It’s not known if Eleanor Holmes Norton does windows, but it is now sadly clear that she does light bulbs.
If New York is the City that Never Sleeps, Washington is the City That Doesn’t Work as any visitor to Shaw Junior High School realized last Thursday.
An event there underscored the inseparable elements of low citizen expectations of, and media inattention toward, the bankrupt, inept government of your nation’s capital. The Washington Post relegated it to a “brief,” or smidgen,
inside the local section, while TV took a pass.
At a typically grim, inner-city school, students were beckoned into the auditorium as a band played, majorettes twirled batons and honored guests made their way to the front. The fanfare was suited to a football pep rally.
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Instead, Norton, a former civil rights attorney who is the District of Columbia’s one (non-voting) representative in Congress, was there to announce that the secretive Defense Intelligence Agency was taking a most public action.
It was giving the city’s public school system 20,000 fluorescent light bulbs.
Imagine.
Crime rises in Washington, D.C., while it drops everywhere else. AIDS cases are up. Uncollected garbage flows from street corners toward the horizon. Potholes the size of golf sand traps go unfixed. Scores of street and traffic lights are unrepaired, surely leading tourists to check guidebooks for the meaning of flashing red lights.
The police are so undermanned, overrun and cynical that the Tribune just hired a private detective to investigate the attempted rape and awful stabbing of a young woman in our bureau whose attacker is still on the loose. And, lucky us, the ex-convict mayor, Marion Barry, is now pushing to release 1,000 criminals early from the crowded jail to save money.
And the schools, with one of the highest per-pupil spending rates in the nation, don’t have a dime for light bulbs.
So it’s fitting that a celebration greeted the move of the Pentagon’s military intelligence arm–switching to a more energy efficient bulb–to pass off its surplus on schools in which their top officials’ kids probably wouldn’t be caught dead.
“You don’t appreciate what a light bulb means until you don’t have one,” Norton told the assembled, apparently not noticing that one of the bulbs directly above her was out.
“In the District of Columbia we have gotten to the point where the police don’t have cars to drive so you know it is possible that we can get to a point where there are not enough light bulbs to go around,” Holmes said.
She was followed by Robert De Gross, an official of the intelligence agency, who presented one of the fluorescent tubes with the same gravity with which they pass out the Nobel Prize. Several officials handled it as if an artifact from a wondrous archeological dig.
Franklin Smith, the school system’s superintendent, concluded the program and everybody stood as the band struck up, “America the Beautiful.”
They then ambled down a hall, to a ladder positioned right under one of the estimated 1,000 bulbs that need to be replaced at the school. There, a maintenance worker climbed the steps and installed a new bulb.
Everyone clapped with the same vigor displayed by spectators at center court at Wimbledon after a great shot.
The maintenance worker later said that the bulbs were great “but now we need to replace the roof. When it rains, the ceiling leaks.”
“I do really shake my head,” Norton said during a telephone chat hours later. “If all the parties involved did their job, none of this should have happened. This city has a better underlying economy than Chicago. Tourism and the federal government are steadier than, say, manufacturing.”
Norton detailed the mess of a government too large for its population, facing expenses it must face without the help of any state funding and beholden to those in Congress (“people from Podunk”) without much link to the city. “It’s not like Chicago, which has the backing of its own delegation.”
The Republican-led Congress, holding hostage the $660 million the city gets from the federal government, has forced the district to cut another $150 million in spending.
“Those cuts have accelerated people leaving the city,” Holmes told me. “I screamed and hollered and said this can’t happen.”
Turn out the lights. It did.
Passport fraud or terrorism?
Kathryn Porter, wife of Rep. John Edward Porter (R-Ill.), has been to Turkish prisons in her role as a human rights activist and president of the Human Rights Alliance. Last week, she went to the District of Columbia jail.
“It was pretty horrific. It wasn’t exactly like a Turkish prison, but my hand did slide down the (grimy) Plexiglas. It was pretty gross,” Porter said.
Her trip was to visit a close friend whom the U.S. government says is guilty of fraud. He is not, says the government in an action filed in Los Angeles, the person Porter and her husband they thought he was and have often played host to at their home.
Kani Xulam is a Kurdish activist and head of the American Kurdish Information Network. The Turkish government believes he’s a terrorist aligned with the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which seeks a separate state for the Kurdish ethnic minority.
But Xulam was arrested last week and accused of lying on passport applications. The government claims he got into this country in 1986 under an assumed name, that of a dead child, then changed it twice more. At a court hearing, he conceded he’s the person who came in under that name.
Xulam is well-known and liked within the capital’s Kurdish community and among human rights groups. But he’s now in jail without bond as his friends appeal his jailing, seek political asylum for him and try to have the case’s venue moved to Washington, D.C., from Los Angeles.
“The man is probably guilty of passport fraud,” Porter said. “If you’re guilty of something, you’re guilty. But in the scheme of things, that’s relatively minor.”
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She likens him to “6 or 8 million others who have come under extreme conditions and falsified documents” to get into this country.
She believes that the Turkish government, an American ally, is trying to silence Xulam. She also feels bad since “I feel responsible for this.”
With 31 million Kurds worldwide, they are “the largest ethnic group without their own state,” Porter said. But she fears the group could be less one person if the Turkish government seeks Xulam’s extradition.
“If he goes back to Turkey, they will torture him for a few days and then kill him. They’ll call it an accident.”
Cokie watch
“You can use the quotes from last year,” Jeff Greenfield of ABC News said drolly.
Last year, I’d written of Greenfield, the star ABC reporter who does much on media, speaking to a major industry trade group, the National Association of Broadcasters for $12,000.
ABC supposedly had new conflict of interest rules, inspired partly by well-chronicled moonlighting of a Greenfield colleague–oh, you know who–but carved out an exception for speaking for pay to groups within the media industry.
It struck me as a distinction without difference. Anyway, Greenfield was back in Las Vegas last week, speaking for the NAB’s cash.
“We disagree on this,” he said to me.