tastes like what your body turns it into. What I am saying is that we must be more critical when we look at what people use as evidence. The fact that some phenomena is shocking to us does not mean that it proves anything. What we see in these blogs and websites and photo galleries is a fallacious (perhaps even unethical) use of pathos appeal. Because these stories and pictures elicit revulsion, they are used to support arguments that these items really can't support. Perhaps (well, almost undoubtedly) we should change our eating habits. But if we change based on this evidence, we have been duped.

Cavemen and Kindergartners: A Literacy Narrative

In response to research by literacy expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Deborah Brandt, our literacy class was asked to tell our story of how we became literate. I already had my story in mind because, having also been inspired by this research, I had just assigned a similar assignment to my freshmen. I'm writing here because I thought that the story I came up with would be fun to share, and to analyze.

First of all, allow me to qualify this story by saying that my memory is very imperfect, as the event in this post happened when I was only five years old. I have only a cloudy memory that has no doubt been colored by my also cloudy memory of being told the story later by my mother. She may be able to, but should not necessarily feel obliged to, correct any erroneous details. With my disclaimer out of the way, here is my first memory of performing a literate act.

I actually do not remember learning to read (I remember learning to love reading, but that's another post). My earliest memory of the act of writing comes from when I was in kindergarten (I think) and I was quite excited at having learned to write. I parked myself under my baby sister's crib, which must have seemed like a suitable hiding place, and wrote on her walls. In my memory, the writing was very colorful but I have no memory of what I wrote or what I used to write with. I only know, and I may only know this because of my mother telling the story, that I wrote my own name.

When my mother discovered the writing, I told her that it had not been me. Furthermore, I very logically told her that, since the writing was on my sister's walls, it must have been she who had committed this crime of literacy. Against this claim, my mother offered three pieces of evidence. The first was that Tina was not even a year old; she couldn't write. Of course, this proved only that it had not been Tina. It did not prove that it had been me. My mother pointed out that I was the only one of her three kids that had learned to write. Her final piece of evidence was ultimately the death knell of my story. I had written my name on the wall.

What's interesting about this story to me now is how well it fits into what Deborah Brandt has discovered, quite accidentally, in her research. She found that, while reading tends to be a very communal act where our earliest memories of reading are almost always centered around the family, early memories of writing often involve writing which is subversive or proscribed, and solitary (almost every literate person remembers having been read to by family members, but almost no one remembers writing with family members). It's interesting to me that it seems that I must have known that this type of writing would get me into trouble. After all, I chose to write under the crib, a place that seemed safe and cave-like to me. So, in an act strangely reminiscent of prehistoric cave art, I went to a lonely and secret place and wrote, what else, my name.

And this is the very curious thing about the way I chose to write. My act of writing was assertive because it was subversive; I broke the rules. Furthermore, it was my name that I wrote. Such an act seems to be a form of existential genesis. It was as if, by asserting my name, I was saying, "I exist. I have a name." And yet, I wrote it in a place where I thought it would be hidden from view, again, like a caveman who hides his art.

This is the curious irony of writing. It is an act of assertiveness, almost violence even - "here is what I am writing and you must read it. You cannot deny my name" And yet, it is an act of extraordinary solitude, and often loneliness.

Why You Never Research a Preacher's Story

As the son-in-law of a career preacher, and a regular church attendee, and as someone who teaches research, I know that preacher's stories aren't all they're cracked up to be. In fact, anyone who's spent any time in church knows that preachers' stories are illustrative fish tales. As literary texts, they belong structurally to the genre of myth. I don't mean "myth" in the popular sense of meaning "false." I mean that as narrative constructs, preacher tales work in the same way as other mythical works such as old parables, nursery rhymes, and (dare I say) the Bible. Myths are texts use common archetypal tropes in order to teach the hearer and they put their emphasis, not necessarily on the historical and chronological accuracy of the story, but on the message. In other words, myths privilege truth over facts.

So, having foregrounded this post with that, I should say that I don't particularly expect preachers' tales to pass the muster of rigorous research. Nevertheless, when I tried to find a quote from a preacher's story I recently heard (because I wanted to use it on facebook), I got a first hand look at just how shifty and shaky the literary form of the sermon illustration is. So today, just for fun, I will present to you a dubious sermon illustration followed by my own research and finally a bit of speculative questioning as to how a story (actually, more correctly, stories as we shall see) goes from half true anecdote to sermon illustration.

