Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Bully For Us - 5/31/07

His message to the Michigan legislature was clear and to the point.  Don’t promise more than you can deliver. Don’t be too swayed by the rich and powerful, or too sentimental about the downtrodden.

Don’t sell out to the reactionary right, or be misled by what he called “those foolish conservatives, foolish reactionaries who fail to see that we are the real conservatives,” when we try to get abuses under control.  He knew what he was talking about; he had been a state legislator himself. But he also warned against fuzzy-headed liberals who have a “vague, general desire to reform everything.”

That’s what President Teddy Roosevelt told the Michigan Legislature a century ago today, and they loved it.  He was a Republican – and back then, nearly everyone else was too.

There were only five Democrats in the entire legislature. But Michigan’s love for Teddy went beyond party ties. Running for President three years earlier, he had gotten seventy percent of Michigan’s vote. Five years later, he would run again, on his Bull Moose ticket.

He won only six states then, but one of them was, indeed Michigan. The Michigan Teddy Roosevelt visited in 1907 was sort of an embryonic version of what it was about to become.

Though still mainly a farm state, it was rapidly becoming the automotive capital of the world. The man at the center of the industry, one Henry Ford, was probably too busy working out the bugs in his Model T to notice the President’s visit.

Detroit police were grappling with a newfangled problem, an epidemic of auto accidents that would kill – are you ready for this – seven people that year. Panicked police set a speed limit of eight miles an hour, but people kept going faster.

Michigan had about one-quarter the population it does today, and on that very day, the Detroit Tigers beat Cleveland on the way to winning that year’s American League pennant.

We were in transition then. The Civil War was only about as distant in time as the Vietnam War is from now. Some people had too much money, and wanted to prevent others from getting more.

Breaking up what he saw as unfair monopolies and trusts were the hallmark of what Teddy Roosevelt spent his presidency trying to do.

Yet what would he think if he were around today?  Historians know that trying to guess what people in the past might have thought about present-day problems is futile. But it’s always fun to guess.

My guess is that Theodore Roosevelt would be a lot like a John McCain with a more progressive social policy. The party bosses never liked or trusted either man; they saw them as mavericks, loose cannons.

Teddy probably would have supported the Iraq war; he believed in a muscular and, frankly, imperialistic foreign policy.

But it is difficult to imagine him cozying up to Halliburton.  The only thing we know for sure is that he would be happy and astonished, perhaps, that Michigan is remembering him today.

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Interview: Cameron Brown - 5/31/07

Presidents didn’t travel much a century ago. Air travel wasn’t an option and good roads were scarce. But a hundred years ago today, President Teddy Roosevelt showed up in Lansing. He gave the commencement speech at what is now Michigan State. And he addressed the Michigan Legislature. Today, his speech to the legislature was reenacted. State Senator Cameron Brown got the ball rolling. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Taxing - 5/30/07

Republicans have a good point when they say that anyone calling for a tax increase needs to show exactly what the money would be used for, and justify taking it from the taxpayers.

That’s sound public policy. Those who raised taxes in the past should have been called to account more closely when times were good. However, anyone suggesting we don’t now protect Michigan’s greatest assets should have to justify that as well.

The state does have important and essential functions to maintain. And if our lawmakers are unwilling to provide the money to keep them going, they need to tell us openly, honestly, and directly what the think we would be better off living without.

Do they honestly believe it would be worth a hundred dollars in the pocket of every family to seriously downgrade the quality of higher education in this state? Do they think it makes sense to make Michigan a state where only the children of the upper middle class can afford to go to college? Do they think the state should abolish foster care and forget about protecting the environment?

If so, they should honestly tell us so.

We have had tax cut after tax cut for the last two decades. Those who really know about state government will tell you that all the so-called fat is gone. All the emergency and rainy day funds are gone. We’re even selling off money we are supposed to get in the future. Your elected leaders are behaving like poor people who get high-interest “payday” loans from unscrupulous loan sharks.

To balance the budget this year, we raided special funds that are supposed to do things like fix leaky petroleum tanks buried in the ground. That, according to the Michigan Environmental Council, will cause more pollutants reaching our drinking water, and eventually affect the Great Lakes. We again slashed at the institutions that are trying to get Michigan a future, our colleges and universities.

Tuition is going to go up and some research programs are going to be put in jeopardy. We did this so that twenty-one Republicans in the state senate can tell the Michigan Chamber of Commerce that they kept taxes low, regardless of the cost.

