First came “Squeezy the Pension Python,” Gov. Pat Quinn’s effort to draw attention to the severity of the problem of underfunded retirement obligations to public employees.
Squeezy, introduced at a Nov. 18 news conference, was mocked for being juvenile and criticized (here and elsewhere) for conveying a vague and imprecise message
Then came Drowsy the Pension Videos — my nickname for the pair of pedagogical YouTube offerings generated at Quinn’s request by Internet education pioneer Salman Khan and released last week.as part of the second phase of Quinn’s public awareness campaign.
Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, an institution that has generated some 3,600 teaching videos noted for their clarity and spare, blackboard-only presentation style. His talent for explaining complicated matters in an understandable, straightforward fashion is legendary.
But there’s only so much any man can do to make this topic come alive: “Talking about pensions isn’t always viewed as the most interesting thing to do,” begins “Pension Obligations,” the 10-minute first installment.
Yes? Go on.
Khan delivers important information conversationally and without patronizing gimmicks. But if you’re still awake at the end of the 7 1/2-minute second video, you will do a spit-take at the surprise ending (spoiler alert!):
“Fairly hard decisions are going to have to be made,” Khan says, after showing how pension obligations are siphoning funds from critical prorams. “Decisions on cutting, necessary investment or restructuring. Or who knows what it might be. I don’t envy the people who have to make these decisions.”
It’s a shrug, not a call to action.
“There has to be a precise `ask'” for a social media campaign to be effective, said University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy adjunct professor Ronald Gibbs when the subject of Squeezy came up during his visit to the Tribune Thursday. “You can’t just define a problem. You have to tell people what you want them to do.”
This spot-on observation put me in mind of the Occupy movement, which was excellent at generating attention and energy, lousy at putting it to use.
Once we’ve laughed at Squeezy and determinedly stayed awake through Drowsy, what, aside from not envying those tasked with fixing these problems, are we supposed to do?
“Let the Springfield politicians know that you get it and it can’t wait!” says the campaign’s website, thisismyillinois.com.
In responding last weekend to my column item critiquing this new campaign for not laying out a deeper action agenda, Quinn’s spokeswoman Brooke Anderson fired off a note saying “We did that in April when we laid out a very specific pension reform plan that would eliminate the unfunded liability and fully fund the system by 2042.”
Indeed they did.
I’d forgotten the details, they’ve been so quiet about it, but in fairness, yes.
But now it’s time to unveil a character in this drama, Crafty the Pension Fixer — a Bob-the-Builder type wearing a toolbelt stuffed with proposals and a hard hat to protect him against the rocks that will inevitably be hurled his way.
The salad summit
If nothing else, the visuals were pleasant Thursday when President Barack Obama had his former Republican challenger Mitt Romney to the White House for a private lunch that included turkey chili and grilled chicken salad.
These post-campaign meetings have become a tradition in recent decades, signaling the many values and goals that even the bitterest U.S. poltiical rivals have in common. But watching it unfold caused me to think it would be an even better idea for presidential candidates to break bread off the record and behind closed doors once a month during the campaign.
Such meals, even if consumed in frosty silence, would illustrate the baseline civility and restraint with which we all ought to conduct ourselves when things get heated and nasty. They might encourage all of us to tone it down a bit.
Another chance for ‘heterosexism’?
A recent update to the Associated Press stylebook recommends against use of the word “homophobia” to describe strong opposition to equal rights for gay people.
A phobia is “an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness,” noted the editors. And, as I argued four years ago, it’s beyond patronizing — to the point of unfairly argumentative — to classify someone’s viewpoint on a social issue as some sort of pathology.
I therefore retracted my previous casual uses of “homophobia” and “homophobic,” apologized and vowed to eliminate them from my active vocabulary.
Gay-rights historian Nathaniel Frank took the opposite view in an essay published in Slate last week. He wrote that the claims of anti-gay activists “that LGBT equality will undermine the health of the country by weakening its values, bedrocks, and defenses” are pure expressions of irrational fears. Therefore it’s accurate to lump in the haters with others who suffer from irrational fears.
Perhaps, though University of California at Davis social psychologist Gregory M. Herek, who has studied anti-gay predjudice, has written that “many heterosexuals who express hostility toward gay men and lesbians do not manifest the physiological reactions to homosexuality that are associated with other phobias,” and that, far from being socially crippling, such hostility “is often highly functional” for straight people.
In either case, even if the diagnosis is accurate, it strikes me that you’re much more likely to change an opponent’s mind by arguing that he’s wrong rather than arguing that he’s sick. And that the AP is right to recognize “homophobia” as a loaded term, at best.
“Heterosexism,” the far more neutral term that I championed in 2008, has yet to catch on, even though it fairly and rather neutrally describes the practice of denigrating non-heterosexual relationships and behavior.
This, however, may be its moment.
Mmmmmmm…buttery messes
This is going to be a hot, buttery mess…. Chicago Teacher’s Union President Karen Lewis on the then-upcoming union negotiations, April, 2011
The school-closing piece is a hot buttery mess…. Karen Lewis Oct, 2012
This is going to be a mess — a hot, buttery mess…..Karen Lewis, Wednesday on the looming battle over school closings.