First, the story itself, from the best of my memory, as I heard it from the pulpit:

Harmon Killebrew, the baseball great, once told a story from his childhood about his father. Harmon was the youngest of four brothers, and his father used to play catch with his boys in the front yard. One day, a neighbor, who was known for his well-manicured lawns walked by and said to Harmon's father, "You'll never grow any grass if you keep playing on it like that." Harmon's father looked at the man and replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass; I'm trying to grow boys."

Here is the actual quote from Killebrew (which is quoted to death all over the inter-webz):

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys."

The best context I can find for Killebrew's quote, without doing the kind of serious actual research for which I may have to log into EBSCO, is from a 2004 interview in with Killebrew in Baseball Digest in which he says:

"Dad used to work with my brother and me on different things that were important in all sports--football, basketball, baseball. One evening we were out in the front yard, and my mother came out on the porch and said to my father, "Clay, the boys are digging holes in the yard, tearing up the grass." And my father went over to my mother and very sternly said: "Kate, we're not raising grass here. We're raising boys."

Though it doesn't particularly diminish the quality of the quote, the elements of the preacher's story are markedly different. Where is the idyllic scene of playing catch in the yard? Where is the turf-vain neighbor who acts as something of a villain, and who we can imagine flaunts his "Yard of the Month" sign and yells at neighbor kids who stray into his grass? Can this story have gone this wrong?

First of all, yes, of course it could. If one has ever played the game in which several people sit in a circle passing a message around to see how much it changes before it gets back to the message's originator, than one can understand how these tales get so out of control. One preacher hears a story in a father's day sermon and decides he likes it. The next year, when preparing his own father's day sermon, he says to himself, "self, we sure did like that story we heard last year. Now what was it again?" and he does the best he can from his memory of a sermon he half listened to a year before. The youth-intern from the nearby Christian college hears his sermon and sacks it away for a few years later when he'll be the pulpit minister for the kind small congregation that hires brand new grads. And so on the story goes.

Of course, with this story, there is something else, an element of the story which lets Reverend Preacher off the hook a little. And that is this fact: this story is not original (or at least not singular) with Killebrew. Instead, there is another version of this story that involves college football great Amos Alonzo Stagg.

In 1965, just before Stagg's death, the football coaching great and champion of the cause of amateur sports had a bunch of kids playing football on his front lawn. A neighbor told Stagg that if he allowed the kids to play "the grass with never grow that way." Stagg replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass. I'm trying to grow kids."

So Stagg's story fills in the missing elements from the Killebrew story. In Stagg's story, we see the neighbor presented as a character instead of the father's own wife being used as the foil, and the quote is a bit more direct (substitute "boys" for "kids" and it's exact.) What I can't yet be sure if is what these stories have to do with one another. Did the preacher's story grow out of an accidental combination of the two, as if one of the preachers in the archetypal chain heard both stories and confused them? Did in fact one of these men (Staggs and Killebrew) steal the saying from the other? Reportedly, Staggs made his remark shortly before his death in 1965, by which time Harmon Sr. had been dead for twelve years. But I don't know when Killebrew started telling his version of the story. So did Staggs borrow from Killebrew's language when he made his remark to his neighbor, or did Killebrew borrow from Stagg's language when he began telling his own childhood story about his father sternly replying to his mother's concern about the yard? Or did in fact both men make remarkably similar statements, allowing for later preacher story confusion? I can't say for certain, as it is 0034 hrs and I'm tired of researching something that will be of no use to me in my dissertation. More on this controversy as I get bored enough to pick the research back up.

