Kern High School District trustee Ken Mettler believes in civic education. We know this because in 2007 he enthusiastically endorsed the creation and classroom placement of 3,000 “In God We Trust” posters declaring that “Civic Education is Fundamental.”
As valuable as those posters might be in impressing American values on the hearts and minds of Kern County students, they pale in effectiveness next to Mettler’s own vivid example.
His lesson for the kids: Our electoral process still works fine after all these years, but a little lubrication sometimes comes in handy.
Mettler, who is running for Jean Fuller’s soon-to-be-vacant 32nd Assembly District seat, has oiled things up by throwing a straw candidate into the proceedings. Faced with an opponent, Shannon Grove, from the formidable camp of political consultant Mark Abernathy, Team Mettler “invited” another Shannon — Shannon Holloway — to run against him too. Mettler’s ally and fellow trustee, The Rev. Chad Vegas, helped secure the signatures needed to qualify her candidacy. Doppleshannon would split the “Shannon” vote and lift the crafty school board trustee to victory. “It’s a political strategy,” Holloway confessed to radio host Ralph Bailey last week. The assumption behind the strategy, of course, is that voters are as malleable as sheep. Which may be correct.
In addition to demonstrating to government students across the San Joaquin Valley the depths to which some candidates will sink, Mettler, consultant Tracy Leach and their associates have struck a blow for bored campaign advisers everywhere. Politics need not be so gosh-darn serious all the time! Underhandedness adds an entertaining dimension to the enterprise that folding brochures and knocking on doors could never offer.
Of course, there’s downside to all of this for Mettler, who has always tried to position himself as the voice of the moral majority. He might come across as just another politician willing to check his honor at the door of the campaign office.
Fact is, he has shown dubious judgement before. Remember the street-corner scuffle with the No-on-Prop. 8 protester who had obtained and defaced a Yes-on-8 sign? You’d think a fiftysomething school board member would have the sense to walk away from a 21-year-old knucklehead, but instead Mettler took a swing — and was spared a juicy YouTube moment only because the camera angle wasn’t up to optimal production standards.
And you might recall the dust-up over the 2002 Rosedale Union School Board race, when incumbent trustee Mettler was charged with vandalizing an opponent’s sign by covering portions of it with white paper. The case went to trial, but the judge dismissed the charges, saying the alleged actions didn’t meet the definition of graffiti under the penal code section that Mettler was charged with.
Now, with this ham-handed attempt to confuse voters, Mettler has succeeded in the previously thought-to-be-impossible task of making the Abernathy team look like the aggrieved party.
No small chore, that. The folks from Abernathy’s Western Pacific Research have seen every trick in the book, and may have written a few.
The Abernathy crowd isn’t so clumsy they’d spell it all out in e-mails, but their footprints are at a few crime scenes. Consider the role played by candidate Phil Wyman in the 2006 GOP primary for this same 32nd Assembly District seat. When the votes were counted, it was clear that Wyman had successfully split the anti-Jean Fuller vote (i.e., the anti-Abernathy vote), resulting in Fuller’s election and the defeat of well-funded businessman Stan Ellis, a level-headed guy whose heart seemed to be in the right place. Did Abernathy recruit Wyman to enter the race? There’s no telling, but after the election, Fuller and Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a longtime Abernathy client, officially sponsored a fundraiser to pay off Wyman’s campaign debt.
There’s got to be a temptation among people who run campaigns for a living to run with the big boys and engage in a little political larceny. Campaign intrigue gets the heart beating faster. Stamping envelopes is boring. Finding ways to exploit the quirks and vulnerabilities of the multiple-candidate ballot has got to be downright fascinating.
But there’s an ethical line there somewhere that separates gamesmanship from fraud, and if Mettler, et al., didn’t cross it, they stepped on it.
