The limits of the "forgetful" defense

Being a graduate of a journalism program who has also toiled on the outskirts of the journalism profession lo these many years, I find the whole Judy Miller/Valerie Plame hubbub of some interest. And having seen my own memory (which was never of the steel trap variety) become less reliable in recent years, I can appreciate that people of a certain age may indeed forget details of relatively recent events. However, the latest "Oops, I plumb forgot" from Miller boggles. As Arianna Huffington so aptly put it:

"When the Plame case broke open in July 2003, these notes were presumably no more than a few weeks old. But who had revealed Plame’s name was not seared on Miller's mind?
This is as believable as Woodward and Bernstein not recalling who Deep Throat was. It also means that Judy went to jail to protect a source she can't recall."

Which leads me to wonder just how dumb do Miller and others think we are.

Sadly, considering the non-reaction to all of this, they've guessed about right.

Sheesh!

Ran across some disturbing graffiti at Dog Heaven yesterday, written in magic marker on a log that serves as a seat next to the Mill River. To wit: "Yuppie scum, increasing homelessness since 1980."

WTF?

Ah, well. If only Northampton had remained a sleepy little factory town, with no pesky culture or commerce or diversity to befoul the Eden that it once was. And if only those factories hadn't closed, leaving the town in even more dire straights.

For a friend of mine who attended Smith in the late '50s/early '60s told me that Northampton was a bit of a dump back then, certainly not a candidate for the best small arts town in America as it is now.

I could understand the antagonism if the "yuppie scum" had closed all the factories, or razed all the buildings and put up hideous modern cubes in their place (that's Smith College's job), or somehow cheated the existing residents out of their homes for rock-bottom prices, but that's not the case. And that these same people who bemoan the "Scum" invading their towns sell their homes willingly to the "Scum" and do their shopping in places that ensure more American jobs go overseas, well, the enemy is alive and well and looking at us in our mirrors, as always.

Let's focus on the here and now, people, not some bygone era that is gone, if indeed it ever existed.

Speaking of the here and now, I've seen a sign against the Community Preservation Act (CPA) and a sign for the CPA. Both signs were handmade, but the pro-CPA sign carried the day, IMHO. It said, simply: "No to sprawl, Yes to CPA." Of course, there's more to it than that, but it certainly isn't "yet another baseless tax," as I've seen it described around town and in the papers.

With all the taxes we pay for insanity (the war in Iraq, for one major example), wouldn't it be nice to have a tax that actually served us as a community?

Yeah, I know. Color me naive....