Thoughts on State Sponsored Death and Old Testament Law

Anyone who knows my politics knows of my ambivalence toward the death penalty. On one hand, I do not doubt the justice of it. If a man kills another, it is fitting that he should be killed. One need only look back to the Noahic Covenant: "Whoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood me shed" (Gen 9.6) (of course, I'm not sure that this verse is a command for the state to kill murderers so much as it is a karmic statement like "live by the sword, die by the sword"). Also, as a man who has been face to face with horrific personal tragedy caused by another's crime, I feel a deep longing for justice. When I here about the nine year old child who had been killed in a drive-by, or I talk to the woman who has been raped, or see the body of a brutally murdered man whose only crime was to become addicted, I cry out for something to be done. There are some crimes for which only death can atone.

So it is not the justice of the death penalty that I question. Rather, it is the state's competence in deciding who should live and die. When people bring up the jurisprudence of the Bible as support for a state sponsored death penalty, I am quick to remind them that the Old Testament nation of Israel was a theocracy. Therefore, at least within the narrative context of the Bible, God himself was the appeals process. It was God who ultimately decided who lived and who died. From a historical perspective, it may be optimistic to say that God's oversight prevented the killing of the falsely accused, but it's not out of the question to say that this would be the Bible's perspective. In our own imperfect and secular legal system, on the other hand, we can make no claim to the ultimate oversight of God himself (although some probably would).

When one looks at our system, one must consider the examples of Willie Francis, whose story is told by Gilbert King in his book, The Execution of Willie Francis. Willie was a seventeen year old African-American sentenced to death for the murder of a Louisiana pharmacist. He was convicted on evidence so lousy that, today, he would not have even been charged. He was sent to the electric chair twice when the intoxicated jail trustee entrusted to electrocute him the first time botched the wiring, sending Willie enough electricity to torture him, but not to kill him. One must consider the cases of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz who were sentenced to death and to life in prison respectively for a murder they did not commit and who spent thirteen years in prison until DNA evidence exonerated them. Consider the men sent to death row on the false testimony of Joyce Gilchrist whose testimony helped lead to the execution of eleven men (we may never know if some of these were innocent), and who was willing to trade men's lives for her own career ambitions.

I don't use these examples to say that our criminal justice system is irreversibly corrupt. Indeed, I don't believe that such is the case. By and large, our system is dominated by men and women who are trying to do the right thing, and I truly believe that our system gets it right almost every time. But the cost of failure is so high. Get it wrong, even once, and you've killed an innocent person. And killing an innocent person makes you a murderer. And so, while I long for the justice that seems to come with the death penalty, I find that I can't quite support it either. And this is the view that for a couple of years I have stuck with.

Then, a few days ago, I listened to stories about serial rapists and listened to a few interrogations in which these men talked about their crimes. Many of these men spoke flippantly about actions that had forever changed the lives of their victims. Some of them masturbated while speaking to detectives or even while listening to their victims' testimony in open court. It is easy to see the unmitigated evil in the hearts of these men.

This got me thinking about the reasons the Old Testament supported the killing of their worst criminals. Proponents of our death penalty will often argue one or all of the following points: 1) putting these criminals to death insures that they will never hurt another innocent person, 2) putting criminals to death sends a message to other would-be criminals that they too will be killed if they commit these crimes and 3) putting criminals to death saves on the cost of feeding and sheltering these criminals for life. Each of these arguments is easily defeated. Argument 1 is easily countered by saying, "so does putting them in prison for life," (and retort usually countered with argument 3). Argument 2, a logical anecdotal argument, seems to be invalidated by crime stats. Though we are the only developed Western nation that still has a death penalty, we are also the nation among these with the highest rates of violent crime. The fear of death seems to have done little to stem violent crime in our country. Thus, the commission of these crimes seems to have little, if any, correlation to the severity of punishment possible. Finally, argument 3 is just flat false. It costs more money to put a criminal to death than it does to feed them for life because of the expense of the appeals process. Even a wealthy defendant will become indigent after his first trial. This is because, in most cases, whatever he does not spend on his defense, will be seized for victim's compensation funds. Thus, his appeals will all be tax-payer funded. It could be (and often is) argued here that the appeals process could be expedited so that is is less expensive, but the types of injustices that I have already pointed out show the danger in that; If Dennis Fritz's appeals process had been expedited, he would have been executed.

