Otterblog

Some quick thoughts for a Thursday:

1) Words matter. The title for yesterday’s hearing on immigration was “Gangs, Fraud and Sexual Predators: Struggling with the Consequences of Illegal Immigration.” Not hard to figure out where this group of elected officials is coming from. Complex problem. And despite what people say, complex problems demand complex solutions.

2) Politics matter. It’s hard not to look at the picture of Erskine Bowles on our front page at his installation as president of the UNC system without thinking that for much of the last five years he spent a great deal of time wanting to do another job. i.e. be a U.S. Senator. My guess is that he will do better with the politics of the state education bureaucracy than he did with voters. It’s a different constituency, and one that plays to his strengths.

3) At the end of the day, it’s the votes that matter. Bowles and U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, who brought the immigration hearing to W-S, know that. So does Bucky Covington, who was voted off the American Idol island last night. Long hair and a nice smile can take you pretty far, but not to the finish line.

Community takes a thousands forms in this day and age. We orient ourselves around where we live, around the schools we attend, the teams we root for, the politicians we like (or dislike), even the barbecue we eat.

In some ways, all communities are equal. It doesn’t matter who we commune with as long as we commune.  In other ways, they’re not. I think that geographic community is most important, because face-to-face conversations with our neighbors builds a better world (No, this is not going to be a sermon ...).

That’s my interest in the fire that destroyed the Clingman Community Center, and a reason it’s on our front page today. Community centers seem a bit archaic today. I mean, does anybody really go these sorts of places? Well, as the folks in southeast Wilkes told our reporter, yes, they do. And these centers house memories.

It’s true that a fire doesn’t kill a memory any more than a fire destroys a sense of community. But the absence of a physical structure makes it harder to contain those memories and community. They spread and scatter. It may be the same amount of community, but it’s harder to know it’s there.

A week or so back, I wrote about the Duke Lacrosse case and the power of images. As most of you are aware, there have some been dramatic new developments in the case: the players’ lawyers say that DNA tests done by the state SBI lab refute the notion of a sexual assault.

Not all sexual assaults leave behind DNA and conversely the absence of DNA doesn’t automatically make prosecutors drop cases. Darryl Hunt can attest to that. But in this day and age, with skeptical jurors and CSI overloads running through our brains, it makes it very difficult for jurors to convict without forensic evidence.

If you believe the players’ attorneys—who are some of the best and best-connected criminal defense attorneys in the state—this case is over. Maybe. Maybe not. What does seem clear is that the events of that night are much more complicated than have originally been reported. And this raises some interesting issues about media responsibility in a 24/7 world. There has been intense pressure to publish and broadcast and post on this case for the reasons I wrote about last week. If you take the sexual assault off the table—assuming for the purpose of this discussion that it didn’t happen—is there still a story about piggish and racist (but not criminal) behavior by a bunch of college jocks? Yes, but it might not make the national news.

What should the media do? Our car doesn’t go in reverse, yet based on what’s happened so far some of the earlier reporting is way too breathless. So this is yet another reminder that most issues—sexual assaults, wars in Iraq, peace in the Middle East, immigration—are much more complex than the providers AND consumers of news want to admit. Neat and tidy works for kitchen cabinets, but little else.

I’m no stock-picking guru—and this is neither an endorsement to sell or to buy stock—but with all the navel gazing about the quality and durability of Winston-Salem’s tech sector, the clearest indication may come this Thursday, when Targacept has its long-awaited IPO.

This follows on the heels of last week’s announcement regarding organ-tissue regeneration done by researchers at Wake Forest University.

Targacept is the company spun off from RJR in 2000 that does a lot of ground-breaking research on nicotine and has been working to find pharmaceutical uses for nicotine in treating diseases of the central nervous system. It cut a huge deal with AstraZeneca in December to help with the marketing and development of its products.

The stock market, as many companies find out much too late, is unforgiving and unsentimental. It cares less about the past than the future and is obsessed with expectations. And it also has a herd mentality. Money follows the leader. Targacept’s success as a publicly traded company may not be THE barometer of Winston-Salem’s tech economy, but it will be a measure worth keeping your eye on. 

There is the dizzy-bat contest and the pizza yell, but for sheer depravity at a minor-league baseball game, nothing quite compares to the Frozen T-shirt contest.

Two contestants are given a T-shirt that has been soaked wet and then frozen. The object is to put your T-shirt on first. It ain’t easy. The basic tactic is to beat the ice out of it by banging the block against the roof of the dugout. Yowza.

I witnessed my first—and hopefully not last—FTS contest last night at the season opener of the W-S Warthogs. Hogs won 4-3. The back story is that the city is still trying to figure out how to get a baseball stadium closer to downtown, and it doesn’t appear that we’re much closer than we were a year ago.

It’s all about money. Billy Prim, formerly of Blue Rhino and now of Primo Water fame, would like his Warthogs to be downtown, but there’s still a gap between the cost of a stadium and what he wants to put up or borrow.  Greensboro’s spiffy downtown stadium was essentially built without public money, courtesy of a grant from the Bryant Foundation that picked up half the cost. Without a similar gift, it’s hard to imagine a stadium here getting off the ground free of the taxpayers. And so here we are.

