GAZETTE COLUMN: THE FLYING CHAIR by John P. Flannery

John Flannery (Photo: Holly Flannery)

About a year and a half ago, I talked about a longing I had harbored for several springs, to ride a motorcycle; our rolling countryside reminded me of another time and place when I was younger and rode such hills and country elsewhere.

You may know or imagine what it’s like to be on a motorcycle, a part of what you see, no longer a mere observer in a controlled environment, confined by a windshield; instead, you are exposed, in the space surrounding, pushed by winds at the rush of the bike and the changeable weather, able to see to the clouds above, the road below, and the horizon that lays ahead, catching the scent of field grasses, magnolia and honey suckle, and feeling the tilt of the bike as you lean into the turn. 

In a car, you are surrounded by sameness, the radio, phone, all of it a homogenous extension of what you experience all the time wherever you are, at home, in your car, at the office.

When you ride alone on a bike, it revives your spirit, and helps you to expel the toxic nonsense that confounds our lives.  When you share a ride with someone, the wind and the bike insulate each of you even though you share the experience.  While riders ride with other bikers, I’ve always thought riding was most about going solo and that you were better for it.  Not surprisingly, there is a community among riders even when they don’t know each other, never saw each other before.  Riders reach out their left hands when they pass each other on the road in opposite directions, as if waving toward the shared road and toward each other, acknowledging another rider, saying hello.

I really think riding a bike is like flying (though firmly bound to the road).  A most charming Irish friend from Dublin, who lives in Loudoun, rides a Triumph; in his delightful brogue, he’ll tell you that riding his bike is like riding a “Flying Chair.”  

I rode for years while I was a student, but the most exceptional experience I had was when I “did the continent” after engineering school, before I began Columbia law.

After a prop flight from NY to Heathrow, I bought a BSA in London, bound my duffel bag to the back of the bike with bungee cords, drove to Dover’s white cliffs, caught a ferry to Calais and there launched a three month tour of Europe.  I was ready for anything because I had a bed roll for those nights there’d be no inn or youth hostel.  One night in the South of France, it was so pitch black dark on the country road, I pulled off into a field, picking my way as carefully as I could; I was awakened the next morning, however, by cattle surrounding my bedroom in their breakfast eating hall.

My renewed impulse to ride prompted many invitations to try a classic (a Harley, Triumph, or BMW, and many others), even a bike that looked more like jet engines on wheels.  I was leery, however, of being over-mounted.  So last September, I found a 250 cc Suzuki at Loudoun Motorsport in Leesburg.

While I have managed to drop my bike in the dirt once quite soundly, I’ve found the rest of my rides all that I hoped for. 

I can easily offer you a taste of the marvelous landscape I’m talking about if you’ll just try a (slow) ride on Loyalty Road north from Waterford to Taylorstown. 

The road rises and falls and twists like a friendly roller coaster through brilliant pastures, well-tended lawns, sweeping vistas, and historic homes.  It just has to be experienced.  If there’s anything that reminds me of that continental tour I took years ago, it is this exquisite ride north along Loyalty. 

If there’s anything that should enliven a community’s interest in restoring and preserving our county’s verdant and historic legacy, it is signified by this short expanse of road and the environs.

You may not be able to take this jaunt on a bike, as I have, but if you do try it this Fall in a car, turn off everything, i.e., your music, phone, air conditioning, and throw open the windows, slow down the speed, and let your senses inhale and experience something that is, albeit remotely, like what you’d enjoy if you were on a motorcycle instead.

COLUMN: OBAMA’S VISION OF “SHARED PROSPERITY” AND REPUBLICAN MYOPIA by John P. Flannery

President Barack Obama addressed the democratic convention last Thursday evening advocating a “new vision of America in which prosperity is shared.”

That’s democracy, small “d,” the sentiment that “we are all in this together.”  Our inscribed nation’s seal bears the inscription, “e pluribus unum,” meaning, “out of many, one.”  Our American constitution embraces, “We the people of the United States,” meaning all of us.  We formed a Constitution because the confederation of separate states lacked the shared strength for this nation’s survival and the need to provide and promote for its general welfare. 

Our government is a reflection of our human condition, as John Donne said, that “no man is an island, entire of itself,” and that each of us “is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

That’s why I was taken aback by the Republican reaction to the President’s vision of “shared prosperity.”

Driving east of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina past a tobacco field on our way toward Creedmor, we heard a local Republican Congressional Challenger for the Fourth Congressional District, Tim D’Annunzio, attack the President’s “vision” in a freshly minted radio ad.

D’Annunzio said the President’s “vision” was a “deceptive way of saying his future includes more socialism.  And it’s a perverted version of the American Dream.” (Listen for yourself: http://www.timvote.com/media/ )

My wife, Holly, and step-daughter, Alex, couldn’t imagine how our constitutional principles could be considered a “deceptive way.”