Interestingly, you see no arguments like these in the Old Testament Law. I think this is explained by the differences in the way we see crime and punishment. Modern Americans see the law from a very individual perspective; what needs to happen to this individual for this crime. Hebrews, on the other hand, thought of crime and punishment as communal acts how does this person's crimes relate to us as a people. I don't mean this in the same sense as when we ask, "what is the danger to the public if we allow this person to remain at large." But rather, I think their question may have been, "what have we, as a people, done through this person." Hebrews saw a type of connectivity between people and other people and indeed through people and creation that we do not. Thus, scripture explains its use of the death penalty thus, "If anyone kills a person, the murderer shall be put to death at the evidence of witnesses. . .So you shall not pollute the land in which you are" (Num 36.30-33). As anyone who is even a little familiar with the Bible knows, there are many other offenses in the OT for which one should either be put to death or expelled from the country. Interestingly, in all these statutes, the idea of punishment is never really about stopping the crime from occurring again, sending an example to the people, or even about punishment at all. Instead, the OT is obsessed with cleansing the land (and the people) of evil. The Hebrew people killed their offenders, not because they deserved it (though they may have), but because they believed that the evil in one person remained in the community as a whole. I don't mean to say that they knew that if they allowed an evil person to remain that the person would continue to do evil to others and thus he had to be stopped. Rather, because the evil person belonged to our community, so did the evil within him. And the people of God simply cannot abide evil.

These thoughts do not necessarily change my mind about our death penalty today. After all, God no longer exists within a particular state as he did with Israel, but among a people, not defined by an earthly government. So I don't see OT Law as jurisprudence for our own secular law. Instead, these thoughts make me wonder how we, as a people, are effected by the presence of evil among us. Does the evil within one of the rapists I listened to the other day remain, at least in part, within me as well? Does it pollute not just our society but indeed creation as a whole that we abide evil? And if so, what do we, as a people, do about it?

The Thunder in Context: What do basketball and April 19th have to do with one another,

Scott Howard-Cooper wrote a very touching blog for nba.com in which he compares the resiliency of the OKC Thunder to that of the city to which it belongs. If you have not read it, click the link above and do so. Then read this letter I wrote to Scott in response.

Scott,

This is a short note to thank you for your wonderful piece about the the Thunder's conection to Oklahoma City on nba.com. I have lived in Oklahoma City most of my life and your article, I am not ashamed to say brought tears to my eyes.

My father is a retired OCPD Crime Scene Detective and my step father is an OKC firefighter. They both spent a full month after the bombing sifting through the wreckage to recover victims. Years later, they both carry the scars from that month. Indeed the entire city has grieved together all these years. We have hurt together and cried with one another as we attend memorials every year around the city and cry together with people we may have never met.

In light of this, your article is a wonderfully beautiful expression of the power of sports. Just as we have cried together so many years, with the arrival of the Thunder and with their surprising success this year, we have also been able to come together to CHEER about something. Your article brought to my mind images of the President's memorial service just after the bombing in a dilapidated old arena here in Oklahoma City. The idea that the same crowd that cried together in that arena now celebrates together in the Ford Center is moving and profound. What we needed in Oklahoma City was something to cheer about. Something that would allow us to show people how proud we are. I don't know that it is appropriate to say that the arrival of the Thunder has completed our healing, but it's not a stretch at all to say that it has helped.

Sports are not just frivilous pass-times. Rather, because they connect a community, because they give a community something to be proud of, and because they bring a community into one common goal and one common voice, sports are in fact profound, transformative and, as anyone in Oklahoma City can tell you, healing.

Again, thank you for your writing.

Sincerely,
Jeffery Spruill

If Maps Fails, We'll All Die!

This is just a reminder to everyone of how vitally important to the health and well being of this city that it is that we all go out and vote "Yes" for MAPS 3. In order to demonstrate the importance of this issue, I have pointed out all that we will get with MAPS 3, and I have outlined the dangers that we as a city face if it fails. What we'll get:

1) A world class Convention Center. Though we already have two civic convention centers and dozens of hotels with convention space, and though convention business is dropping steadily across the nation, I choose to believe a fictional novel when it says "If you build it, they will come." I know that other cities who've built convention centers in the past several years have all seen convention business decline and leave them holding the bills for an unused building, but OKC has one thing these other cities don't have: year round bad weather.