I like Ernie Shore field. It has a good vibe and heritage, along with the view of the Whitaker Park skyline. It reminds me of who we are in W-S. The question of course is whether that’s also what we want to be.

It’s hard to think of another university that consistently gets such adoring coverage in the media as Duke University. Maybe not always in the local media, but certainly in the national press. Part of Duke’s rise to national prominence, in my opinion, has been about finding a brand, which I will call here “Excellence through enlightened competition” and then living it and selling it each and every day.

The poster boy for all this is of course Coach K, teacher, leader, mentor, talking about trust and Chevys, etc. A great brand.

So, it’s interesting when that brand is challenged, as it is today with the widening investigation into allegations of rape involving members of the Duke Lacrosse team. Instead of basketball coaches in their suits on the sidelines, we have a photo of a swaggering lacrosse coach in a pair of sunglasses. A much different image.

Time magazine had a good read on the rape case, as did the Associated Press in the past weekend. They’re both a little overwritten, but the bones of this case, regardless of guilt, read like something from an episode of Law and Order. White athletes, rich school, black student at the HBCU across town working as a party stripper for some extra cash, town and gown, etc. This is a story that writes itself, and for an institution such as Duke that has been extremely successful in controlling or at least managing the story lines that get written about it, the pounding is just brutal.

Not that PR is everything. Again, this is a serious allegation of a serious crime, and how the university addresses the systemic issues raised here is what will determine whether the old image and brand of Duke survive or what takes its place.

Tax day is 10 days away. Ugh. Nobody likes to pay taxes, but as an accountant friend of mine says, taxes are the price we pay for the government we deserve.

Which brings me to two “voluntary” taxes and our approach to them. First the lottery. Sales were $1 million below expectations in the first five days, $24 mm, instead of $25 mm. On one hand, being only 4 percent off is some pretty good estimating the first time out of the blocks. On the other hand, there’s a nagging feeling that it’s now up to all of us to buy tickets and keep the revenue stream strong, lest some kid not get his school improvements.

Second, the sales tax. Graham Pervier, Forsyth County’s manager, said yesterday at the chamber luncheon that FC’s tax base grew about 2.5 percent, but that the sales tax is up 5 percent. Again, that’s good news, but I hear a little voice that says I need to do my civic duty to keep the property tax at bay by shopping more.

Making a list: Remember back in the 1980s, when W-S bragged about having three Fortune 500 companies based in the city? Wachovia, RJR and Piedmont. Not bad for a city this size. We have two now, Reynolds American, BB&T and we’ll get a third later this year when Hanesbrands is spun off from Sara Lee. Again, not bad.

Winston-Salem doesn’t make the national news all that often. And when we do, it’s often for fairly predictable reasons, such as stories about cigarettes or doughnuts. It’s been said there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but it can still be a little tiresome.

So, the city hit a home run yesterday with news about research on the regeneration of organ tissue by Dr. Tony Atala at WFU. Stories in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post etc. 

The research is published in The Lancet.

Discreetly hidden in most of these stories is the fact that Atala’s regeneration and transplant of this bladder tissue was done BEFORE he came to Wake Forest in 2004, but that matters not. When the music stopped, he was standing in front of the chair marked Winston-Salem, and he’s got a neat looking building at the research park to continue this work.

In this day and age, when every community with a test tube and a petree dish wants to be a biotech hub, it can be confusing separating the killabees from the wannabes. Which are we? Not the latter, not quite the former, but on the map.

Birthdays come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s one that most people don’t know about. The Journal begins its 110th year today. If you don’t believe me, check out the Inside Box on the front page. It says 110th year, No. 1.

Not bad. The birthday is relevant at this time because there’s a little-known fact about the Journal’s early days and its ownership. The person who started the Journal was Charles Knight. He came to what was then the town of Winston and the neighboring town of Salem in 1897, started the Journal, then left in July (I’m getting this info from Frank Tursi’s history of the Journal.) After Knight left, he kicked around and eventually settled in Akron, bought that city’s Beacon Journal and built a publishing empire that eventually became Knight Ridder. That company was sold last month to McClatchy in a deal that will define the newspaper industry for many years. Goes to show you how much of life is interconnected.

Interesting issues raised in our Sunday stories about immigration in the mountains and the politics of immigration in local legislative races. Two points here. One, for many people immigration is deeply personal. It’s easier to talk about immigration in the abstract than it is in the personal. I was eating breakfast Saturday at a restaurant in W-S, and the waitresses, all Anglos, went into the kitchen and presented a birthday cake and sang for one of the cooks, who was Hispanic. Relationships change how we look at issues. Two, Immigration is federal, but that doesn’t mean the states won’t try to get into the act, particularly if Washington stalls on this.

Good read elsewhere. Big profile of Josh Howard in ESPN magazine. Story talks about how he returned to W-S last summer to get his head screwed back on by his grandmother. What I also learned from the article was that the slang for Winston-Salem is Tre-4. Hipper friends of mine just smiled, but it’s short for 34, which is Forsyth County’s alphabetical place in the state’s 100 counties. Now you know.