A DIRTY BUSINESS

The recent recall of mayor Bauer and the visit of George Bush and John Edwards to River City set me to reflecting about Portsmouth’s politics and history.

The dirtiness of politics is proverbial. How can anyone participate in, without being contaminated by, politics? The butcher is going to have a bloody apron and the plumber a gucky snake, but we never stop being indignant when a politician has sticky fingers, deep pockets, deserving friends, and enough skeletons in the closet to supply every anatomy class in the nation.

Politicians as a class are despised and distrusted even more than lawyers, and they are often of course one and the same. The very worst of them belong to the opposing political party. There is a name for politicians who are not lawyers: fools and amateurs.

Politicians, like lawyers, do our dirty business, as we used to have washerwomen do our laundry. Politics does not attract the sensitive or morally squeamish. Politicians are usually ambitious and shrewd but seldom honest. A lack of principles is not a requirement for public office, but it is harder to succeed with principles than without them. Count on it: anyone who speaks reverently of “the American people” or “the people of Portsmouth” is probably trying to screw them.

Lawyers and politicians know how sausages are made. The sausage eaters, the electorate, don’t want to know about it. Who cares how many porkers get slaughtered. Just keep those sausages coming.

Politicians are men not of steel but of pig iron. The first mayor of Portsmouth, a gent name Tomlin, “kept a hotel on Pig Iron Corner,” as Evans wrote disapprovingly in his History of Scioto County. Did Tomlin rent rooms by the hour as well as the day? Evans does not say. When he came to Portsmouth in 1831, Tomlin married the daughter of a local saloonkeeper and made his living supplying whiskey and pork to the people of Portsmouth. Booze? Pigs? Inevitably, he got into politics. A Democrat, he was appointed Associate Judge of Scioto County. (“The devil is an Irish judge,” an old Irish proverb says.) Tomlin was also elected to the Portsmouth town council. In March 1837, he was elected first mayor of Portsmouth and subsequently was reelected. He was reelected again in 1844, defeating the Whig candidate with the help of what Evans calls “defamatory circulars” distributed just before the election by the Swift Boat Veterans for” . . . no, wait I am getting things mixed up. It was the Committee to Re-Elect Mayor Bauer, no, that’s not it, either.

They did not have Recall back then; they apparently didn’t need it. After several terms as mayor, during which time he continued as Associate Judge, Tomlin ran afoul of the town council, which voted to remove him from office claiming he was sick, deaf, and incompetent. They appointed another man to fill out his term. Tomlin was a candidate in the next mayoral election, but he got only one vote, presumably his own.

There is no mural on the flood wall for the first mayor of Portsmouth, nor is there one for the infamous “Black Friday,” January 21, 1830, when the eighty or so African-Americans of Portsmouth were driven out of town in accordance with the “Black Laws” of Ohio.

The floodwall is where Portsmouth’s history gets laundered. The Flood of 1937 and the drowning of a black woman, the flood’s only fatality, washed away all our sins, or most of them anyway.

FOLLOWING A PRECEDENT

“It was a great day for the City of Portsmouth,” Richard Bussa began his article in the Community Common following the recent visit of President Bush to our river city. I disagree strongly. I believe September 10, 2004, in Portsmouth, Ohio, was a poor excuse for democracy. September 10, was, as far as democracy goes “a miserable failure” – to borrow Representative Dick Gephardt’s characterization of the president himself.

The Bush campaign chose Shawnee State University because it was, like Bible colleges and military institutions, a safe venue. When Bush’s twin daughters were graduating from Yale and the University of Texas last spring, he did not go to either of those graduations because his mere presence was likely to provoke massive protests over the Iraq War.