2) A new park: It will be complete with water features that will also serve as free bath tubs for the homeless community that will be displaced when the Salvation Army Social Services Center is torn down to make room for the park. And because it will be protected by a dangerously understaffed police department with an average response time to high priority calls of just over nine minutes, park goers can be sure that they will have an exciting time after dark. Who doesn't like excitement? And though MAPS contains money to build these projects but not to mantain them, the park can be mantained for a mere $3 million dollars (about the salary and benefits for two police officers or firemen for an entire career) a year!

3) A new light rail system: Imagine all the middle class riders that will now only have to pay for parking once in Bricktown and who won't have to walk at all when visiting downtown! And, since the city will surely end its habit of ignoring underserved parts of the city, the rail system will provide a foundation to build a rail system off of that which would actually stretch into inner city neighborhoods so people can come from the projects to work at the convention center. After all, that's the purpose of mass transit anyway, and the city's sterling record of providing quality mass transit speaks for itself.

4) Sidewalks and Trails: Assuming someone picks up the $250 Million dollars of the convention center cost that MAPS 3 does not budget for, money will be left to add much needed sidewalks and trails that will help people lose the weight that they will gain because they don't have to walk around downtown thanks to the light rail system. And what a bargain at only $143,000 a mile!

5) Senior Wellness Centers: because someone has to drive those pesky non-profits like the YMCA out of business!

So, you can see that we have much to gain from MAPS 3, but what will happen to us if we fail to pass MAPS? Our progress as a city will instantly stop! Our investment in Bricktown ended in 2001 when the MAPS tax transferred to the MAPS for kids tax. Nothing has been built in Bricktown after 2001. And just look at neighborhoods that didn't see any MAPS money. None of them have thrived, except maybe Midtown, the Paseo Arts District , the Downtown Arts District, the Plaza District, the Asian District, and the hospital district. Okay, so a few have, but those were accidents of a good economy, while MAPS projects thrived only because we raised the money for them.

If you need an example of how much difference MAPS money makes, just look what MAPS for Kids did. Every school in the Oklahoma City Public Schools has received much-needed money for improvements and upgrades. Now everyone wants to put their kids in OKCPS. No one tries to move to other districts like Yukon, Moore, Edmond, and Putnam City. After all, if you could choose between Edmond Memorial and John Marshall, why wouldn't you choose John Marshall, aside from the gang problem, the under performing scores, and the low graduation rate?

Finally, a "no" vote on December 8th threatens the progress we have made in our city. If MAPS does not pass, the Bricktown Ballpark will be torn down. The Ford Center will crumble. The Oklahoma City native that owns the OKC Thunder will move the team to Las Vegas, and the canal will be filled in with dirt, on top of which will be built a pot-hole filled road. Don't let Oklahoma City move backward! Don't tell the city that you would rather them to invest your money in uselss things like firemen who are just going to slow traffic during the MDA drive or police officers who do nothing but write you tickets anyway.

Vote "Yes" on December 8th.

Who MAPS Forgot

The Oklahoma Gazette published in yesterday's paper a letter I wrote about the MAPS 3 proposal. They kept it pretty much in tact, about which I was surprised and appreciative but, as with any newspaper op-ed, they cut chunks out to save copy space. So here is the complete version:

A couple of years ago, I assigned a class of college freshman writers a chapter of Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz which discusses a crime prevention program in the city of Los Angeles involving the construction of concrete roadblocks in certain parts of the city, supposedly for the purpose of hindering drug traffic between drug infested neighborhoods and neighboring middle class areas. But the roadblocks also had the effect of holding undesirables in certain parts of the city, separating them from better policed, more affluent parts of the city, thereby creating privileged spaces where the upper-middle class didn’t have to fear, or even see, LA’s urban blight.

I asked my students if Oklahoma City has such privileged spaces and, after considering the question, they inevitably mentioned Bricktown, but they seemed to feel a sense of superiority over LA, since we at least didn’t have concrete barriers. But when we looked at a map of Bricktown, we stumbled across borders just as real as any barrier in LA. To the east, I-235 nicely separates our middle class playground from the long neglected, racially segregated lower east side. On the south, the renamed “Oklahoma River” provides a natural barrier from the poverty stricken south east side, and to the west, the elevated railroad tracks are a literal wall between Bricktown and the transient infested downtown area (of course, with the arrival of the Thunder, we should perhaps move that boundary to the Greyhound station).

