A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

The House has adopted and referred to the Senate House Resolution 69, authored by Reps. Bauer and Porter which is a very nice tribute to the late Kurt Vonnegut. The resolution was drafted by DI-69, meaning the Legislative Service Agency’s highly accomplished counselor and Kurt Vonnegut afficianado, Tim Tyler, Esq. It has a summary of his history and accomplishments and concludes:

Be it resolved by the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana the Senate concurring:

SECTION 1. That the Indiana General Assembly acknowledges the accomplishments of Indianapolis native son and Hoosier legend Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. as a major figure in English literature for more than half a century and a grandmaster of contemporary American letters.

SECTION 2. That the Principal Clerk of the House of Representatives shall transmit a copy of this resolution to the family of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. And so it goes*

I am pretty open about the fact that I’m a geek. Here is another installment in that policy of openness. Growing up, I read Tolkien books repeatedly – in particular, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion. In my experience, a substantial portion of the population has read the first two on the list, but not very many have read the Silmarillion. But, let me be the first to stipulate that I am not really that hardcore where Tolkien is concerned. For example, I’ve read some of The History of Middle Earth but just in passing and only small parts.

Like I said, however, the Silmarillion was one I read repeatedly, probably 5 or 6 times. I’ve read it enough times to have a favorite passage. And, much to my surprise, as I was driving back to work after dropping my son off at preschool, somebody on the radio was reading that passage.

Turns out, Christopher Tolkien has used some of his father’s work to compile The Children of Húrin which is being released. The Children of Hurin expands upon the parts of the tale told in the Silmarillion about Hurin and his family, particularly Turin and the events surrounding his slaying of the dragon Glaurung (I’m a geek, I know!).

And, in case you care, as to the favorite passage in question, the set up is this. Hurin is, simply put, a bad ass. He is a leader of one of the enlightened tribes of men who have aligned themselves with the elves who are fighting Morgoth, the original Dark Lord to whom Sauron was a mere servant. He is fighting with his brother Huor and the elves in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. At some point, it becomes clear that the battle is lost. Hurin and Huor decide to make a stand in order to allow their friend, the elf-lord Turgon to skin out of there and get back to his fortress at Gondolin. Eventually, everyone else was dead or gone:

Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried: ‘Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!’ Seventy times he uttered that cry, but they took him at last alive, by the command of Morgoth, for the Orcs grappled him with their hands, which clung to him still though he hewed off their arms, and ever their numbers were renewed, until at last he fell buried beneath them. Then Gothmog bound him and dragged him to Angband with mockery. Thus ended the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, as the sun went down beyond the sea. Night fell in Hithlum, and there came a great storm of wind out of the West.

The scholar who was reading this passage on the radio explained about how Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories very much follow the “Northern” view of heroism as opposed to the Greek or Latin views. The Northern view is very fatalistic. There is no ultimate triumph. No matter what you do, you will die anyway and there is always another monster or another evil around the corner. But, you keep trying and fighting anyway. For whatever reason, as an adolescent boy, there was something very appealing about that view generally and about the Silmarillion and Hurin in particular. I don’t spend much time thinking about such things anymore — something about raising kids and paying a mortgage sort of pounds one into reality — but I still have fond memories.

I do not know how well this will work in my WordPress blog format, but I want to use this entry to chronicle the use of the Virginia Tech tragedy for an agenda. So, my intent will be to update it as I see a new one. So far, we have:

Anti-gun control – Josh Claybourn at In The Agora, with a link to Instapundit, says that Virginia Tech’s “gun free zone” regulations assisted the killer.

Pro-gun control – The New York Times calls for stricter gun control and, in a news article, notes that Virginia has some of the weakest gun control laws in the nation.

Anti-evolution and abortion – Answers in Genesis (h/t Dispatches from the Culture Wars) blames the shootings on an era where students are taught that plants, animals, and humans arose from natural processes and where abortions are allowed.

Public health – I have suggested that public mental health concerns should be just as much of the debate as gun control concerns. However, at this point, I think that “just as much” should be close to zero. The tragedy is too recent for us to make good public policy decisions based on the incident.

Iraq – Blue Herald says that Iraq has “2 Virginia Techs a day.”

Immigration – When it was thought that the shooter might be a Chinese national here on a student visa, Debbie Schlussel concluded that this was “yet another reason to stop letting in so many foreign students.”

Movies and video games – Dragon Quill says: “[T]he bottom line is that we have created a society in which violence is an acceptable way of dealing with problems. Movies and video games idealize violence. Stress and frustration is our way of life. Children grow up with little supervision, and with pressures on them that were unheard of even a few years ago. We’ve created a society that in many ways resembles a pressure cooker. And anybody who’s used one of those things knows, there has to be a valve to allow the steam to get out, or the entire pot will explode.”

UPDATES BELOW THE FOLD

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Indy Cornrows has a good entry on the Pacers loss to the Nets last night that officially put them out of playoff contention. First time in ten years they’ve missed the playoffs. Seems like they’ve been dying a slow death ever since The Brawl featuring Ron Artest a couple of years ago. Hopefully they’ll somehow begin to regroup and start a new chapter.

Mary Beth Schneider has an article in the Indy Star entitled Rokita apologizes for slavery remark which refers to the incident wherein Secretary of State Todd Rokita compared black voters’ relationship to the Democratic Party as that of slaves to a master. From the original Washington Times Herald article:

Rokita spent some time revisiting the party’s history, especially concerning the African-American vote. He said that African-Americans vote 90 percent Democrat and questioned why.