D’Annunzio nevertheless insisted that the President’s vision of “shared prosperity” would lead us “to national decline, chronic unemployment and the cannibalization of national wealth.” 

D’Annuzio’s fractured view is that, when the Declaration of Independence says we have “the right to pursue happiness,” we are otherwise on our own.  Tim should have read the Declaration of Independence more carefully including the rudimentary principle that “Governments are instituted among Men…” in order “to secure these rights” including the right to pursue happiness.

Cognitive dissonance is a term from psychology where a person or party holds conflicting beliefs, irreconcilably contradictory, at the same time, causing a feeling of guilt or anger. 

We know Republican leaders, as well as friends and neighbors, who say they can do it on their own without government but, in their individual daily lives, that’s not what they do; they seek out other friends and neighbors to share responsibility to mutual advantage on an array of projects.

How do our leaders and friends reconcile claiming they need no help from government but expecting aid and comfort from friends and neighbors? 

More to the point, how are they able to disregard the fact that they accept and expect help from the government as well.

When we consider more closely all these individuals who claim they can exist native, rugged, without any government assistance, we see that they drive on highways we all pay for, use water and waste systems shared with others, enjoy community supported fire and police protection, their children attend public schools, are protected by our national defense, use weather and satellite information, and so many other services they take for granted, seemingly  ignored as factually irrelevant, by atomistic Ayn-Randish citizens, who insist they need no one else, but especially no government.

This cognitive dissonance, they call independence, is really about indifference to our national challenges.

Consider the contradictory Republican messages this presidential season when Republican leaders and supporters claim they are for creating jobs by forgiving taxes to the wealthy who have created no jobs previously while they otherwise resist any jobs program that would get this nation back to work.  They say they care for the unemployed, the homeless and the hungry, but lift not a finger to lighten their load, even slandering families that feed their families with food stamps.  They are the party of women we are told even as they dictate to women what they may do with their own bodies.  They support the right to vote but suppress it with legislation calculated to restrict access to the voting booth among seniors, minorities, students, and the poor.   They are for an all-inclusive nation but resist pluralism and would cast out immigrant children who have never lived elsewhere.   They proclaim proudly, in one breath, how this nation is exceptional, and, in the next, they bash and trash our nation top to bottom.

We can’t expect a winning plan for our nation from a party that doesn’t know its own mind.  Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, said, if elected, he’ll take 8 years to balance the budget.  President Obama has a head start on a plan in place to clean up the mess that President Bush created.  Let’s stay the course.

COLUMN: THE REPUBLICAN CONFECTION by John P. Flannery

Eastwood Unplugged

We’ve grown numb to the unworthy process of cage fighting pols busting each other with unsubstantiated slanders and impossible policy claims.

Romney’s campaign team has just finished regaling us with their “vision” of America as seen from Tampa, Florida. 

Congressman Paul Ryan, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, charged that a sensational factory closing in his home town, Janesville, Wisconsin, arose because of Barack Obama’s failed promise to keep it open; in truth, GM announced the closing in June 2008 because of sagging SUV sales while Bush was President.  

Ryan charged that S&P downgraded U.S. debt because of Obama when it was the Republicans in Congress including budget maven Ryan who refused to raise the debt ceiling until the last minute.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice claimed street cred’ for international neophytes Romney and Ryan.  She overlooked the war in Afghanistan.  No doubt that was because President Obama’s administration found and killed Osama Bin Laden when Bush and Rice could not find him or the chimerical weapons of mass destruction they posited as the reason to invade Iraq.

Romney needed an assist on his foreign policy acumen given how he botched what should have been no more complicated than a walk in Hyde park.  Romney dissed his Olympic hosts in Great Britain and couldn’t keep secret he had also met with British military intelligence.  In Israel, he eagerly signed onto Netanyahu’s forced march to Teheran, apparently relinquishing America’s prerogative to refuse another preemptive war.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christy, a bombastic blow bag, warmed to a litany of his own “accomplishments,” but could hardly bring himself to mention Romney, the presidential nominee.

Ann Romney talked about her husband, the nominee, because we don’t see him the way she does.   

And we still don’t see him that way. 

Frankly, who cares if Mitt is charming if he can persuade us that he’d make a make a difference for the better.     

Romney tells older American they won’t lose their social security, just the younger adults who fund their retirement, suggesting the Romney social security system is not so secure.

Romney tells the sick they should have planned better and must learn how to take care of themselves -- even though presidents, senators and congressmen don’t.

It’s hard to believe Romney’s policies will add a single job when he’s for firing public employees including teachers, refusing unemployment insurance, rejecting public job training, and resisting public works projects that would repair our declining national infrastructure and put men and women to work.