To protect this privileged space from the urban blight which surrounds it on all sides, the City of Oklahoma City built a brand new, fully-staffed police station responsible for the five or so square blocks that Bricktown encompasses, leaving four stations to protect the other 664 square miles of Oklahoma City. In a recent radio interview, Fraternal Order of Police President Gil Hensley said that, in order to staff the Bricktown station, officers were pulled from districts serving the rest of the city. While Bricktown has added interest and vitality to the downtown area, it has also increased the workload of the OCPD, and it has not hired more officers to help support this workload. President Henley’s counterpart in the Fire Department’s employee group, Phil Sipe has seen a similar increase in workload and has actually had nearly fifty positions cut from his department so that OCFD now has two empty fire stations. So, while it can certainly be argued that the Bricktown development has greatly benefitted our city, it has done so at the expense of the citizens who live in underserved, less affluent areas of the city.

Now the mayor would like the people of Oklahoma City to pass MAPS 3, an extension of the Maps tax already in place, which has already been extended once with MAPS for Kids. The new MAPS tax will build a third convention center downtown, a downtown trolley system, and a downtown park. So who is left out of this new MAPS? With no funding in the plan for new police, fire, or roads, the manpower needed to protect and maintain these new projects will have to come from somewhere. Likely, it will come from already underserved areas of the city. The projects will be paid for, not just by the Edmond, Norman, and Moore residents who come to the city to enjoy these amenities, but by those citizens who will never be able to afford the ticket prices to the new convention center, the bills in Bricktown restaurants and so on. They will not be able to come into downtown to ride the trolley because the famously bad Metro Transit Authority will not see a cent to improve its slow routes and unreliable service.

Thus, the people who are left out of the new MAPS improvements are the people who are most in need. Those of us in the upper middle class will have another nice party destination and we will no doubt feel safe and protected by the platoons of public servants we will see inside our barricaded safe-haven. But people who live just outside our barricades will continue to live with such dilapidated roads that they cannot drive a car down their street, such as those who live just blocks from downtown in the 2200 block of SW 8th, whose street cannot even be called paved. People in the rural areas of the southeast side will still have no fire hydrants, and the police station that serves them will still be twenty miles away. People who live in less desirable neighborhoods in the city will see the police and firemen transferred away to fill the needs of visitors downtown, leaving them unprotected, because the tax that built these new downtown projects didn’t provide for the manpower needed to protect them. Without a doubt, the new projects proposed in the new MAPS are worthwhile projects, but if the primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens, then the new MAPS neglects its primary responsibility. It neglects those who most need protection. It robs the poor to give to the rich.

Why You Should [Loudly] Support Your Local Police

As any of you who have followed my writing lately know, I have very closely watched the Gates case in Cambridge, MA. I am intensely interested in the case because 1) my grandfather grew up in Cambridge and I still have family there so I have spent much time there and the city is close to my heart, 2) I was once a big fan of Professor Gates and assigned his writing to the freshman I taught at UCO and 3) I have an obvious professional interest.

As I have followed the story in the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, one of the things that has pleasantly surprised me has been the incredible outpouring of support for the Cambridge Police Department by people commenting on the websites of both these papers. Over the past several days, I have seen hundreds of comments that support the police in general and the involved sergeant specifically, but almost none condemning them. People have hung signs of protest in Professor Gates's front yard, yet Sgt. Crowley's yard has gone untouched. This, to me, has been an impressive -and rare- show of public support.

Many officers today feel under attack. I think it's safe to say that, across the country, morale on our police departments is extremely low. Officers feel unsupported, and unprotected. They feel that people are slow to act on their own, but quick to criticize, eager to sue, and indefatigable at second-guessing. Officers, I think, feel like they are constantly placed in no-win situations. After all, don't ask for an ID, and later you'll find out that the person you had contact with was a burglar. Ask for ID, and you'll get accused of racism by the homeowner that arrogantly thinks you should know him. Because of situations like these, many officers feel that they work to protect a public that doesn't appreciate, and perhaps even hates them.

