What's in Dave's Head

Events over the past 30 days – and reactions to them – have cast a light on simmering tensions over attitudes toward race and gender. On June 16, announcing his presidential bid, real-estate developer and TV celebrity Donald Trump criticized Mexico and immigrants who come to the U.S. illegally. "They're bringing drugs," he said. "They're bringing crime. They're rapists." On June 18, a gunman – allegedly one Dylan Roof – shot and killed nine black church members, including a state senator, at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina. On June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling overturned state bans on gay marriage . And on July 8, a federal judge ruled to cancel the Washington Redskins’ trademark registration, stating the name denigrates Native Americans. The high court’s decision legitimizing intra-gender marriage (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas dissented) is, in my view, similar to the over...

Donna and I took off for the weekend, to one of my favorite places, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, known as The Land of Pleasant Living. From our home in Columbia, you cross three bridges along the way— the Severn River Bridge,   the 4.5-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and finally the Kent Narrows Bridge, after which you are officially on the Eastern Shore. Each takes you further back in time, to a slower, less crowded, quieter place. It’s not the horse-and-buggy lifestyle of the Amish in Pennsylvania, but it’s certainly more serene than life in the midst of the Baltimore-Washington corridor. You are among farms that date to the 1600s and 1700s, flat horizons broken by lone, wood-frame houses and the occasional tree line. There are reminders of civilization: a cell tower here, a grain elevator there, and, increasingly, encroaching housing developments. When you go, pay attention to the names. The towns: Sudlersville, Galena, Snow Hill. The narrow strips of land between the scads of...

As we approach St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d do a little digging into the making of saints. Legend has it that St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was the first to explain the holy trinity with a shamrock, and that he drove the snakes from Ireland.   In fact, he was not born in Ireland. He was probably born in Wales or Britain. He was kidnapped by pirates as a boy and sold into slavery in Ireland. He escaped after about six years, and fled to France, where he joined a monastery and studied religion for years before returning to Ireland, where he converted many Pagans to Christianity. A link to an interesting website about St. Patrick is here . The making of saints According to Wikipedia, today there are 810 canonized Roman Catholic saints, from Abadiu of Antinoe to Zygmunt Gorazdowski. The road to sainthood begins with the   Congregation for the Causes of Saints ,   an administrative body of the Church that oversees the process that leads first...

Recent incidents in the NBA and NFL highlight good and not-so-good approaches to changing toxic organizational cultures. The National Basketball Association and the National Football League both encountered situations that exposed institutional cultures that threaten the integrity of their respective brands.  In each case, there are lessons to be learned about how to protect a brand and shift an organization’s culture. Adam Silver In the NBA, revelations about two owners turned attention to racist attitudes of those at the highest levels of the industry, and to the perception of bigotry in a game dominated by white owners and black players.   Bruce Levenson ( John Bazemore, AP) Less than a year after Donald Sterling was forced by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to sell his interest in the Los Angeles Clippers and banned for life from the NBA after remarks he made to, and recorded by, his daughter, an inflammatory email written by Atlanta Hawks principal ...

Donna and I go to Washington every spring to see the cherry blossoms that ring the Tidal Basin.  It’s a rite of spring and, like the start of baseball season, signals the end of winter.   This year, after the winter we had, saying hello to spring was especially welcome.  I don’t think this past winter set any records, but standard-setting or not, it was awful.  Way too much snow, way too many frigid days, and way too long.  We had three big snows just in March—one on the 3rd, another on St. Patrick’s Day and the final indignity on the 26 th .    I know, I know, cry me a river. Today was the first 70-degree day we’ve had, and sunny with an azure-blue sky.  We decided to drive and made the trek and found a parking space (sort of legal, I’ll leave it at that) not far from the Jefferson Memorial in about an hour.  The TV news people had been telling everyone in the Washington viewing area that today would be the best day to come, an...

I remember in elementary school we used to have air-raid drills, like fire drills.  When the siren went off we would put our heads under our desks or be walked down to the school’s basement and wait for it to be over.  Both very effective plans, I’m sure, if the Rooskies came a-knockin’ with their 50-megaton friends.  The Cold War was a pretty tense time in our nation’s history.    The media lately have been recalling a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin from several years ago: “The breakup of the Soviet Union [in 1991] was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20 th century.”   Putin seems to be trying to put the Soviet Union back together.    In 2008, a couple years after Putin made that statement, Russia invaded Georgia, pushing ethnic Georgians out of about 25% of that country and creating two “independent” states—South Ossetia and Abkazia—recognized by a handful of Russian allies.   Now, with Russia ...

I’m kind of a book junkie.  I’ve read some really good ones over the past year.    Last week I finished one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve ever read, The Guns At Last Light by Rick Atkinson.   It’s the final book in his Liberation Trilogy about the Second World War’s Europe theatre.  (Spoiler alert: we won.)  The book is magnificent in how it brings to life the horror and humanity of war.  The writing is almost poetic, similar to one of my favorite novels, All the King’s Men , by Robert Penn Warren . I haven’t read the first two books in the Liberation Trilogy but my parents-in-law just gave them to me.  I start on them today.  Atkinson really pisses me off.  He’s a great writer.  He has a string of honors and awards, including two Pulitzers, one for investigative journalism and the other for the first book of the Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn .  As a reporter for the Washington Post he’s been on the fro...