Well, we could save the state even more money, at least in the short run, if we eliminated revenue sharing with Rochester, the town where Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop lives. We’d save a little more if we cut out state police protection for his town.

I did not hear him suggest that. He, by the way, got a fine education at the University of Michigan, one heavily subsidized by the taxpayers. I didn’t hear him volunteer to pay the state back.

Taxes are what feed our common interests. Yes, they can be too high. But if we aren’t willing to pay for the basic needs of civilization, the long-term costs are going to make the taxes we fear now look very, very cheap in the long run.

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Interview: Mike Bishop - 5/30/07

Last week, the Michigan Legislature suddenly announced that they had solved the state’s $800 million deficit problem. But the lawmakers came under heavy criticism for the way they balanced the books. And many said there was no way next year’s budget could be balanced without a tax increase. Republican Mike Bishop is state senate majority leader. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry reached him on his cell phone as he was on his way to this morning’s legislative session.

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Essay: Shame - 5/29/07

There’s a word for the way in which our lawmakers “balanced” the budget last weekend, and that word is disgraceful.

Utterly, totally and shamelessly disgraceful. Desperate to get out of town for the Memorial Day weekend, the legislature threw together something Friday night that continues our five-year tradition of avoiding responsibility, borrowing from the future, and putting off solving our problems until tomorrow, when they are sure to be worse.

They looted special funds they weren’t supposed to touch.

They lost money long-term by selling off tobacco settlement proceeds Michigan was supposed to get in the future, and, of course, cut higher education again. When your tuition, or your children’s tuition goes up this fall, thank your legislator.

“They dodged a bullet, and now they face a Gatling gun,” said Craig Ruff of Public Sector Consultants. But Kalamazoo County’s Don Gilmer may have said it best. Gilmer knows a lot about budgets; he was chair of the House Appropriations Committee for years.

He told the Detroit News that all our lawmakers had done was pile more deficit onto next year’s budget. He seemed almost stunned at the stupidity of this so-called solution. “They aren’t going to resolve this thing by further adding to the structural deficit.”

“And it absolutely defies logic that they are disinvesting in higher education at a time when we know that high-tech, knowledge-based jobs are our future.” Gilmer, by the way is not a wild-eyed New Deal spendthrift. He is a Republican and a conservative.

But he knows that you get what you pay for, that two plus two make four, and that chickens come home to roost. Those simple facts were evidently lost on those who approved this budget.

Yet however poorly the legislature performed last week, the most astonishing performance was that of Governor Jennifer Granholm, who after weeks of agonizing over the deficit, was nowhere to be found when the deal to balance the books was complete.

I understand why the governor vanished. What happened must be totally humiliating. What it says to all of us is that she has failed to lead, despite having won re-election by a landslide last fall.

Three months ago, knowing an immense deficit was looming, she timidly proposed, or rather, had her budget director propose, a small sales tax on services. The legislature, even the Democrats, treated that with contempt. Three years ago, her administration issued a report that said Michigan’s future depends on higher education. She enthusiastically agreed -- and has throughout her tenure cut funds for higher ed again and again.

This time, there wasn’t even a peep of protest.

The governor does have a lot of charisma. Nearly as much as another politician born ninety years ago today. His name was John F. Kennedy, and as a senator he won the Pulitzer Prize for a book called Profiles in Courage. We have a lot of politicians in Michigan today obsessed with protecting their profiles.

We desperately need a few with vision, and a little courage,

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Interview: Chris Christoff - 5/29/07

Some thought the Michigan Legislature might remain in session throughout the holiday weekend. But we woke up Saturday to find our lawmakers had apparently balanced the budget. But how did they do that, and what does it mean? Chris Christoff is Lansing bureau chief of the Detroit Free Press. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Women in Combat - 5/28/07

I am a little out of my element here, since I am obviously not a woman, and I have never served in the military. That’s partly due to the chromosome lottery and partly due to getting a good draft number.

However, I do know something about history. There are many, many examples of women who have behaved as valiantly and fiercely in combat as men, going back to the Celtic Queen Boadicea of England, who nearly drove the Romans out of Britain two thousand years ago.

During World War II, Berlin was repeatedly bombed by battalions of Soviet night bombers with women pilots. Today nations including Canada and Germany officially allow women to fight in combat roles.