Romney repeats the cant that by collecting less taxes from the filthy rich, they’ll create the jobs they failed to create when Bush gave them an earlier tax holiday.

There is an abiding selfishness in the Republican platform disfavoring the middle class

By contrast, Democrats believe we are in this together to help each other.

Pope Leo believed that the role of the State was to promote social justice through the protection of rights.  The modern Republican party denies any such responsibility.

Pope Leo insisted workers have bargaining rights to defend against unbridled capitalism.  The Republican party doesn’t see it that way.

Leo said, “If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.”  In this recession, we have seen families with jobs that paid less and suffered indignities by employers who knew their workers had few, if any, alternatives.

The current Republican Party compromises the working man and woman for their business’ bottom line.

We’ll do better with President Barack Obama.

COLUMN: “LEGITIMATE RAPE” – THAT’S CONGRESS FOR YOU! by John P. Flannery

Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO) infamously claimed that forced sexual encounters cannot lead to pregnancy because, and I quote him precisely, “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

In other words, rape prompted by date rape drugs, or threats are not “forced” and this is then what?, “illegitimate” rape, meaning that’s okay?  Wrong!  Definitely wrong!  The critical element of any rape is the woman’s refusal, the withholding of consent to having sexual intercourse; this is true no matter how the violation of the woman’s soul and person is done, whether by trick, threat, force, or lack of capacity or consciousness by the victim.  Rape is rape. 

Senator Claire McCaskill, Akin’s opponent for her Missouri Senate seat said, “It is beyond comprehension that someone can be so ignorant about the emotional and physical trauma brought on by rape.”

When I studied sociology, Margaret Mead, a world renowned anthropologist, reported from her excursions to the South Pacific that Trobriand Islanders believed that a woman became pregnant when she swam at low tide.  We need someone like Mead to find out what tribe taught Todd that the female body can repel a rapist’s unwanted sperm.  It is scarily ironic that Todd has a vote as a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Congressman Akin’s sexist and ignorant declaration about rape brought on an almost universal rage as Akin revealed himself as a throwback to the knuckle dragging days when women couldn’t vote and were treated as property rather than persons.

Nor is this new for Akin.  In the bill, HR 3, offered for consideration last year, with Akin as a co-sponsor, Congress was forced to re-consider a long standing policy (more than three decades old) of not funding abortions with taxpayer funds except in the case of rape or incest.  The fight was over the breadth of the exceptions. The current Republican Vice Presidential Candidate, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), joined Congressman Akin and 225 other Republican members who wanted to re-define rape by a “new and improved” definition, affixing the word, “forcible,” to narrow the exception for rape, and to cut back on past protection afforded teenage girls who were raped.  Every Republican Congressman in Virginia signed on as a co-sponsor to this hateful sexist revision (Reps. Cantor, Forbes, Goodlatte, Griffith, Hurt, Rigell, Wittman, and Wolf); no Democrat in Virginia supported this wrong-headed initiative (not Rep. Connolly, Moran, nor Scott); in the end, mercifully, this heartless ruse was seen by the public for what it was and struck from the bill.  Congressman Akin’s recent quote only reminded us of the unvarnished malicious intent of these 227 members of Congress.

There is more – sad to say.  31 state legislatures including Virginia do not prohibit and thus enable the rapist to seek visitation with and custody rights for any child that issues following any rape.  When the rape victim decides as a matter of religious belief or other reason to have the child, she may face the horror of the rapist demanding his right to visit with and/or have custody of the child when s/he is born.  Suzanne Powell, a mother herself, said, “Hell No.”  Ms. Powell couldn’t believe it.  Few can.

Whatever anyone’s belief about terminating a pregnancy, I would like to believe that, as a national and local community, we all agree that rape disqualifies the rapist from having any rights of custody or visitation should the rape victim give birth. 

Rebekka Prinz said, “Rape is about control, so the idea that a child would be handed over to someone who has already demonstrated a willingness to dehumanize another person to the point of physical assault is, frankly, terrifying.” 

Our model should be the 19 States that have established affirmative safeguards against just this happening, and that disqualify a rapist having either visitation or custody rights.

Nor should it matter, that this may sometimes be difficult to determine, for example, when the woman was raped by her husband.  To my mind, it doesn’t matter who commits the rape.  He should be barred from visitation or custody.  Of course, the rapist may concoct the impermissible defense of threatening to seek custody or visitation to coerce the rape victim into withdrawing her charge of rape.

Women should be on guard this election at what these Republican throwbacks want to do to their rights, and we should see that every state includes a prohibition in its code that no rapists shall have any rights to custody or visitation for any child resulting from their rape of the mother.