At Shawnee State University , the Bush campaign, with the cooperation of local Republicans, were able to stage one of those surreal Republican fantasies in which Bush and his most enthusiastic and carefully screened supporters were insulated not only from his miserable record on the economy, Iraq, and the environment, but also from the unpleasant realities of Portsmouth – from poverty, unemployment, prostitution, drug dealing, and political corruption, problems that prompted local voters recently to throw out a corrupt and inept Republican mayor by a 2 to 1 margin in a special recall election.

I joined those protesters who gathered in a small median set aside for protestors at the edge of the university. If there was one place Bush and his entourage could be guaranteed not to drive by it was that small reservation in which the white leaders of Portsmouth succeeded in penning dissenters, who were warned not to move from the site, certainly not in the direction of the insulated incumbent and his followers. The protestors had to satisfy themselves with exchanging chants (“Four more years!” versus “Three more months!”) with a group of young Bush supporters who were allowed to mix with and taunt the protesters. One anti-Bush protestor was arrested. A few people who witnessed the incident said he was not doing anything to warrant an arrest. The biggest (literally and figuratively) trouble-maker and loud-mouth among the Bushies, who said he was a student from Rio Grande, was sought out by a reporter for the Portsmouth Times. “Instead of being out here protesting,” the Rio Grande student said very angrily (I was standing right beside him), “why don’t they go look for a job?”

I am sure most of the millions of unemployed and underemployed in America and Appalachia would gladly get fulltime jobs if they could, but the Rio Grande student and president Bush refuse to acknowledge that during his administration there has been the greatest loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover, the last Republican president to visit Portsmouth. Hoover gained a kind of infamy for his refusal to face the reality of unemployment, poverty, and social unrest in America. Hoover kept on insisting that we had turned the corner, that new jobs and prosperity were just up the road, even as millions of desperate Americans took to the road in a futile search for jobs. When they got mad enough, they joined in protests against a Republican presidents’ bankrupt policies and elected a Democrat president. We hope to follow that precedent.

TERMINAL: A POEM

(On the demolition of the Norfolk & Western terminal)

After our candlelight vigil, we returned the next day
for an unauthorized tour of the Art Deco terminal
that will be razed to make way for a jail.
We could not find a room with a window
overlooking the past that we knew.
Like prisoners of the twentieth-first century,
we went from office to office, from floor to floor,
looking for memories undusted by asbestos,
stepping over wires ripped from walls and ceilings,
stubbing toes on clunky beige telephones
that were once the last word in style.
Faded green files lay on the floor like salmon
that had spawned obsolete data and died
of irrelevance, shamed by change.
Schedules beneath our feet lay at the bottom
of a tributary that had run dry
when America, captivated by cloverleafs,
sold its soul to the infernal combustion engine,
and trains stopped carrying passengers
in love with rail, and salesmen, servicemen,
fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts –
when Americans of every kind –
with faith in the future, reverence for the past,
with destinations as close as the town up the line,
or as remote as places existing only in the mind,
departed for the last time from the terminal.
Departing is such sweet sorrow.

Robert Forrey

Straight Talk and Gay Bashing

What a week!

In an interview in Playboy Terrell Owens, a former teammate of Jeff Garcia, implied that the former quarterback of the San Francisco Forty-Niners was a homosexual. “Like my boy tells me,” Owens said about Garcia, “if it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, by golly, it is a rat.” Ricky Williams, the record-setting running back of the Miami Dolphins, is rumored to have retired prematurely because he is a homosexual who wants to do other things with the rest of his life than knock heads with Mike Ditka-like linebackers. And then New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey, the highest ranking elected official ever to do so, publicly admitted to being a homosexual. Actually, with a wife and children, McGreevey could qualify as bisexual, but just as 1/32 of Negro blood during the slave era made one legally a Negro, one homosexual grain of sand is enough to convince homophobes the whole beach is gay. And now John Welton has discovered that back in 1981 the Daily Times reported that Lee Scott, among other things, had allegedly been involved in a homosexual relationship.

