for a greater New York

What a legacy! Yes, but while still alive, for most of her eighty years, Antonia Pantoja must have been just a dazzling, inspiring, sometimes daunting, everyday reality for those who shared her life and for those whom she helped. In the end, she helped all of us, making the entire country, and New York especially, a much better place.
Juan Gonzalez describes her impact on individuals, in today’s Daily News.

With all due respect to Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin and J.Lo, no one during the past 50 years did more to elevate the Puerto Rican community in the United States than Pantoja.

One look at the doctora’s story however and Gonzalez’s comparisons seem grotesquely lame.

more on Weakland, spot on!

The New Republic includes the first critical look at the Catholic Church mess in Milwaukee, and makes it clear that this one is not a story of child abuse, the sexual importuning of a teenager, and most probably not even sexual date rape.

Because while all those priests for whom child molestation became the hobby of choice are utterly contemptible, so is someone who poses as a victim in order to extort money from a church.

The only quibble I can find right now is that the author neglected to ask whether the payment of the $450,000 blackmail payment was the decision of the Archbishop alone, of a committee of some sort, or even one kept out of his hands entirely by the hierarchy (Rome?) Weakland after all, has so far maintained almost complete silence on the matter, citing a privacy agreement with his lover.

the World Trade Center today

An editorial in today’s NYTimes pauses to observe the completion of clearance work at the World Trade Center site, and the portion of the text which addresses the recent past manages to be surprisingly gentle.

Most of us have found our own ways to accommodate the meaning of Sept. 11. But for the crews that have been at work on that unimaginable site — and at the holding areas where the debris has been sifted and analyzed — the one way to deal with the tragedy has been to dismantle it, fragment by fragment, until there was nothing left. Those crews have served as our surrogates.
….
Removing that last steel column marks the moment when the physical ruins of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath have been effaced. Some of us have been eager to push them out of sight, and some of us have been reluctant. But from now on, those ruins exist only in us.

Anything but marriage

Interesting that some people who think about these things are now arguing that in opposing same-sex marriage, social conservatives may actually be encouraging the legal recognition of such relationships, and in fact hastening the demise of marriage as an institution!
Jonathan Rauch argues in the Atlantic that the last thing supporters of marriage should be doing is setting up an assortment of alternatives, but that is exactly what they are doing, and not only for gays, when they offer “ABM” (Anything But Marriage).

Every year more companies and governments (at the state and local level) grant marriagelike benefits to cohabiting partners: “concessions fought for and won mostly by gay groups,” as the Los Angeles Times notes, “but enjoyed as well by the much larger population of heterosexual unmarried couples.”
….
ABM, perversely, turns one of the country’s more culturally visible minorities into an advertisement for just how cool and successful life outside of wedlock can be.

So, eventually, a religious ceremony could become more like an alternative decorating choice!

Are we done yet?

Seven minutes in Cathedral Square, half an hour in the Hermitage, and an especially-miniaturized “Nutcracker,” all in a day’s work for the emperor who already knows all he has to know.

President Bush’s father, when he was in the White House, introduced the world to “speed golf,” involving a breathless race through 18 holes. The younger Bush, on his European trip, practiced a variation: robo-tourism.

But don’t suppose the subtleties of European culture escape him in his high-speed bubble:

Arriving for a caviar dinner at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s country residence, Bush viewed the immaculate grounds and told his host: “Nice of you to mow the grass for us.” At the French president’s palace, he noted that Jacques Chirac is “always saying that the food here is fantastic.”

Bushie pans literacy

In Paris yesterday an American reporter was the target of the ire of the unelected one, because the NBC News White House correspondent deigned to ask the French President in French the same question he had just asked Bushie in English.

Perhaps Mr. Bush thought the French question was directed at him, or perhaps he thought Mr. Gregory was showing off. Whatever the case, Mr. Bush, his voice dripping with sarcasm, said “Very good, the guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he’s intercontinental.” (Mr. Gregory offered to go on in French, but that only made things worse.)
“I’m impressed — que bueno,” said Mr. Bush, using the Spanish phrase for “how wonderful.” He added: “Now I’m literate in two languages.”
Mr. Gregory seemed a bit abashed, but others noted that, during the trip, Russian, German and French reporters posed questions to Mr. Bush in English, and in their native tongue to other leaders.

Yuck. My guess is that our leader is trying to tell us that, if we are Americans, we should be excoriated for being courteous, smart or educated.
W’s snap at the correspondent was totally out of line, stupid, childish, and especially egregious in the context of the gentle handling he has enjoyed from his hosts in Europe for almost a week. The French President had been especially solicitous:

Perhaps to help cover for Mr. Bush, Mr. Chirac opened the press conference with a lengthy and rambling monologue about their talks and the state of U.S. – French relations. Mr. Chirac’s remarks ate up about half the time allotted to the press conference, and he then shut down the press conference after only a handful of questions.

even hero gays must remain invisible

It’s official! Only those legally part of the heterosexual system can be heroes. Wednesday the House Republican majority killed a bill, passed unanimously in the Senate, which would have extended death benefits to the survivors of gay chaplain Mychal Judge and nine other public safety officers who died during the attacks on September 11. The ten are the only public-safety officers killed in the attacks who have no “immediate family.”

Under current law, only parents, spouses or children of public-safety officers who died in the Sept. 11 attacks are eligible to receive the standard $250,000 in federal death benefits.
Sources said the measure was shelved because of some lawmakers’ concerns over the potential cost due to its precedent-setting nature, while others objected to the bill’s recognition of the victims’ “domestic partners.”
George Burke, of the International Association of Firefighters, said it was an outrage to deny “recognition for fallen heroes.”
“We’re very frustrated here. We’re very angry,” said William Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations.

Don’t just sit there!

Every graduating class needs a Tony Kushner a lot more than it needs some suit.
Invited to address this year’s graduating class at Vassar, the activist and playwright told its members and their guests that the future did not look bright and that no one he knew was truly happy.

The best they could hope for, he said, was to be “happyish.”
“This is a time of crisis,” he said. “And in a time of crisis, you have to focus on being real.”
In his 20-minute address, Mr. Kushner urged the graduates to think to themselves: “I am here to organize; I am here to be political.”
“It’s boring to organize, but do it,” he said. “The world ends if you don’t.”

Oh those wacky sports fans

Is this what the F.B.I. had in mind when it warned us about light aircraft?

An attempt to honour a dead baseball fan’s last wish went horribly wrong on Friday, forcing the evacuation of Safeco Field, the home of the Seattle Mariners baseball team, amid fears of a bio-terror attack.

The plane dropped a package which exploded on impact, spraying the area with a “mystery white powder.” It later turned out that the package contained the ashes of a devout Mariners fan who had wanted his remains cast over the field.