“How can that be?” Rokita said. “90 to 10. Who’s the master and who’s the slave in that relationship? How can that be healthy?”

Rokita’s apology today:

Rokita said Monday that his overall message about the black vote was meant to encourage the Republican Party to continue its efforts to diversify, in part by continuing to reach out to blacks.

But, he said, “The word choice that I used in one part of those remarks was poor, and if I offended anyone then I ask their forgiveness for what was an insensitive metaphor.”

From the Washington Times Herald article, it didn’t sound like Rokita was encouraging his party to do anything else. Rather, it sounded like he was bragging that the Republican Party had done plenty already — why, the GOP is the party of Lincoln after all; and the initiator of the civil rights movement (the rise of the former Dixiecrats, Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and the events of the past 40 years notwithstanding). Instead, from the article, it sounded like he was saying the Republicans had done a great many things for black people but simply were not receiving the proper gratitude, perhaps because of this master-slave relationship. Obviously a lot depends on how faithfully the Washington Times Herald article reflected Mr. Rokita’s speech.

Reps. Bill Crawford and Rep. Charlie Brown had some unkind words for Mr. Rokita’s commentary:

Rep. Bill Crawford of Indianapolis — one of 12 black lawmakers, all Democrats — called Rokita’s words “personally offensive” and inappropriate for a statewide elected official.

“A half-a-million or so persons of African ancestry are in this state,” Crawford said. “To use the analogy of the master-slave relationship implies that people are compelled to do something, that they don’t act with their own free will. And I think that in essence what he said was that African-American voters are ignorant, ill-informed, are compelled to vote for Democrats.”

Rep. Charlie Brown, D-Gary, who also is black, said he was shocked by Rokita’s statement, “especially this close on the heels of the (Don) Imus debacle, that a public official would not have chosen better words.”

I suppose it bears mentioning that Democrats Brown and Crawford benefit politically by having the black vote break down 90 to 10 in favor of Democrats. Still, I think Mr. Rokita’s choice in metaphors was, at best, remarkably bad.

Holy crap. Virginia Tech Shooting Kills at Least 22.

At least 22 people were killed today, some of them students, and about two dozen more injured during shootings at Virginia Tech, some of them in a classroom, the police said. A gunman was also shot to death, officials said.
. . .
At 7:15 a.m., an emergency 911 call came in to University police department about a shooting at a campus building, West Ambler Johnston, a dormitory for about 900 freshman students. About two hours later it was followed by a second shooting at a classroom in a science and engineering building on the opposite end of campus, Norris Hall. The shooter died there, the police said.

“It didn’t stop for almost two or three minutes,” a junior from Fairfax named Josh told CNN. “It sounded like a handgun or something but it was many, many shots.”

Meanwhile, In The Agora seems to blame the tragedy on a gun ban at Virginia Tech. I’m a friend of the Second Amendment and think there is a certain utility in allowing citizens to meet force with force where necessary, but jeeze, wait until the bodies are cold.

Marcia Oddi’s Indiana Law Blog has sensitized me to this issue. The ILB ran a series of posts a while back on the subject of whether Indiana’s Constitution requires the General Assembly to pass a budget. It does not. And yet, year after year in article after article — particularly as the General Assembly is winding down in an odd-numbered year, you’ll see references to the budget as something that lawmakers are Constitutionally required to pass. It’s a great idea for them to do it. There would be hell to pay if they did not. But, near as I can figure, there is no legal requirement for them to do so.

So, where does Theodore Kim get his facts when he writes in the Indy Star:

Failing to pass a budget, which the state constitution requires, is the only issue that would oblige the legislature to meet beyond April.

His story does not require this assertion. The general thrust remains the same: there are a lot of knotty issues that the legislature has to untangle before they’re done. As a practical (as opposed to a legal) matter, the budget is the most important one of these. Thanks to the ILB, every time I hear a reporter or legislator talk about their Constitutional duty to pass a budget, it’s like needles on a blackboard. If someone can direct me to the constitutional provision that requires this, I’d appreciate it. Otherwise, it would be nice if reporters and lawmakers stopped perpetuating this myth.

[tags]budget myth[/tags]

Advance Indiana, quoting the Washington Times-Herald brings us the tin ear of Todd Rokita.

Rokita spent some time revisiting the party’s history, especially concerning the African-American vote. He said that African-Americans vote 90 percent Democrat and questioned why.

“How can that be?” Rokita said. “90 to 10. Who’s the master and who’s the slave in that relationship? How can that be healthy?”

Rokita went on to stress that the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, abolition, and the civil rights movement and they should be proud of their heritage. It’s the fault of the national media, however, that this heritage gets lost when folks think of the major political parties and race relations in America. No mention of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the defection of the Dixiecrats to the Republican Party, the almost total shift of the GOP center of gravity to the South, and really pretty much everything having to do with race and politics for the past 40 years. Nope, blacks vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats because of the national media and their slave-like relationship with the Democrats.

I don’t think Rokita meant anything bad by his statements. But I think his statements are disingenuous, patronizing, and a maybe a little naive.

Update Finfinito has an entry on the incident over at Blue Indiana. Rokita’s comments have been picked up by Kevin Rader of WTHR-13. Mr. Rader is requesting that Mr. Rokita provide an on-camera clarification.