I had not heard that before, but during the Recall Bauer campaign I heard more than once that the mayor was a homosexual. I wouldn’t mention this rumor if someone who is in a position to know, and who is not a political enemy of the mayor, had not confirmed that the rumors were true.

In the interest of full disclosure I’ll admit that I’m faculty advisor to the Gay and Straight Student Alliance at Shawnee State. I know the Bible condemns homosexuality, but that is one of the issues I don’t agree with the Bible on. I think the world would be a less hate-filled place without homophobia, but I’m not suggesting we should be tolerant of drug-dealing and political corruption, two of Portsmouth’s prevailing vices. What I am suggesting is that we should not think homosexuality has some inherent link with drug trafficking and political corruption. The vast majority of drug-dealers and corrupt politicians are heterosexual, but that does not make heterosexuality a vice.

It is to the credit of Welton and Scott that, in spite of their being the victims of a sleazy “ex-con” flyer in the Community Common, they did not sink to making Bauer’s sexuality an issue during the recall campaign. During that bitter campaign, I asked Scott about the Bauer rumors, and he said the sex life of the mayor, though no secret in Portsmouth, was not a relevant recall issue.

A homosexual relationship Scott allegedly had almost twenty-five years ago is even less relevant than his drug conviction almost twenty-five years ago. He readily admits he was guilty of trafficking, for which he expresses contrition. He may have to answer for being a Benedict Arnold and a sell-out, just as Bauer may have to answer for being a pawn of the corrupt Portsmouth powers-that-be, but Scott does not have to answer for his sex life any more than the ex-mayor does.

Legal Corruption

State investigators found nothing illegal in the city’s purchase of the Marting’s Building. That may be the case. Just because something is corrupt or unethical or unwise does not mean it’s illegal. The mayor may not have done anything illegal, but that does not mean he hasn’t facilitated the legal corruption that flourishes in Portsmouth. Because someone is un-indicted does not mean he is honest. Because someone is un-indicted does not mean he should not be recalled from office. Even in Portsmouth, we need to hold people who occupy public office to a higher standard than whether or not they are indictable.

Digital Revolution

Recent events in Portsmouth, Ohio, and the recall of the mayor in particular, may reflect the remarkable revolution that electronics has brought about in communication in general and politics in particular.

Several days before the recall vote, I was talking to a solid citizen, Bob Mollette, who was very active in the recall movement. He probably was in a better position than I was to say how the vote was likely to go, but he was curious about what others thought. I told him that I had interviewed a number of people for my video documentary on the recall, and my sense was that dissatisfaction with the mayor was both deep and widespread, as a PORTSMOUTH DAILY TIMES survey had recently indicated.

But the campaign to keep the mayor in office had spent a lot of money in the two weeks prior to the election, and the two local newspapers, the DAILY TIMES and the weekly COMMUNITY COMMON, as well as local radio stations, had carried paid advertisements focusing on the criminal records of several leaders of the recall movement. The COMMUNITY COMMON carried as an insert a flyer that was designed to look like a WANTED poster, with mug shots of the ex-convicts. It was an attempt to smear the widely-based recall movement by identifying it with criminality, in spite of the fact -- or perhaps because of the fact -- that the ex-convicts John Walton and Lee Scott had long since done their time and were now actively crusading against political corruption. The advertising blitz did not mention Austin Leedom, the founder and editor of THE SENTINEL, who is an Air Force veteran and a deeply religious person, nor did they say anything about the Mollettes, a very impressive couple. The blitz was a crude smear job, but I thought it might succeed. In addition, the local media though they did not use smear tactics, editorially advised readers and listeners to vote against the recall. I thought the editorials and the blitz could possibly turn the tide against the recall movement.

However, I added an important qualification. I told Bob Mollette that one of the most striking things I had noticed in talking to people was how many of them were electronically literate. Even if some of them were pretty shaky when it came to using the English language, they knew how to operate a computer and go on-line to read publications like THE SENTINEL and THE SCIOTO COUNTY NEWS and to participate in lively electronic discussions, like DANNY'S FORUM, and read blogs and see digitalized documentaries that cover controversial subjects from an unconventional point of view.