Of course, I honestly believe that this is not the case, and I think that the support from the Boston community following the Gates debacle shows that. I think, by and large, an overwhelming majority of citizens appreciate and respect police officers and the sacrifices they make. But they are not called the silent majority for nothing. Arrestees and malcontents call police departments and send letters all the time railing about what officers have done wrong, but very few ever call in or write in to say thank you to the officers who served them or to congratulate officers on a job well done. Officers routinely find themselves being investigated after a formal complain, but rarely get to stand in lineup to hear a letter of appreciation about them being read in front of their peers. Instead, officers only hear complaints and accusations. But officers deserve to, and need to, hear audible public support.

And if there's any doubt that officers deserve praise, consider this: since September 11, 2001, 667 American soldiers have been killed in the war in Afghanistan. In that time, 1,157 police officers have been killed on the streets of America. Officers are giving their lives in a war that is being waged all around you. Yet, though it would be unthinkable to accuse an American soldier returning from Afghanistan of going to war only because he hated Arabs, we give an open ear to people who accuse officers of racism without a stitch of evidence to support the claim. When a convicted felon accuses an officer of excessive force, we drag his name through the mud on the nightly news. I'm not suggesting that we turn a blind eye on actual police malfeasance, but we owe to men who are sacrificing their lives at least the same benefit of doubt that we allow to felony suspects - the assumption of innocence until proven guilty.

And it isn't just their lives that officers are sacrificing. If most people were to watch a person aspirate on their own blood until they die, were to see a thirteen year old child floating dead in a swimming pool, or to see children who have been given cigarette burns by their mother's boyfriend, the person would be effected and haunted by these sights for the rest of their lives. Yet these are all things that officers can to expect to see numerous times through the course of a twenty five year career. After each of these events, the officer will not be offered psychological treatment, or days off to process the event. Instead, he will write a detailed report and go back in service, the event being added to a bank of such mentally destructive memories. The officer can't arrive on the scene of a brutal murder and fall into the street sobbing the way the witnesses around him are. Instead, he must somehow cope with what he is seeing and perform the work his profession requires.

Officers subject themselves to these sights so that the citizen will not have to. He runs into situations that others run away from. He doesn't do these things so that he can harass those he hates, or so that he can get the power and force the respect he didn't get in high school. These rewards would not be worth the sacrifices. And, because you pay his salary, you know he doesn't do these things for the meager pay.

So, when you are being stopped by an officer, and you find yourself quick to think that he's a jerk, remember that he may have just helped pull the lifeless body of a kid from a swimming pool, or he might have been called a racist by someone he was trying to help. So, if it seems that he's having a bad day, remember that a bad day for you means getting lectured by your boss for not getting your TPS reports in on time. A bad day for him involves being bitten by a mentally ill homeless man with god knows what diseases. Instead of telling your officer that he has better things to do than pull you over, say "sorry sir; I'll pay better attention next time." When you see an officer in a restaurant, take the time to go by and say, "thank you." And when a rich man with a home on Martha's Vineyard calls a good officer a racist, respond with a resounding and public, "shut up."

Why Gates is off My Reading List.

As a former university English instructor, I have always been an admirer of Henry Louis Gates's work. He has produced some of the most enlightening scholarship into African American literature and the African American experience. However, as a current police officer, I am very disappointed in Professor Gates's actions regarding his arrest.

Every police officer has experienced countless situations in which a person of a race different than the officer has accused him of taking enforcement action against him based on his race. However, I expect better of Professor Gates. Professor Gates fails to see that what he has done to officers of the Cambridge PD is exactly what he has been preaching against his entire career. He assumed immediately upon meeting these officers that he knew what they were and what they were about. Since they were police officers, Gates seems to think, they must be racists. This is the exact type of rush to judgment that racism is made of.