Shannon Holloway dropped out of the race Friday (her name will still appear on the ballot), but her place in the annals of Kern County political shenanigans is assured. She can thank Ken Mettler for that — as can high school government teachers across the county. Lessons so rarely write themselves before our eyes.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
Two-thousand ten vs twenty-ten
I’ve often thought it would be fun, if I weren’t so dignified and respectable, to climb into an aluminum-foil jumpsuit and re-create a scene from a certain sci-fi movie that persists in my memory:
The disoriented time traveler finds himself on a barren desert road. He walks into a lonely, one-pump gas station and asks the grizzled old proprietor, “What year is it?” And without batting an eye, the old man answers, “Why, it’s 1948!” — as if he got that particular question as often as “Is this the road to Pearsonville?”
Last week, minus the silver jumpsuit, I got to ask that same question. And not because I’d just emerged from a time-space vortex — I simply don’t know how I’m supposed to say “2010.” Now that we’re several days into the new year, we ought to have developed some sort of consensus. But what is it? So I started asking: “What year is it?”
The two options would seem to be “two-thousand ten,” in keeping with the habit of the past 10 years (“two-thousand [and] nine,” “two- thousand [and] eight,” etc.), or “twenty-ten,” in keeping with the habit of the thousand years or so before that (“ten sixty-six,” “fourteen-ninety-two,” “seventeen-seventy-six,” etc.)
Liz Rodriguez was trying to pay for her car wash when I cornered her with the big question. “It’s twenty-ten,” she said. “Two-thousand-ten takes longer to say. My name is Elizabeth but I call myself Liz. Same reason.”
Gilbert Espinoza, the car wash customer service manager, observed with flawless logic that because last year was two-thousand-nine, this had to be two-thousand-ten.
Vanessa Guitierrez, working behind the cash register, observed that because brevity usually wins the day, this has to be twenty-ten. “Nobody said two-thousand-nine. It was oh-nine, oh-eight, oh-seven. Same deal.”
Yvonne Copeland received divine guidance on the issue. It was spelled out right on the front of last Sunday’s church program at Calvary Bible: “How to win in twenty-ten.” The shorthand answer, in case the Rev. Ted Duncan accuses you of napping through the sermon: Immerse yourself in God’s word.
Mae Leslie Strelich started the new year one way and then changed course. “I’ve actually discussed this with my 19-year-old son. He said, ‘Mom, it’s twenty-ten.’ So I guess I must have started off saying ‘two-thousand-ten.’”
It’s good to know the preferences of younger folk. This is their decade, their century, their millennium, not ours. So this matter is settled — or will be, as soon as I walk over to this teenage girl to get linguistic confirmation. Oops.
“Two-thousand-ten,” declared Brooklyn Lowe, a high school sophomore. “Twenty-ten makes thirty!”
“Yeah, two-thousand-ten rolls off the tongue,” said her mother, Wandra Lowe. “No doubt there.”
Well, there’s plenty of doubt. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick gave us “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the titular year was pronounced “two-thousand-one.” But in 1969, the singing duo Zager and Evans warned us, “In the year twenty-five, twenty-five, if man is still alive ...” Pop culture isn’t particularly helpful here.
In fact, contradictory information is everywhere. One of county government’s most important planning documents is the 2010 General Plan, and everyone seems to pronounce it “twenty-ten.” The Winter Olympics begin Feb. 12 and the organizing committee is already referring to the big event as “Vancouver twenty-ten.”
But car makers, with a few exceptions, are talking up their “two-thousand-ten” models. That’s the auditory version supported by David Crystal, the author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. However, he notes, 2011 will be "twenty eleven." Go figure.
Then there’s the influence of Spanish, which can’t help but bleed a little into ordinary, daily English. KKEY-TV anchor-reporter Jaqueline Hurtado says she has heard it only one way: “Dos-mil-diez — two-thousand ten. You don’t hear people say, ‘viente diez.’” But perhaps she doesn’t go to the same car wash I do.
These are not idle questions. The answers, I think, speak to our comfort with linguistic tradition, whether we place more value on logic or convention, and whether logic and convention even apply to year-naming.