As recently as fifteen years ago, when I moved here, TV, radio and newspapers had enormous almost exclusive power to shape public opinion, especially in a company town like Portsmouth. The proliferation of technology and the internet especially has democratized -- the elite might say bastardized -- political discourse. Once confined to the Letters to the Editor section of the DAILY TIMES, if they were lucky, unempowered people in our river city can now criticize those in power as well as each other, sometimes bitterly, whenever they want to. The people of Portsmouth were communicating with each other during the recall movement not only the old-fashioned way -- by word of mouth -- but electronically and digitally. That is one of the reasons the smear campaign did not work. The people of Portsmouth were not letting the media do their thinking for them.

The privileged class of Portsmouth may have been confounded when their money not only could not keep the mayor in office, it could not stop him from being swept away by a 2 to 1 margin. The voters of Portsmouth had more faith in ex-convicts than some of the con-artists who control this city. Those in the recall movement utilized the new technology to achieve a stunning victory. The digitalized genie is out of the bottle. In Portsmouth, things may never never be the same.

Welcome to River Vices

Portsmouth, 1903. Floodwall Murals

I have started this blog (or online journal) to add my voice electronically to those that are protesting the political corruption in Portsmouth and Scioto County. In the weeks, months and hopefully years ahead, I will share some of my observations on and analyses of Portsmouth's "river vices."

I am an English professor at Shawnee State University (SSU), in Portsmouth, Ohio, a city of about 24,000 located in south central Ohio, on the Ohio River, where I have lived for the past fifteen years. I hold a B.A. and M.A. in English from Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. I have been very active in the Shawnee Education Association (SEA), the faculty union, which I served as president for four terms. I have also served as president of the Concerned Citizens Group and I have written for the Shawnee Sentinel, an alternative newspaper that was created by students at SSU, and which was instrumental in the recall of the mayor of Portsmouth from office on June 22, 2004, by a 2 to 1 margin. Until a few months ago,  I did not follow city politics closely. I had no opinion on the recall effort and knew very little about Portsmouth politics, but when I began making a documentary video  The Recall of Mayor Bauer (which is available at the Clark Memorial Library at Shawnee State and at the Portsmouth Public Library), I came to understand that the politics of Portsmouth were much like those at Shawnee State. The privileged class of the Portsmouth area tried to control the city the way the Board of Trustees (with a few notable exceptions) controls SSU: mainly for the benefit of the privileged classes. The mayor of Portsmouth and the city council, like the president of the university and the board of trustees, is expected to serve the interest of the privileged class of the area. Mayor Bauer and his chief assistant, a former student of mine, might have dissuaded me from forming this negative opinion, but they declined to be interviewed for the video.

I might not have begun this blog and definitely would not have named it River Vices if it were not for River Voices, the documentary created by my colleague Professor John Lorenz and his son Nathan. After watching River Voices, I felt strongly that in addition to hearing the voices of Portsmouth,  the people of Portsmouth needed to read also about the vices of Portsmouth, which are biblical in character. In beginning River Vices, I had in mind the magazine column "The Prophet," which Theodore Dreiser, author of An American Tragedy,  had written very early in his career, when he adopted the voice of the prophets of the Old Testament, denouncing the corruption of the privileged classes and the neglect of the slum dwellers in cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. Later in his career, however, Dreiser tried to repress his identification  with the poor and with failures,  and identify instead with the rich and powerful, with the unscrupulous and the  successful in the person of the Robber Baron Charles Tyson Yerkes. I dealt with Dreiser's conflicting values in my Yale dissertation, "The Flesh and the Spirit" (1971). Though not a believer myself, I have adopted the prophetic voice in River Vices. 

                                                                                                                   Robert Forrey