Which brings us back to the major question: Ought women to officially serve in combat roles in the United States armed services?

On this, I don’t see how anyone can have any doubt whatsoever. Yes, they should. Absolutely they should serve in combat roles.  If women are fully equal with men, if they have an equal right and ability to serve in the United States Senate or as the head of Hewlett Packard or  run for president, they should have the right to kill for their country.

That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I am a bloodthirsty militarist. I think most of our nation’s recent wars have been mistakes, and I think the present conflict in Iraq is a military and geo-political disaster.

However, if men can take part in battle, women should be allowed the same privilege. All of the arguments I have heard against this sound terribly sexist to me. Yes, women have somewhat different biology. But the same biology was shared by the women partisans who helped liberate Nazi-occupied Europe. Some men have more upper body strength than women, true. But some women are just as strong.

And in any event, very little of modern combat involves picking up large rocks, or even unarmed wrestling matches.

I think the resistance to having women in combat has nothing to do with women at all, but with men. That is, with some men’s sentimental and romanticized view of both women and war. Many of us spend our lives avoiding reality.  We don’t like thinking of our wives and daughters and girlfriends as killers, or of them stopping a bullet or having their legs blown off by an improvised explosive device.  But if we are all in this together, as equals, we should all be in this together. General William Tecumseh Sherman understood this very well. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,’” he said.

His theory was that the more society was forced to confront how ugly war was, the faster society would force an end to the war.

Hopefully, confronting reality might even make all of us of every sex less likely to start another war. That might be the best argument in favor of sending women into combat there is.      

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Interview: Regina Greenwood - 5/28/07

Though many Americans don’t realize it, female soldiers aren’t technically allowed to serve in combat. However, they are sometimes drawn into action anyway. Kettering University Professor Regina Greenwood has just co-authored a major study looking at how men and women think about the roles women should play in the military. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her.

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Essay: Masquerade - 5/24/07

I wasn’t surprised by the revelation that an enormously talented liar was head of security for one of Michigan’s nuclear plants.

We are a nation of tale-tellers.  After all, we learned earlier this very spring that the dean of admissions at MIT, one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, had made up her credentials, didn’t even have a college degree, and had fooled everyone for thirty-some years. What nobody much wants to talk about is that she apparently did a good job, and Zeke Clark, for all his invented personal history, also did well at the Palisades plant.  That is, at least as far as we know.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about our history. Since roughly 1620, America has been a place you came to when you wanted to start life over. That’s precisely what people have been doing ever since. Thousands of them came here and conveniently forgot bad debts or outstanding warrants or sometimes even the wife and kids they left back in Manchester or Moravia. Thousands of native-born Americans have run into some kind of trouble, and lit out from New York to California, or Michigan to Oregon.  Millions of others, faced with a hungry family and the need for a job, have fudged their credentials a bit.

What’s different now is that it is far easier, thanks to modern technology and transportation, to check up on people. What’s interesting is that so many employers never bother to do so. Nor do the rest of us.  Three years ago, much of the nation was horrified by the case of a fake doctor who had no medical training, but who did perverted operations.

In one case, he used a cooking spatula to insert breast implants into the chest of a man who wanted firmer muscles.

The phony doctor eventually fled to Belize, where he not only continued to butcher people, but got a job as a professor of medicine. At least, that is, until he was sent back to the States for trial.

How in the world did he fool his patients?  Well, how do you know your doctor is really a doctor?  I mean, yes, she has diplomas on the wall, but you can buy those on the Internet or make them.

The problem is that we want to believe. For decades, until DNA testing, a bizarre woman named Anna Anderson had half the world believing she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia.

The real Anastasia was murdered by the Bolsheviks with her father, the last Czar of Russia, in 1918.  But so strong was the desire to believe that the famous princess had survived, that Anna even persuaded some members of the Romanoff family… despite not knowing a word of Russian.

My guess is that there are a lot more imposters out there. And by the way, if I have convinced you I am the real Jack Lessenberry… you have only yourselves to blame.

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Interview: Tom Junod - 5/25/07

What if a compulsive liar who claimed to have been a paid assassin were to become head of security at a nuclear plant in Michigan? Well, it happened. Until he resigned two weeks ago, William Clark was head of security at the Palisades Nuclear Plant, which is north of Benton Harbor. Esquire writer-at-large Tom Junod profiled him in the June issue. The article is called, “Mercenary.”   Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Junod.

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