My final tally was 15 to 7 for “twenty ten” (with two inexplicable votes for “oh-ten”), but I am less convinced than when I started. I may have to ask again next week. Maybe I’ll try the foil jumpsuit.
rprice@bakersfield.com
The disoriented time traveler finds himself on a barren desert road. He walks into a lonely, one-pump gas station and asks the grizzled old proprietor, “What year is it?” And without batting an eye, the old man answers, “Why, it’s 1948!” — as if he got that particular question as often as “Is this the road to Pearsonville?”
Last week, minus the silver jumpsuit, I got to ask that same question. And not because I’d just emerged from a time-space vortex — I simply don’t know how I’m supposed to say “2010.” Now that we’re several days into the new year, we ought to have developed some sort of consensus. But what is it? So I started asking: “What year is it?”
The two options would seem to be “two-thousand ten,” in keeping with the habit of the past 10 years (“two-thousand [and] nine,” “two- thousand [and] eight,” etc.), or “twenty-ten,” in keeping with the habit of the thousand years or so before that (“ten sixty-six,” “fourteen-ninety-two,” “seventeen-seventy-six,” etc.)
Liz Rodriguez was trying to pay for her car wash when I cornered her with the big question. “It’s twenty-ten,” she said. “Two-thousand-ten takes longer to say. My name is Elizabeth but I call myself Liz. Same reason.”
Gilbert Espinoza, the car wash customer service manager, observed with flawless logic that because last year was two-thousand-nine, this had to be two-thousand-ten.
Vanessa Guitierrez, working behind the cash register, observed that because brevity usually wins the day, this has to be twenty-ten. “Nobody said two-thousand-nine. It was oh-nine, oh-eight, oh-seven. Same deal.”
Yvonne Copeland received divine guidance on the issue. It was spelled out right on the front of last Sunday’s church program at Calvary Bible: “How to win in twenty-ten.” The shorthand answer, in case the Rev. Ted Duncan accuses you of napping through the sermon: Immerse yourself in God’s word.
Mae Leslie Strelich started the new year one way and then changed course. “I’ve actually discussed this with my 19-year-old son. He said, ‘Mom, it’s twenty-ten.’ So I guess I must have started off saying ‘two-thousand-ten.’”
It’s good to know the preferences of younger folk. This is their decade, their century, their millennium, not ours. So this matter is settled — or will be, as soon as I walk over to this teenage girl to get linguistic confirmation. Oops.
“Two-thousand-ten,” declared Brooklyn Lowe, a high school sophomore. “Twenty-ten makes thirty!”
“Yeah, two-thousand-ten rolls off the tongue,” said her mother, Wandra Lowe. “No doubt there.”
Well, there’s plenty of doubt. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick gave us “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the titular year was pronounced “two-thousand-one.” But in 1969, the singing duo Zager and Evans warned us, “In the year twenty-five, twenty-five, if man is still alive ...” Pop culture isn’t particularly helpful here.
In fact, contradictory information is everywhere. One of county government’s most important planning documents is the 2010 General Plan, and everyone seems to pronounce it “twenty-ten.” The Winter Olympics begin Feb. 12 and the organizing committee is already referring to the big event as “Vancouver twenty-ten.”
But car makers, with a few exceptions, are talking up their “two-thousand-ten” models. That’s the auditory version supported by David Crystal, the author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. However, he notes, 2011 will be "twenty eleven." Go figure.
Then there’s the influence of Spanish, which can’t help but bleed a little into ordinary, daily English. KKEY-TV anchor-reporter Jaqueline Hurtado says she has heard it only one way: “Dos-mil-diez — two-thousand ten. You don’t hear people say, ‘viente diez.’” But perhaps she doesn’t go to the same car wash I do.
These are not idle questions. The answers, I think, speak to our comfort with linguistic tradition, whether we place more value on logic or convention, and whether logic and convention even apply to year-naming.
My final tally was 15 to 7 for “twenty ten” (with two inexplicable votes for “oh-ten”), but I am less convinced than when I started. I may have to ask again next week. Maybe I’ll try the foil jumpsuit.
rprice@bakersfield.com
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