These officers did not see a black man walking down the street and jump out on him. They were called to this address. The only thing officers did to provoke Professor Gates was to ask him to identify himself, something that the courts have been clear officers have the right to do, and something that officers routinely do to most everyone they contact, no matter what race. If Gates would have produced an ID, something he no doubt has, this matter would have ended immediately. Officers would have seen his address on his ID and gone back into service (we are, after all, a bit lazy and love calls that last two minutes instead of the two hours it takes to book someone into jail). Instead, Professor Gates unleashed a string of tired accusations of racism and self-important language cops hear everyday. Perhaps Professor Gates should consider what would have happened had someone really broken in.

Would Dr. Gates have wanted the officers to have checked the burglars ID, or would he have liked them to take for granted that they were telling the truth when they said they lived in this home? Did Dr. Gates feel that the officers should have known who he was, as if police officers routinely keep abreast of preeminent literary scholars?

Gates has claimed that he did not behave in a disorderly manner, as police reports by two seperate officers claim, and that he was unfairly arrested at his own house. But a picture published by the Boston Globe on boston.com shows Gates with his mouth wide open, looking suspiciously like he is yelling at a police officer who is walking in front of him. Additionally, the photo shows him handcuffed with his hands in front of him, a courtesy that is against nearly every department's policies, as this is considered unsafe for officers. So, not only does it not appear that he was treated poorly, it appears that he was in fact treated preferentially. Professor Gates is now talking about filming a documentary on racial profiling. Perhaps he should first learn a proper definition of that term. If Gates had been stopped by police walking down his own street after police had driven right by a white person a block down the road, his claims of "racial profiling" might have some legitimacy, but officers were only at Gates's house because they were called.

Whether Professor Gates really believes all cops are racist, or whether he is arrogantly offended that people outside of academia don't know who he is, much of what Gates has taught me has been undermined by his behavior. He teaches racial equality, but he seems to be asking for preferential treatment.

Update: The Plot Thickens

I once had a gay bar owner accuse me of responding slowly to a call to his bar because he was gay, a hilarious supposition to anyone who knows anything about my career background and politics. I love that Gates seems to have also chosen the wrong guy about whom to make racist allegations.

Clandestine Cool OKC

When I was a kid growing up in Moore, I thought that being from Moore meant that I was from Oklahoma City. And, since I knew that there was nothing to do in Moore, that meant that there was nothing to do in Oklahoma City. But when I moved back from Memphis, I actually moved into the city (we're now the stuck-up Northsiders we were supposed to hate).

Since moving back, we have travelled a lot, but we have also occasionally stuck around for in-town vacations. If you have never pretended to be a tourist in your own town, no matter how big or small it may be, I suggest that you do so. Go all out. Get a hotel room in a nice hotel, carry a camera around, and go to the places you see on the free tourist maps you get in Bricktown.

Since coming home and getting out and visiting my own town, I have discovered how cool home is. Today we went into midtown. In OKC, midtown includes the area around St. Anthony Hospital, Automobile Alley (NW 10th/Broadway area), an the Mesta Park neighborhood. We ate at McNellie's Pub in Crown Plaza (a historic three sided building that sits on one of the city's few roundabouts). We sat at a table with a view of downtown, ate traditional Irish dishes, and had a pint of Guinness (well, Charissa didn't). We then walked across the roundabout and had a gigantic banana split at the Grateful Bean Cafe which inhabits the old, classic Kaiser's Ice Cream building, just down the street from St. Anthony's.

And this was just one example of decidedly cool, big city afternoons we've had here. No more am I the teenager who thinks there's "nothing to do" here. I've lived in Memphis, spent considerable time in Boston, and visited most of the major cities in the U.S. and I've finally discovered that OKC belongs among any of these cities.

We've stayed in the Skirvin Hotel, walked around in the underground (a part of this city many residents don't even know about), hung out in the wonderfully strange Paseo Arts District (NW 3oth and Dewey), and eaten every kind of ethnic food.

I've patrolled districts that are primarily Mexican where all the businesses have signs in Spanish, and another that is primarily Vietnamese where all the signs are in their language. I've eaten in Mediterranean restaurants owned by Iranians and pizza parlors owned by New York Italian-Americans. I even have a German Deli (significant to me) a mile from my house.

Okies, this place is cool! And the secret is getting out. If you haven't noticed, then get out of Moore, get a room in the Skirvin and become a tourist in your own town for a couple of days. It just may change your mind about our clandestine cool city.